Johannes Jaeckle is the co-founder and CEO of Heron Data, a New York fintech that uses large language models to automate document-heavy workflows in financial services. Heron reads emails, classifies submissions, extracts data, and syncs it into CRMs and loan platforms for more than 150 customers - from small lenders to FDIC-insured banks - processing over 350,000 documents a week. Jaeckle started building with LLMs in 2020, two years before ChatGPT went public, after a fintech operating career that included running the remittance company Taptap Send and serving as UK Managing Director of Segovia Technology. In July 2025 Heron raised a $16.6M Series A led by Insight Partners.
Misha Laskin is the co-founder and CEO of Reflection AI, a New York lab building open-weight frontier models and autonomous coding agents. A theoretical physicist by training (Yale, University of Chicago), he led reward modeling for Google DeepMind's Gemini and worked in reinforcement learning at Berkeley and DeepMind before launching Reflection in 2024 with AlphaGo co-creator Ioannis Antonoglou. In 2025 the company raised roughly $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, positioning itself as America's open-source answer to DeepSeek.
Mok Oh is the co-founder and CEO of Foundation EGI, a startup building what it calls the world's first Engineering General Intelligence platform - an AI system that turns messy engineering instructions into machine-executable workflows for design and manufacturing. A serial entrepreneur with an MIT Ph.D. in computer graphics and vision, he previously founded EveryScape (a Street View for building interiors), served as Chief Scientist at PayPal where he built the data science org, and was CTO of Mercari US. Foundation EGI, spun out of MIT research, raised a $23M Series A in 2025, bringing total funding past $30M.
Jahanzaib Khan is a software engineer at DigitalOcean (Engineer II) working on AI and cloud products, including the company's agentic cloud direction. A Ruby on Rails and React/Next.js developer based in Lahore, Pakistan, he joined DigitalOcean's orbit through Cloudways, the Lahore-rooted managed-hosting company DigitalOcean acquired. He describes himself as an AI and LLM enthusiast and has spoken about building an agentic cloud at DigitalOcean.
GPTZero is a New York-based AI startup that builds tools to detect AI-generated text and verify human authorship. Launched in January 2023 by Princeton senior Edward Tian, it grew from a viral side project into a profitable company serving over 10 million users and 100+ organizations across education, hiring, publishing, and legal. Its mission is to restore trust and transparency to writing on the internet as large language models flood it with machine-made text.
Hebbia is a New York-based enterprise AI company that builds Matrix, an agentic platform for analyzing huge volumes of documents. Instead of a single chatbot guessing at an answer, Matrix dispatches a swarm of AI agents across thousands of files - PDFs, spreadsheets, presentations, emails - and returns structured, fully cited answers in a grid. It is used by asset managers, investment banks, law firms and Fortune 100 companies to compress work that took analysts days into minutes. Founded in 2020 by Stanford PhD dropout George Sivulka, Hebbia raised a $130M Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2024 at a reported $700M valuation.
Lyzr AI is an enterprise agent-infrastructure company that helps banks, insurers, and other regulated organizations move AI agents from proof-of-concept to production. Its open-core Agent Framework bakes Safe AI and Responsible AI modules into the core architecture, while products like Agent Studio and a roster of named agents (Jazon the AI SDR, Skott the AI marketer) let teams build, govern, and deploy autonomous agents inside their own firewall or VPC. Backed by Accenture and valued at $250M, Lyzr positions itself as the trusted layer between large language models and the compliance-bound enterprise.
OpenRouter is a unified API gateway for large language models. Through a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint, developers can reach 400+ models from 60+ providers, with automatic routing, price comparison, and failover across vendors. It removes the need to maintain separate integrations for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral and dozens of others, and now processes around 100 trillion tokens per month for more than 8 million users.
Ryan Janssen is the Co-founder and CEO of Zenlytic, a New York-based AI-powered business intelligence platform that lets non-technical users query data in plain English. A former McKinsey consultant and 6-year venture capital investor with advanced degrees from Harvard and Oxford, Ryan co-founded Zenlytic in 2020 alongside CTO Paul Blankley after spotting a gap: companies had modern data infrastructure but no accessible way to use it. Zenlytic has raised $15.4M including a $9M Series A in 2024 led by M13, and its AI analyst Zoe can now onboard itself autonomously to any data warehouse.
Alex Atallah is the CEO and co-founder of OpenRouter, the unified API and marketplace that routes developer requests across hundreds of large language models. He previously co-founded OpenSea, the NFT marketplace, where he was CTO before leaving in 2022 to build from zero to one again. A Stanford computer scientist and Palantir alum, he turned a side project that connected browsers to AI models into infrastructure now routing roughly 25 trillion tokens a week, and raised a $113M Series B in 2026.
Edward Tian is the co-founder and CEO of GPTZero, the AI-detection tool he wrote in three days at a cafe over the 2023 New Year holiday while a senior at Princeton. Within days, tens of thousands of teachers swarmed the app and crashed its server. Two years on, GPTZero has raised $13.5 million, reached millions of users, turned profitable, and become a default check for educators, recruiters, and grant agencies trying to tell human writing from machine writing.
Dr. Kate Jarvis is the CEO and co-founder of Fifth Dimension, the London-born AI company building Ellie, an agentic assistant that screens deals, drafts investment-committee memos and surfaces risk for the people who buy and manage real assets. A Stanford linguistics PhD turned backend engineer, she spent a dozen years shipping machine-learning products before GPT-3 convinced her that real estate's mountains of unstructured documents were a problem language models were born to solve. She has raised more than $40M, opened offices in London, New York and Singapore, and put firms like BXP and Realty Income on her platform.
Agency (agen.cy) is a San Francisco company building the tooling layer for AI agents. Its flagship product, AgentOps.ai, is an observability, testing, and compliance platform that logs every decision an autonomous agent makes - so teams can see what their agents actually do, catch failures, and ship reliably. Founded in 2023 out of the city's AI hackathon scene, the company also runs an AI-agent consulting practice and raised $2.6M in pre-seed funding in 2024.
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.
Deccan AI is a Mountain View-based GenAI data company that runs the post-training and production layer for frontier labs and enterprises. It builds super-accurate SFT and RLHF datasets, reinforcement learning environments and agentic evaluation pipelines using an elite expert network and a purpose-built quality platform.
Ema builds a 'Universal AI Employee' for the enterprise - autonomous AI agents that plug into existing systems and run business processes across customer support, sales, HR, finance, and compliance. Founded in 2023 by ex-Coinbase CPO Surojit Chatterjee and ex-Okta engineering VP Souvik Sen, the company is headquartered in San Francisco and has raised $61M to date.
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.
H2O.ai is a Mountain View-based AI cloud company founded in 2012, on a mission to democratize artificial intelligence for everyone. The company offers a converged platform spanning predictive and generative AI - from its open-source H2O-3 machine learning framework to enterprise products like Driverless AI, h2oGPTe, and the H2O AI Cloud. Trusted by over 20,000 organizations including more than half the Fortune 500, H2O.ai is known for employing the world's largest team of Kaggle Grandmasters and for pioneering automated machine learning. With $246 million in total funding at a $1.7 billion valuation, the company serves industries from financial services and healthcare to government and telecommunications, delivering AI that organizations can deploy on their own terms - on-premises, in the cloud, or in air-gapped environments.
MatX is a Mountain View semiconductor company building chips designed exclusively for large language models. Founded in 2022 by ex-Google TPU engineers Reiner Pope and Mike Gunter, it aims to deliver an order-of-magnitude more performance-per-dollar for frontier model training and inference than current GPUs.
Neuron7.ai is a Santa Clara-based enterprise AI company building service resolution intelligence - software that helps technicians, agents, and customers diagnose and fix complex products in seconds rather than days. Its platform fuses unstructured manuals, ticket histories, telemetry, and expert know-how into guided, real-time answers used by Fortune 1000 service organizations across medical devices, telecom, industrial equipment, and high tech.
Abhishek Jha is the Co-Founder and CEO of Elucidata, a San Francisco-based AI company making biomedical data AI-ready for drug discovery and pharmaceutical R&D. A trained physical chemist with a PhD from the University of Chicago and postdoctoral work at MIT, he spent years at Agios Pharmaceuticals contributing to four FDA-approved first-in-class therapies before co-founding Elucidata in 2015. Under his leadership, the company has raised over $22.7M in funding, grown to 170 employees, and achieved $22.2M ARR, while evolving from a data-curation platform into an AI company solving out-of-distribution (OOD) problems in biomedical research - work that earned Elucidata recognition as one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in 2024.
Anant Bhardwaj is the founder and CEO of Instabase, a San Francisco-based AI platform that helps enterprises extract intelligence from unstructured data - PDFs, images, emails, and documents of every kind. He dropped out of a PhD at MIT in 2015 to build what has become a $1.24 billion company with $277M in total funding, serving clients like NatWest, AXA, Uber, and four of the five largest U.S. banks. Born in Bihar, India, he studied at Pune, Stanford, and MIT before pioneering the idea that the enterprise's biggest untapped asset is the data it can't yet read.
Brian Raymond is the Founder and CEO of Unstructured, the leading enterprise ETL platform for making raw, unstructured data LLM-ready. A former CIA intelligence officer and White House National Security Council director, Raymond pivoted from government service through investment banking and AI startup Primer before founding Unstructured in 2022. In just two years, he raised $65 million across three rounds from Menlo Ventures, Databricks, IBM, NVIDIA, and others, building the critical 'first mile of AI' infrastructure that powers enterprise RAG pipelines and GenAI applications globally.
Henry Ehrenberg is Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at Snorkel AI, the data-centric AI company he helped build out of Stanford's AI Lab in 2019. With a background in applied mathematics (Yale) and computational engineering (Stanford), Ehrenberg co-developed the Snorkel system — a paradigm-shifting framework for training machine learning models using programmatic weak supervision rather than hand-labeled data. Snorkel AI has raised $338M total, including a $100M Series D in May 2025 at a $1.3B valuation, and counts five of the top ten US banks, Fortune 500 companies, and leading research labs like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic among its clients.
Jason Lopatecki is the co-founder and CEO of Arize AI, a leading AI observability and evaluation platform that has raised $131M including a $70M Series C in 2025. A serial entrepreneur and UC Berkeley EECS graduate, he previously co-founded TubeMogul and scaled it from a garage startup to a NASDAQ-listed public company before Adobe acquired it in 2016. At Arize, he is building the infrastructure layer that helps engineering teams test, evaluate, and troubleshoot AI models and LLM-powered agents in production - a market that has exploded with the rise of generative AI.
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.
Kim Parikh is Co-Founder and SVP of Data and Content at Hippocratic AI, a Palo Alto-based company building the first safety-focused large language model for healthcare. With a background spanning leveraged finance at PIMCO and Western Asset Management and strategy operations at Health IQ, Parikh brings a cross-disciplinary lens to one of AI's most consequential bets: putting voice-enabled AI agents into direct, empathetic contact with patients. Hippocratic AI has raised over $438M, most recently a $126M Series C in November 2025, and has completed over 1.8 million patient calls at a 8.95/10 satisfaction rating.
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.
May Habib is the co-founder and CEO of Writer, a full-stack enterprise generative AI platform valued at $1.9 billion. Born in rural Lebanon and raised in Canada after her family immigrated when she was eight, she studied Economics and Near Eastern Languages at Harvard before stints at Lehman Brothers and Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund Mubadala. She co-founded Writer in 2020 with Waseem AlShikh - making a contrarian bet to build proprietary LLMs (the Palmyra family) 18 months before ChatGPT - and has grown it into a platform serving 250+ enterprise clients including Uber, Salesforce, L'Oreal, and Intuit, raising $326M in total funding.
Melissa Gordon is the CEO of Rasa, the enterprise conversational AI platform powering two of the world's three largest banks and downloaded over 50 million times by developers. A two-time NCAA Division I All-American pole vaulter at Stanford and a near-decade Oracle veteran, she joined Rasa in February 2022 and has since led the company through a strategic pivot to generative AI, launching CALM (Conversational AI with Language Models) and raising a $30M Series C in February 2024 co-led by StepStone Group and PayPal Ventures.