large-language-models
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Felix Kim Is Building AI for the People Silicon Valley Priced Out
A shy child learned what it costs to arrive without context. A lawyer learned how institutions manufacture trust. Now Felix Kim is spending his second career trying to make both problems smaller with code.
Etienne Bernard Is Teaching AI to Read the Fine Print
The physicist who helped make machine learning automatic at Wolfram is now shrinking document AI into focused models that turn unruly files into useful data - with privacy, precision, and a well-placed null.
Dillon Rolnick
Dillon Rolnick is the chief executive of Nous Research, an applied AI lab building open-source, human-centric language models and the decentralized Psyche training network. A Vanderbilt graduate who came up through quantitative FX trading at Effex Capital and founded the litigation-claims firm Crysknife Capital, he moved from finance into AI research leadership, helping steer Nous through a Paradigm-led $50M Series A and, by 2026, a reported $75M round near a $1.5B valuation. His focus is proving that world-class models can be trained openly and over the internet rather than behind the walls of a few large labs.
Birago Jones
Birago Jones is the co-founder and CEO of Pienso, a no-code AI platform that lets subject-matter experts train, fine-tune and deploy their own machine learning models without writing code. Born out of research he and Karthik Dinakar did at the MIT Media Lab on cyberbullying detection, Pienso is built on a simple conviction: the people who understand the data best, not just the engineers, should build the models. His customers now include the US government and Sky, the UK's largest broadcaster, which used Pienso to process half a million customer calls a day.
Luis Voloch
Luis Voloch is the co-founder and CEO of Jimini Health, a New York mental health startup that pairs licensed therapists with a clinically supervised AI assistant called Sage. An MIT-trained mathematician and computer scientist who won the school's best-thesis prize, he previously co-founded and served as CTO of Immunai, the AI cancer-immunotherapy company that grew into a billion-dollar unicorn. He has taught entrepreneurship at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and is building toward what he calls a 'Genentech-like company in mental health, powered by AI.'
Emily Nieves
Emily Nieves is the co-founder and CEO of Delineate, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup building AI agents that read the scientific literature the way a pharmacologist does - pulling numbers out of buried plots and patents to speed up drug development. A University of Georgia biological engineer turned MIT PhD researcher, she worked on computational modeling at Pfizer and AstraZeneca before deciding the bottleneck wasn't the models but the months it took to feed them. Delineate, part of Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch, now works with top-10 pharma companies to turn months of systematic review into weeks.
Alastair Blake
Alastair Blake is the Chief Business Officer of Layer Health, an MIT-spinout building an AI layer for clinical chart review backed by Google Ventures, General Catalyst and Define Ventures. A Cambridge-trained physician (MD, MRCP) turned commercial operator, he trained as an internal medicine doctor in the NHS, served a National Medical Director's Clinical Fellowship at the Care Quality Commission, earned an MBA from Wharton, consulted at McKinsey, and led clinical and commercial partnerships at the healthcare data company nference before joining Layer Health in 2024. He sits at the intersection of medicine, data and go-to-market - a doctor who now sells the software meant to give doctors their time back.
David Sontag
David Sontag is the co-founder and CEO of Layer Health, a Boston-area startup building an AI layer that reads and abstracts messy medical charts at clinician-level accuracy. He is also a professor at MIT in EECS and IMES, a principal investigator at CSAIL, and a leader in machine learning for healthcare with more than 20,000 citations across roughly 140 publications. After a decade of academic research turning raw clinical data into predictions, he took partial leave in 2025 to scale Layer Health, which raised a $21M Series A led by Define Ventures.
John Kanarowski
John Kanarowski is the CEO of Implicit, the New York AI company formerly known as Agolo. A self-described sales-and-go-to-market leader with about 25 years in technology, he took the helm of a decade-old company and steered it through a hard pivot - from text summarization to entity intelligence to its current focus: a no-code 'knowledge engine' that turns scattered documents, tickets, and tribal knowledge into cited AI experts for customer-facing and technical teams. He spent his first 100 days listening - to every employee, to customers, to recorded calls - before forming the hypotheses that reset the company's direction.
Robert Huntsman
Robert Huntsman is the Chief Data Officer at iCapital, the platform that powers much of the world's alternative-investment marketplace. He runs the teams, technology, and governance that let the firm ingest, protect, and analyze data across private equity, hedge funds, and private credit. A Stanford-trained quantitative economist with CFA and FRM credentials, he previously ran a 150-plus-person data science group at Prudential Financial. His current obsession: pointing large language models at messy, unstructured fund documents so private markets can finally move at the speed of public ones.
Mayank Goyal
Mayank Goyal is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist (Head of AI) at Leena AI, an enterprise agentic AI platform that automates HR, IT, and Finance support for organizations worldwide. An IIT Delhi alumnus in Production and Industrial Engineering, Mayank co-founded ChatterOn in 2015 with Adit Jain and Anand Prajapati before pivoting to Leena AI in 2017 after noticing large enterprises like Coca-Cola and Vodafone using their chatbot platform for internal support. Leena AI joined Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch, raised $40M+ across multiple rounds including a $30M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners, and now serves 500+ enterprise customers across 90+ countries, reaching 3+ million employees. Mayank leads the AI research and product intelligence that powers Leena AI's pre-built AI colleagues - Gavin (HR), Miles (IT), and Harper (Finance).
Sung Kim
Sung Kim (김성훈), known professionally as Hun Kim, is the Co-Founder and CEO of Upstage AI, South Korea's first generative AI unicorn. A former HKUST professor and founding head of Naver Clova AI, he co-founded Upstage in October 2020 to solve the gap between enterprise data and practical AI deployment. Under his leadership, Upstage developed Solar - a compact 10.7B parameter language model - and Solar Pro 2, which outperforms GPT-4.1 at half the compute cost. With $326M in total funding and a Series C close in early 2026, Upstage is positioning itself as a global AI frontier company focused on enterprise document intelligence and AI agents.
Lucy Park
Lucy Park (Eunjeong Park) is the co-founder and US CEO of Upstage, the first Korean generative AI startup to achieve unicorn status. A PhD in Data Mining from Seoul National University and MIT Innovators Under 35 honoree, she built KoNLPy - the go-to Korean NLP library used in classrooms and production systems across Korea - before leading the Papago machine translation team at NAVER. At Upstage, she drives the company's AI models and document intelligence products into enterprises across insurance, finance, legal and healthcare, with the company's Solar LLM powering mission-critical workflows globally.
Stefano Ermon
Stefano Ermon is the CEO and co-founder of Inception Labs, the company behind Mercury - the world's first commercial-scale diffusion LLM. An Italian-born Stanford associate professor on leave, Ermon co-invented DDIM (the speedup trick powering modern image generation), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO, the alignment technique used to fine-tune today's leading LLMs), and the SEDD discrete diffusion framework that won ICML 2024's Best Paper Award. At Inception, he's betting that diffusion - not autoregression - is the architecture that will define the next generation of AI, with Mercury 2 clocking 1,000+ tokens per second at a fraction of the cost of GPT or Claude.
Rodrigo Liang
Rodrigo Liang is the co-founder and CEO of SambaNova Systems, an AI infrastructure company he built from the ground up in 2017 alongside Stanford professors Kunle Olukotun and Chris Ré. Born in Taipei, raised in Brazil, and trained in electrical engineering at Stanford, Liang spent two decades designing high-performance processors at Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle before betting that the entire computing paradigm for AI needed to be reimagined. SambaNova's Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU) is the architectural expression of that conviction - chips designed around data movement rather than instructions - and in February 2026 the company announced the SN50, claiming it runs agentic AI 5x faster than competing chips at 3x lower cost, backed by $350M in Series E funding and a strategic partnership with Intel.
Steven Banerjee
Steven Banerjee is the Founder and CEO of Nextnet, a life sciences AI platform that organizes and connects the world's biomedical knowledge. A serial biotech entrepreneur originally from New Zealand, he trained as a mechanical engineer at the University of Canterbury, served as a Doctoral Fellow at IBM Labs, and collaborated with gene sequencing pioneer Ron Davis at Stanford before founding his first venture, Mekonos - a cell and gene therapy company that raised over $40 million and was acquired. He then founded Nextnet in late 2020 to bring AI-native research tools to scientists, building a platform now used across 100+ countries by researchers at Harvard, MIT, MD Anderson, and UCSF. Nextnet's Copilot and Explorer tools are powered by a purpose-built biomedical ontology unifying data from PubMed, ChEMBL, Ensembl, and millions of scientific sources.