Testkube is a Kubernetes-native test orchestration and execution platform that lets engineering teams run any testing tool or script at scale, directly inside their own clusters. By decoupling testing from CI/CD pipelines, it centralizes test triggering, execution, results, artifacts and logs into a single platform - with AI-powered troubleshooting on top. Spun out of Kubeshop in 2023 and led by SoapUI creator Ole Lensmar, Testkube raised an $8M Series A in September 2025 and has powered over 100 million automated tests for companies including Cloudflare, Siemens, Adobe and Volvo.
Spencer Kimball is the co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, the company behind CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database built to survive almost anything you throw at it. Long before databases, he co-wrote GIMP as a Berkeley class project in 1995, spent roughly a decade as an engineer at Google working on its file-system guts, and built a photo startup that Square acquired. He named his database after the one creature famous for being nearly impossible to kill - which turned out to be the perfect pitch.
Dmitry Fonarev is the co-founder and CEO of Testkube, the Kubernetes-native test orchestration platform that has powered over 100 million automated tests for customers including Cloudflare, Siemens, Adobe, and Volvo. A Boston University computer science graduate with more than two decades building engineering teams at Dell, SmartBear, and vKernel, he co-founded Kubeshop in 2021 with SoapUI creator Ole Lensmar, then spun Testkube out as a standalone company that raised an $8M Series A in 2025.
Nutanix is a San Jose-based enterprise cloud software company that pioneered hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), collapsing servers, storage, virtualization and networking into a single software layer that runs the same way in a private data center, at the edge, or in the public cloud. Its platform lets IT teams run virtual machines, containers, databases and AI workloads across clouds without the operational sprawl of traditional three-tier architecture. Now a public company (NASDAQ: NTNX) with more than $2.5 billion in annual revenue and roughly 7,000+ employees, Nutanix competes head-on with VMware as enterprises rethink their virtualization stack.
Anyscale is the company behind Ray, the open-source distributed computing framework used to train and serve some of the world's largest AI systems. Founded by the creators of Ray at UC Berkeley's RISELab, Anyscale provides a managed compute platform that lets enterprises scale Python and AI workloads across any cloud, with the performance of bare metal and the ergonomics of a notebook.
Docker, Inc. builds the toolchain that put containers into the daily vocabulary of software development. From Docker Desktop to Docker Hub to Docker Scout, the company helps roughly 20 million developers package, share, and run applications anywhere - and is now extending that same packaging logic to AI models and agents.
DuploCloud is a San Jose-based DevOps automation platform that turns plain-English application requirements into production-ready, compliance-aware cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure and GCP. Founded by ex-Microsoft Azure engineer Venkat Thiruvengadam, it aims to give Main Street IT the hyperscale automation patterns once locked inside Big Tech.
GMI Cloud is an AI-native GPU cloud built around NVIDIA's H100 and H200 accelerators. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Mountain View, it sells on-demand and reserved GPU compute, an orchestration layer (Cluster Engine), and a low-latency Inference Engine to AI labs and enterprises building generative models. In 2025 NVIDIA named it one of seven Reference Platform Cloud Partners worldwide.
Imply is a San Francisco-based data analytics company that built its platform on Apache Druid - the open-source real-time analytics database that its co-founders helped create. The company offers Imply Polaris, a fully managed cloud database-as-a-service for real-time analytics, and Imply Lumi, billed as the industry's first Observability Warehouse. With $215M in total funding and unicorn status at a $1.1B valuation, Imply serves 100+ enterprise customers including Atlassian, Reddit, and Cisco ThousandEyes, enabling sub-second query performance across terabytes to petabytes of streaming and historical data.
Kong Inc. builds the connectivity fabric for APIs, microservices, and now AI traffic. Its open-source gateway sits in front of billions of requests at companies like Cargill, SkyScanner, GE, and Sky. In 2024 it raised a $175M Series E at a $2B valuation, sharpened its pitch as 'the AI connectivity company,' and shipped an AI Gateway that brokers calls to LLMs the same way Kong has long brokered calls to REST APIs.
MinIO is a high-performance, S3-compatible object storage company building the data layer for AI. Its software-defined storage runs on commodity hardware in private clouds, on-prem, and at the edge, and is used by more than half of the Fortune 500 to power analytics, ML training, and exascale AI workloads.
nOps is an AI-powered FinOps platform that automatically optimizes AWS cloud costs for enterprises. Managing over $4 billion in annual cloud spend across 600+ customers, nOps uses machine learning to intelligently provision compute resources, manage AWS commitments, and deliver 50%+ cost savings without operational overhead. The company's Compute Copilot product integrates with Karpenter to optimize Kubernetes workloads, while its Clara AI agent answers cost questions and executes optimization tasks.
Dylan Cui is a co-founder of PingCAP, the company behind TiDB - one of the world's most widely adopted open-source distributed SQL databases. A software engineer by trade, Dylan co-built TiDB from scratch starting in 2015 after experiencing firsthand the pain of database scaling at scale while working at Wandoujia. PingCAP has raised over $341 million and TiDB has more than 33,000 GitHub stars, serving thousands of enterprises globally across fintech, gaming, and e-commerce.
Abhishek Choudhary is the Co-Founder and CTO of TrueFoundry, a Series A-backed AI infrastructure platform that helps enterprises deploy, manage, and govern machine learning models at scale. A former Senior Staff Engineer at Meta — where he worked on infrastructure serving over a billion users — he left to build the platform he wished had existed at Facebook: one that brings Meta-level AI automation to every enterprise. An IIT Kharagpur alumnus, he co-founded TrueFoundry in 2021 alongside batchmates Nikunj Bajaj and Anuraag Gupta, and has since grown it to serve clients like NVIDIA, Siemens Healthineers, and ResMed, raising $21.3M in total funding.
Amet Alvirde is a founder and software engineer based in Mexico City, associated with Render - the cloud deployment platform that hit a $1.5 billion valuation after its $100 million Series C extension in February 2026. A long-time Linux advocate, TypeScript developer, and Fullscreen content creator since 2012, he maintains a public digital garden of philosophical writing in Spanish, shoots street photography on a Sony a7iv, and plays guitar. His GitHub projects span fitness data tooling, trading system analysis, and personal infrastructure - a practitioner who builds for himself as readily as for the platform serving 4.5 million developers.
Anand Babu 'AB' Periasamy is the Co-Founder and CEO of MinIO, the world's most widely deployed open-source object storage platform with over 2 million Docker pulls per day. A serial entrepreneur from Tamil Nadu, India, he previously co-founded Gluster Inc. — the distributed file system company acquired by Red Hat for $136 million in 2011. With MinIO, he built a Kubernetes-native, Amazon S3-compatible storage engine that became foundational infrastructure for AI, machine learning, and data-lake workloads. In January 2022, MinIO closed a $103M Series B at a $1 billion valuation, cementing its unicorn status with backing from Intel Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst, and Nexus Venture Partners.
Anuraag Gutgutia is co-founder of TrueFoundry, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI platform that lets companies build, deploy, and govern generative and agentic AI inside their own cloud infrastructure. A quantitative analyst turned repeat entrepreneur, he spent seven years at WorldQuant rising to VP of Portfolio Management and the CEO's office before co-founding the talent platform EntHire (acquired by InfoEdge/BigShyft) and then TrueFoundry in 2021 alongside two IIT Kharagpur batchmates. TrueFoundry has raised $21.3M in total funding - including a $19M Series A led by Intel Capital in February 2025 - and serves Fortune 1000 companies seeking to run AI workloads without infrastructure complexity or data-sovereignty tradeoffs.
Augusto 'Aghi' Marietti is the CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc., the company behind the world's most widely deployed API gateway. Born in Rome in 1988, he co-founded Mashape at age 19 in a Milan garage, arrived in San Francisco with $600 and a 90-day visa, crashed on Travis Kalanick's couch, and built what became Kong - a $2 billion enterprise processing over 20 trillion API requests monthly. Known as the 'API Godfather,' Marietti has raised $424 million in total funding, surpassed $146M in annual recurring revenue with 800+ employees, and is now positioning Kong as the essential AI connectivity layer for the enterprise.
Dan Temkin is a Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager at Kong (formerly Mashape), one of the world's leading API management platforms. With over a decade of experience in API strategy spanning roles at IBM and Kong, Temkin sits at the intersection of complex distributed systems and the business language needed to explain them. Based in Madison, Wisconsin, he shapes how enterprises think about API security, AI governance, and the economics of running LLMs at scale - authoring widely-read Kong blog posts, speaking at Apidays and AWS re:Invent, and helping translate the architecture of Kong's $424M-funded platform into decisions that matter to engineering and executive teams alike.
Don Johnson is the CEO of Docker, Inc., the company behind the world's most widely used container platform. Appointed in February 2025, he brings decades of hyperscale cloud infrastructure experience from founding Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and serving as a founding technical leader at Amazon Web Services. A builder at heart who spent years constructing the plumbing of the modern cloud, Johnson now leads Docker's mission to make software development frictionless, secure, and AI-ready for the world's 20 million developers.
Ev Kontsevoy is the co-founder and CEO of Teleport, a cybersecurity company building the identity-native infrastructure access platform trusted by organizations like Samsung, NASDAQ, and IBM. A serial entrepreneur who grew up in Siberia and studied applied mathematics, he previously co-founded Mailgun (acquired by Rackspace in 2012) before starting Teleport in 2015 to eliminate the fragmented, secrets-based approach to infrastructure security. Under his leadership, Teleport reached a $1.1B valuation with its $110M Series C, and he authored an O'Reilly book on identity-native infrastructure access management. He is now focused on defining agentic identity frameworks for the era of AI-driven enterprise infrastructure.
Haseeb Budhani is the Co-founder and CEO of Rafay Systems, a Sunnyvale-based infrastructure orchestration platform that simplifies Kubernetes and AI infrastructure lifecycle operations across public clouds, private data centers, and the edge. A serial entrepreneur with a track record of building and selling enterprise technology companies, Budhani previously co-founded Soha Systems - a secure remote access startup acquired by Akamai Technologies in 2016 - and has held senior product and engineering roles at Citrix, Infineta Systems, and others. Under his leadership, Rafay has raised $37.1M in total funding, built partnerships with Verizon, NVIDIA, and Cisco, and grown to serve major enterprise customers at the intersection of Kubernetes operations and AI infrastructure.
Jeyappragash 'JJ' Jeyakeerthi is the co-founder and CTO of Tetrate, the company that made Istio enterprise-ready and brought FIPS-verified service mesh to regulated industries including the US federal government. An IIT Madras graduate who once ran Twitter's Cloud Infrastructure, JJ co-founded Tetrate in 2018 with Varun Talwar to secure the cloud-native stack from edge to datacenter - building one of the most technically credible teams in the service mesh ecosystem, trusted by the US Air Force and some of the world's largest enterprises.
JT Giri is the CEO and Founder of nOps, a San Francisco-based AI-powered cloud cost optimization platform that helps companies manage and reduce their AWS spend. After discovering Amazon EC2 in beta in 2006 and spending years as a hands-on DevOps consultant, he co-founded nClouds in 2012 - which grew into an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. In 2017 he spun out nOps to productize the cloud management tooling he'd built internally. In August 2024, nOps secured a $30M Series A led by Headlight Partners, with the platform now managing over $1.5 billion in AWS spend across a customer base that grew 450% in 18 months.
Kannan Kothandaraman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Selector AI, a Santa Clara-based AIOps and network observability platform that uses large language models, knowledge graphs, and causal reasoning to help Fortune 1000 enterprises detect, diagnose, and resolve infrastructure issues faster. Before founding Selector in 2019, Kannan spent nearly two decades at Juniper Networks - rising from senior software engineer to Vice President of Product Line Management - and before that at Cisco Systems. Selector has raised $104 million in total funding, including a $32M Series B in February 2026 at a valuation of $375 million, and counts Fortune 20 companies in manufacturing and healthcare among its customers.
Linda Haviv is a Staff Developer Advocate at Anyscale and founder of CodingCrystals.com, best known for her wildly nonlinear path from philosophy major and professional singer to site reliability engineer and AI infrastructure advocate. After graduating summa cum laude as Baruch College's salutatorian, teaching herself to code at The Flatiron School, and spending years as a JavaScript developer and SRE at Fox Corporation, she joined AWS as a developer advocate before landing at Anyscale — the company behind Ray, the open-source distributed computing framework that powers OpenAI's ChatGPT training. She uses her platform to demystify AI infrastructure for developers everywhere, and sells STEM-inspired crystal jewelry on the side.
Liran Zvibel is the Co-Founder and CEO of WEKA, a Campbell, California-based AI-native data platform company valued at $1.6 billion. He co-founded WEKA in 2013 after earlier stints at XIV Storage Systems (acquired by IBM) and Fusic, bringing deep expertise in high-performance distributed storage. Under his leadership, WEKA has raised $465M+ in funding, surpassed $100M in annual recurring revenue, and built a platform powering 300+ of the world's largest AI and GPU deployments including 11 of the Fortune 50. A former Israeli military Captain who earned the Israeli Defence Award, Zvibel holds a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University.
Mehran Farimani is the co-founder and CEO of RapidFort, a Sunnyvale-based software supply chain security company that raised a $42M Series A in February 2026. A 25-year technology veteran, Mehran previously led the Fiery division at Electronics for Imaging (EFI) as SVP & GM, then founded Percipo—a computer vision AI company whose technology reached 40,000+ retail locations. At RapidFort, he is pioneering the category of Software Attack Surface Management (SASM), helping organizations automatically harden container images and eliminate up to 80% of CVEs through runtime-aware profiling, without touching a single line of application code.
Max Wang is the Co-Founder and CTO of Workstream, a San Francisco-based HR and payroll platform built specifically for America's hourly workforce. He co-founded China's AngelList equivalent (VC.CN) in 2011, built it to a 50-person team, then crossed the Pacific to co-build Workstream with Desmond Lim and Lei Xu after a 100-interview discovery sprint revealed that hiring hourly workers was a massive unsolved problem. Today, Workstream serves 4,000+ businesses across 24,000 locations, has raised $118 million, and is deploying AI tools - including VoiceAI - to compress hiring cycles from weeks to hours for restaurants, franchises, and deskless-workforce employers.
Mwalimu Karisa is an executive at Kong Inc., the San Francisco-based API connectivity company behind the Kong Gateway and Konnect platform. Originally from Kilifi County on Kenya's coast, Karisa's path ran through an exchange program in Iowa and onto the front lines of global API and AI infrastructure. Kong serves enterprises managing critical API traffic across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments, with over $424 million raised and a $2 billion valuation. Before entering the technology sector, Karisa was publicly recognized for community development work in his home village, raising funds for clean water access and healthcare infrastructure in coastal Kenya.