microsoft-azure
(7)
Ana-Maria Constantin
Ana-Maria Constantin is the CEO and co-founder of Cascade AI, a Bellevue-based startup building agentic AI that automates the grind of HR and back-office operations. A Harvard dual major in computer science and astrophysics who left Romania after high school, she spent five-plus years as a software engineer at Microsoft writing code that touched millions of users on Azure before deciding HR - the function that touches more lives than any other in a company - was the perfect place to point machine learning. She raised a $5.45M-plus seed round led by Google's Gradient Ventures with AlleyCorp, was named GeekWire's Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2024, and recognized as a 2025 Google Cloud Partner All-Star.
David Aronchick
David Aronchick is the co-founder and CEO of Expanso, the Seattle company commercializing Bacalhau, an open-source platform that moves computation to where data already lives instead of hauling data to the cloud. A 4x founder, he helped launch Google Kubernetes Engine, co-founded the Kubeflow machine learning project, led open source ML strategy at Microsoft Azure, and ran Compute over Data at Protocol Labs. His through-line is a stubborn belief that technology is not neutral and that distributed systems should make computing cheaper, more private, and more useful at the edge.
Vadim Vladimirskiy
Vadim Vladimirskiy is the co-founder and CEO of Nerdio, a Chicago software company that automates and cuts the cost of running Microsoft cloud desktops for thousands of organizations across more than 50 countries. He emigrated from Ukraine at 13, started his first IT consultancy in high school, and spent fifteen years running an MSP before turning his internal tooling into a product. In March 2025 Nerdio raised a $500 million Series C from General Atlantic at a valuation above $1 billion, and the company crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue by mid-2025.
Jacqueline Ramos
Jacqueline Ramos is a seasoned Executive Business Administrator at Microsoft with over 25 years of experience, currently supporting the COO, CMO for Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East & Africa (CEMA), and VP for Global Partner Solutions (GPS) in the EMEA region. Based in Dubai, UAE, she has built her Microsoft career from the ground up - starting as an Executive Assistant to the Gulf Services Director in 2008, rising through roles in business operations, and eventually becoming an executive-level administrator supporting some of the company's most senior regional leaders. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from the University of San Jose-Recoletos in the Philippines and has leveraged her technical grounding alongside exceptional organizational and leadership skills to become one of Microsoft's most trusted operational connectors across its vast Middle East and global operations.
Daniel Karp
Daniel Karp is General Partner at Cervin Ventures, a Palo Alto-based early-stage VC firm with $162M in its latest fund. A veteran of Cisco's corporate venture arm - where his portfolio generated over $2.5B in exits including Habana Labs (acquired by Intel for $2B) and GuardiCore - Karp brings a rare combination of chip engineering roots, Microsoft Azure product strategy, Israeli IDF intelligence experience, and nearly a decade of corporate M&A deal-making to his current focus on enterprise infrastructure, DevOps, cybersecurity, and AI-native startups.
Yuval Bachar
Yuval Bachar is the founder and CEO of EdgeCloudLink (ECL), the company building the world's first off-grid hydrogen-powered modular data centers. A 20+ year veteran of hyperscale infrastructure at Cisco, Juniper Networks, Facebook/Meta, LinkedIn, and Microsoft Azure, Bachar co-founded the Open19 open hardware standards project and holds eight U.S. patents. At ECL, he is reimagining what a data center can be - deploying capacity in nine months (vs. the industry's 3-4 years), generating zero emissions, and producing cooling water as a byproduct of hydrogen fuel cells. In May 2024, ECL unveiled the world's first off-grid hydrogen-powered AI data center in Mountain View, California, and Lambda deployed the first hydrogen-powered NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems there. ECL's TerraSite-TX1 near Houston is planned as a 1-gigawatt AI factory on 600 acres.
Sarah Drasner
Sarah Drasner is a Senior Director of Engineering at Google, where she leads the Core Developer Web Infrastructure powering Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Workspace. A rare hybrid of fine artist turned technologist, she spent 15+ years shaping how the web moves - as a Vue.js core team member, staff writer at CSS-Tricks, creator of the Night Owl VS Code theme (used by millions), and author of both 'SVG Animations' (O'Reilly) and 'Engineering Management for the Rest of Us'. Before Google, she was VP of Developer Experience at Netlify and a Principal Lead at Microsoft Azure. She is an award-winning speaker, teacher on Frontend Masters, and co-organizer of ConcatenateConf, a free conference for Nigerian and Kenyan developers.