Xgrid is a tech-first digital services and cloud innovation company founded in 2012. It helps Fortune 500 enterprises, high-growth unicorns, and B2B SaaS startups design, build, and run cloud-native infrastructure, DevOps pipelines, Temporal workflows, custom applications, and full-service digital marketing. With teams across the US, UAE, and Pakistan, Xgrid pairs engineers drawn from AWS, Google, Salesforce, Nvidia, and VMware with a delivery model built around taking co-responsibility for a client's growth.
Zelar (ZelarSoft) is a cloud-native engineering and consulting firm that helps banks, telcos, oil & gas, and government teams adopt Kubernetes, DevOps, and AI without the usual pain. Founded in 2018 and led by CEO Vasu Maganti, the company pairs hands-on services - cloud migration, SRE, security, and data engineering - with its own platforms: Klusternetes for self-service Kubernetes multi-tenancy, OpenOps for production-ready GKE stacks, and Cokpit for agentic AI DevOps. A Google Cloud Premier Partner with offices across the US, Canada, India, and the UAE, Zelar bets that most teams want cloud-native outcomes, not cloud-native homework.
QBurst is a global digital product engineering and consulting firm founded in 2004 in Trivandrum, India. It builds custom software, cloud platforms, data and AI solutions, and digital experiences for a blue-chip client base across the US, Japan, Europe, the Middle East, and South Africa. Now majority-owned by Multiples Alternate Asset Management after a ~USD 200 million 2025 deal, QBurst employs roughly 3,500 people across more than 20 cities and positions itself as a 'High AI-Q' partner blending human expertise with intelligent technology.
Cortex is the engineering operations platform - an internal developer portal that catalogs services, scores them against engineering standards, and pushes teams to act on what's broken. Born out of the chaos of Uber-scale microservices, it gives platform teams a single pane of glass over ownership, quality, and operational maturity.
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.
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.
Anish Dhar is the Cofounder and CEO of Cortex, a San Francisco-based internal developer portal company he co-founded in 2019 after spending nearly five years as an engineer at Uber. Watching Uber's microservices sprawl into chaos—thousands of undocumented services named after video games, ownership lost every time someone quit—he rented an Airbnb for a weekend hackathon with two friends and built the first version of what would become a $470M company backed by Sequoia, Scale Venture Partners, IVP, and the Collison brothers. Cortex raised $60M in Series C funding in September 2024 and is used by engineering teams at Adobe, Grammarly, Xero, TripAdvisor, and Canva to catalog, score, and continuously improve their software services.
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.
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.
Mukunda Srinivasagowda is a seasoned technologist and Co-Founder of SuperAGI, a Palo Alto-based AI company building a full-stack agentic intelligence platform. With over 13 years spanning Amazon, Zomato, and fintech unicorn Navi, he co-built SuperAGI from the ground up in 2023 alongside CEO Ishaan Bhola. The company's open-source autonomous agent framework earned 17,500+ GitHub stars, attracted a $10 million Series A led by Jan Koum's secretive Newlands VC, and spawned a suite of AI-native products including SuperSales, SuperMarketing, and SuperCoder - all targeting the shift from LLMs that generate content to agents that actually take action.
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.
Tigera is the creator of Calico, the open-source standard for Kubernetes networking and security that powers more than a million clusters every day. From its San Jose headquarters, the company sells Calico Cloud and Calico Enterprise - SaaS and on-prem platforms that bolt active runtime security, zero-trust microsegmentation, and observability onto container environments at any scale.
Varun Talwar is the co-founder and CTO of Tetrate, the enterprise service mesh company built on Istio and Envoy. Before Tetrate, he was the founding product manager for both gRPC and Istio at Google — two open-source projects now embedded in the plumbing of the modern internet. He helped stream Felix Baumgartner's 2012 space jump to 8% of all internet traffic, then spent a decade building the connectivity layer that would make that kind of scale routine. Today Tetrate has raised $52.5M and is redefining how AI agents talk to each other securely in production.
Leonard Livschitz is the CEO and Director of Grid Dynamics (NASDAQ: GDYN), a Silicon Valley-based digital engineering company serving Fortune 1000 enterprises. An immigrant from Kharkov, Ukraine with dual master's degrees - one in robotics from Ukraine and one in electrical engineering from Case Western Reserve University - he spent over two decades at Ford, Visteon, HP, and Philips before co-founding Luxera and ultimately taking the helm at Grid Dynamics in 2014. Under his leadership, Grid Dynamics has grown from a boutique e-commerce consultancy into a publicly traded AI and cloud engineering powerhouse with nearly 5,000 employees and over $350 million in annual revenue, earning a Preferred Vendor designation from AWS in 2025 amid a 30% year-over-year growth in its AI division.
Vasu Maganti is the founder and CEO of Zelar (formerly Zelarsoft), a Google Cloud Premier Partner and cloud-native consulting firm headquartered in San Francisco. Since founding the company in 2018, he has built it into an ~180-person, $26.6M-revenue enterprise serving Fortune 500 companies, major banks, telcos, and federal governments across North America and APAC. Zelar was named Google Cloud Activation Partner of the Year - JAPAC 2025 and Google Cloud Partner All-Star in Artificial Intelligence 2024 under his leadership. Maganti co-organizes Silicon Valley's cloud-native meetup community and is a vocal advocate for Kubernetes multi-tenancy, GitOps, zero-trust security, and FinOps practices.
Cindy Sridharan is a distributed systems engineer, O'Reilly author, and influential technical writer based in San Francisco. Known online as @copyconstruct, she wrote the seminal O'Reilly book 'Distributed Systems Observability' and runs the Systems Distributed newsletter on Substack. She is widely respected for her long-form thinking on observability, testing in production, microservices architecture, and engineering culture. She spent years as an engineer at imgix, led the Prometheus user group in San Francisco, and has spoken at major industry conferences including QCon and GOTO. Her Medium essays on monitoring, testing, and systems thinking have shaped how a generation of engineers thinks about building resilient software.
Sam Newman is an independent consultant, author, and speaker who has spent over 25 years helping organisations navigate the messy realities of distributed systems. Best known for 'Building Microservices' - one of the most widely read technical books of its era - he runs Sam Newman and Associates from London, advising engineering teams worldwide on cloud architecture, microservices, and software resilience. A former ThoughtWorks principal, he is also the host of the Magpie Talk Show podcast and a sought-after conference speaker at events like QCon, NDC, and GOTO.