Gopalakrishna Kuppuswamy is Co-Founder and CTO of Cognida.ai, an enterprise AI company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, that raised a $15M Series A from Nexus Venture Partners in February 2025. With 30+ years in technology - starting at CMC Limited in 1994 and spending a decade as VP at Hitachi Vantara - he now leads the engineering behind Zunō, Cognida's agentic AI platform that cuts enterprise AI deployment timelines from 6-8 months down to 10-12 weeks. Based in Hyderabad, he holds master's degrees from both the University of Hyderabad and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and has helped grow Cognida.ai to 250+ employees and $37.7M ARR.
Anna-Katrina Shedletsky is the CEO and co-founder of Instrumental Inc., a Palo Alto-based AI manufacturing software company she founded in 2015 after six years at Apple—where she spent 300+ days in Chinese factories debugging manufacturing issues for the iPod and led product design for the original Apple Watch. At Instrumental, she is converting those factory-floor battle scars into software that uses AI and cameras to find defects and eliminate waste on electronics assembly lines, with customers including Cisco, Honeywell, Bose, Meta, and Lenovo. The company has raised $80.3M in total funding and was named Fast Company's #2 Most Innovative Manufacturing Company in 2021. She also founded the Women in STEM Mentorship Program (WISMP) at Stanford in 2013, which now spans multiple universities.
Jon Sobel is the co-founder and CEO of Sight Machine, the industrial AI company he built from scratch in 2011 after a career spanning the law departments of Yahoo and Tesla and executive roles at CBS Digital and SourceForge. A Princeton and Wharton graduate who also holds a Michigan law degree, Sobel spent over a decade as one of Silicon Valley's most senior in-house lawyers before betting his career on a hunch: that factory floors, drowning in data they could not use, were the biggest missed opportunity in enterprise software. Sight Machine has since raised over $124M, operates in 20+ industries across 20+ countries, and in 2025 closed an equity investment from NVIDIA's venture arm — proving that a former general counsel with a journalism fellowship can, in fact, build a category-defining AI company.