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Jim Rebesco and the problem with tomorrow
He learned to keep algorithms working on Wall Street. At Striveworks, Jim Rebesco is applying that lesson to a world where the weather, the data, and the adversary refuse to stand still.
Hyun Kim Is Teaching AI to See the World Beyond the Screen
A six-month lab failure nudged Hyun Kim from genetics toward automation. Eight years after founding Superb AI, he is still chasing the same practical question: how do you make intelligent systems work when the real world refuses to behave like a demo?
Jaeman An Is Building the Plumbing for AI's Expensive New Age
Before AI could write the future, someone had to make the machines cooperate. The VESSL AI co-founder turned a decade of infrastructure headaches into a company built for the age of scarce GPUs and restless models.
Bhushan Muthiyan Left Silicon Valley to Fix the Unfashionable Part of AI
The Automaton AI founder is betting that India’s AI advantage will be won in the plumbing: cleaner data, disciplined deployment and systems that work where enterprises actually keep their information.
Ryohei Fujimaki
Ryohei Fujimaki is the founder and CEO of dotData, a Silicon Valley enterprise AI company that automates feature engineering and data science. A machine learning PhD from the University of Tokyo, he became the youngest research fellow in NEC's 119-year history at age 33 before spinning dotData out of NEC to commercialize automated feature discovery. He has raised roughly $75 million to make predictive analytics accessible to a broader range of business users.
Anuraag Gutgutia
Anuraag Gutgutia is co-founder of TrueFoundry, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI platform that lets companies build, deploy, and govern generative and agentic AI inside their own cloud infrastructure. A quantitative analyst turned repeat entrepreneur, he spent seven years at WorldQuant rising to VP of Portfolio Management and the CEO's office before co-founding the talent platform EntHire (acquired by InfoEdge/BigShyft) and then TrueFoundry in 2021 alongside two IIT Kharagpur batchmates. TrueFoundry has raised $21.3M in total funding - including a $19M Series A led by Intel Capital in February 2025 - and serves Fortune 1000 companies seeking to run AI workloads without infrastructure complexity or data-sovereignty tradeoffs.
James Rebesco
James (Jim) Rebesco is the co-founder and CEO of Striveworks, an Austin-based AI company that helps the U.S. defense and national-security community build, deploy, and monitor machine-learning models at scale through its Chariot platform. A physicist by training (Caltech) and a computational neuroscientist by doctorate (Northwestern), he spent seven years as a partner at high-frequency trading firm Virtu Financial before turning to operational AI. Under his leadership Striveworks has landed a $70M enterprise government agreement, raised a Series B led by Washington Harbour Partners, and become the first company to bridge the U.S. Army's two largest battlefield AI efforts.
Misha Herscu
Misha Herscu is the co-founder and CEO of Cake, a New York based platform that bundles more than 100 open-source AI components into managed, production-ready infrastructure so mid-market teams get the control of a build with the ease of a buy. A Harvard physics graduate turned full-stack engineer, he previously founded the radiology AI marketplace EnvoyAI (McCoy Medical Technologies), which TeraRecon acquired in 2018. After running over 200 customer-discovery calls as an operator in residence at Primary Venture Partners, he started Cake in 2022 with CTO Skyler Thomas and raised a $13M seed round led by Google's Gradient in late 2024.
Pete Foley
Pete Foley is a serial enterprise-software entrepreneur and the co-founder of ModelOp, the Chicago-based company that built one of the first platforms for governing AI models the way banks govern money. Over a 35-year career he has run and exited a string of infrastructure companies - Infoblox, PortAuthority (to Websense), RingCube (to Citrix), Graphite Systems (to EMC) - before betting that the hardest problem in artificial intelligence would not be building models but trusting them. He served as ModelOp's CEO from its founding and now supports the company from its board of directors.
Gideon Mendels
Gideon Mendels is the co-founder and CEO of Comet, the New York machine-learning platform that tracks, compares, and explains the experiments behind AI models. A computer scientist and NLP researcher by training, he built hate-speech detection at Google and ran speech-recognition research at Columbia before turning the messy, undocumented reality of model-building into a company. In 2024 Comet shipped Opik, an open-source LLM evaluation tool, putting Mendels at the center of the scramble to make AI agents reliable in production.
Abhishek Choudhary
Abhishek Choudhary is the Co-Founder and CTO of TrueFoundry, a Series A-backed AI infrastructure platform that helps enterprises deploy, manage, and govern machine learning models at scale. A former Senior Staff Engineer at Meta — where he worked on infrastructure serving over a billion users — he left to build the platform he wished had existed at Facebook: one that brings Meta-level AI automation to every enterprise. An IIT Kharagpur alumnus, he co-founded TrueFoundry in 2021 alongside batchmates Nikunj Bajaj and Anuraag Gupta, and has since grown it to serve clients like NVIDIA, Siemens Healthineers, and ResMed, raising $21.3M in total funding.
Krishna Gade
Krishna Gade is the co-founder and CEO of Fiddler AI, a Palo Alto-based enterprise AI observability and control platform that has raised over $112 million in funding. Before founding Fiddler in 2018, he built data infrastructure at scale at Microsoft/Bing, Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook - where he led the team that created the industry's first large-scale AI explainability feature, 'Why am I seeing this?' in News Feed. Fiddler AI sits at the intersection of AI transparency, model monitoring, and governance, serving Fortune 500 companies, the US Navy, and organizations that need to trust the decisions their AI systems make.
Linda Haviv
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.
Robert Nishihara
Robert Nishihara is a co-founder of Anyscale, the company commercializing Ray - the open-source distributed computing framework powering AI workloads at OpenAI, Apple, Uber, and thousands of other organizations. A Harvard math grad and UC Berkeley PhD, he built Ray during his doctoral research to solve the tooling bottlenecks he personally experienced doing AI research. Anyscale has raised $259.6M and reached a $1B+ valuation under his leadership before he transitioned from CEO to a product-focused role in mid-2024.
Sri Ambati
Sri Satish Ambati is the CEO and Co-founder of H2O.ai, the company behind the world's most widely used open-source machine learning platform. Since founding H2O.ai in 2012 with a mission to 'democratize AI for anyone, anywhere,' he has built it into a $1.7B enterprise AI platform serving over 20,000 organizations including more than half the Fortune 500. A serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded Platfora (acquired by Workday), Sri bridges academic neuroscience research - via sabbaticals at Stanford and UC Berkeley - with industrial-scale AI deployment. Under his leadership H2O.ai has advanced from AutoML pioneer to generative AI powerhouse, with h2oGPTe ranked #1 on the GAIA leaderboard and the company recognized as a Visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud AI Developer Services.
Florian Leibert
Florian Leibert is a German-born software engineer turned venture capitalist who co-founded 468 Capital, a Berlin-based VC firm managing $1.3 billion across 100+ technology companies. Before VC, he co-founded Mesosphere (later D2iQ), which raised $252M and built the infrastructure layer for companies like Apple, Netflix, and SAP - and before that, he was the engineer at Twitter who helped slay the Fail Whale by architecting the distributed systems that kept the platform from collapsing under its own weight.
Sarah Catanzaro
Sarah Catanzaro is General Partner at Amplify Partners, a Menlo Park-based venture firm investing in technical founders building data infrastructure, machine learning tools, and enterprise software. Before venture, she mapped Somali pirate networks and built threat intelligence systems for the US Secret Service. She joined Amplify in 2017, made partner in 2020, and became General Partner in 2022. Her portfolio includes RunwayML, LangChain, Modal Labs, Hex, DatologyAI, and WarpStream. She invests pre-product, bets on problem-obsessed founders, and argues that most AI struggles trace back to bad data.
Debanjan Saha
Debanjan Saha is the CEO of DataRobot, leading one of the most widely deployed enterprise AI platforms in the world. A PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland and alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, he built his career across IBM, Amazon Web Services (where he launched Amazon Aurora), and Google Cloud (where he oversaw BigQuery Omni and Dataplex). He joined DataRobot in February 2022, became interim CEO in July 2022, and was formally appointed CEO in September 2022. He holds 50+ patents, is an IEEE Fellow, and a Distinguished Member of the ACM.
Neschae Fernando
Neschae Fernando is the CEO of Zone24x7, a 22-year-old technology engineering company headquartered in San Jose, California, with a major hub in Sri Lanka. With a dual background in electrical engineering (MS and BS from UCLA) and enterprise IT delivery at Cisco, Fernando leads a 270-person team that sits at a rare intersection: companies capable of integrating hardware and software end-to-end. Under his leadership since June 2022, Zone24x7 has won seven industry awards in 2025 alone, including Gold at NBQSA and the IoT Technology of the Year Award, while expanding its AI, RFID, and cognitive vision platforms across 50+ enterprise clients globally.
Samir Deolikar
Samir Deolikar is the Chief Executive Officer of BayRock Labs, a Silicon Valley product-engineering firm in San Jose that ships AI-first software for startups and enterprises. He moved into the CEO seat in February 2024 after two years as advisor, and twenty-plus years across Zensar Technologies and Reliance Industries before that.
Ahmed Kamel
Ahmed Kamel is a Cairo-born, San Francisco-based serial tech entrepreneur and Google Developer Expert in Machine Learning. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sinai.ai, an AI-native book platform that transforms static books into interactive, personalized reading experiences via its patented aiBook™ format. A 20-year software veteran, Kamel previously co-founded YOUXEL Technology (2011) and adam.ai (2017), an AI-powered meeting management platform that attracted Atlassian investment and grew 5x during COVID-19. In April 2026, Sinai.ai closed a $1.45M pre-seed round led by KAUST Innovation Ventures and DisrupTech Ventures.
Gabriel Kalejaiye
Gabriel Bayomi Tinoco Kalejaiye is a Brazilian-born engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Openlayer, a San Francisco-based AI governance and observability platform. After earning his MS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon and working as a Machine Learning Engineer at Apple - where he contributed to both Siri and the secretive Vision Pro project - he left with two colleagues to solve the problem that haunted every AI team: models that look great in testing but fail in the real world. Openlayer provides enterprises with evaluation, monitoring, and compliance tooling across the full AI lifecycle, from prototype to production. The company raised a $14.5M Series A in May 2025, grew nearly 5x in 2024, and is now a recognized vendor in Gartner's 2026 Market Guide for AI Evaluation and Observability Platforms.
Mohamed Elgendy
Mohamed Elgendy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kolena, a San Francisco-based AI testing and validation platform that raised $21M to help enterprises build reliable, trustworthy AI systems. An Egyptian-American technologist and author of the widely-read 'Deep Learning for Vision Systems' (Manning Publications, 20,000+ copies sold), Elgendy cut his teeth building AI/ML organizations at Amazon, Twilio, Rakuten, and Synapse (acquired by Palantir) before founding Kolena in 2021. His mission: bring software engineering rigor - unit testing, regression analysis, scenario-level validation - to a field that has long relied on aggregate accuracy scores that mask real-world failures.
Scott Clark
Scott Clark is the Co-founder and CEO of Distributional, an enterprise AI testing platform that helps companies identify behavioral drift and unknown failures in AI systems. A triple-degree graduate of Oregon State University with a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Cornell, he co-founded and sold SigOpt (a Bayesian optimization platform backed by Y Combinator and a16z) to Intel in 2020, then led 200 engineers as VP & GM of AI/HPC Supercomputing at Intel before founding Distributional in September 2023. The company raised $30M in under a year, including a $19M Series A led by Two Sigma Ventures in October 2024.
Tristan Zajonc
Tristan Zajonc is the cofounder and CEO of Continual, a San Francisco-based AI agent platform enabling enterprises to automate complex workflows. A Harvard-trained public policy PhD turned serial AI entrepreneur, he previously founded Sense.io (acquired by Cloudera in 2016) and served as Cloudera's CTO for Machine Learning before pivoting back to founding. With over 15 years building machine learning infrastructure across academia and industry, Zajonc has been quietly shaping how enterprises operationalize AI - from SQL-driven ML pipelines to LLM-powered agents - long before it became fashionable.
Nick Elprin
Nick Elprin is the Co-Founder and CEO of Domino Data Lab, the enterprise MLOps platform trusted by 20% of the Fortune 100. A Harvard computer science graduate who spent seven years as a senior technologist and quantitative researcher at Bridgewater Associates, he co-founded Domino in 2013 to solve the scaling problem he witnessed firsthand: companies could start data science projects but couldn't industrialize them. Under his leadership, Domino has raised $226+ million, been named a Gartner Magic Quadrant Visionary, and become the infrastructure layer for AI in regulated industries including pharma, financial services, and defense. Elprin is also a decade-long meditation practitioner and a vocal advocate for the irreplaceable role of human intelligence in data science.
Nikunj Bajaj
Nikunj Bajaj is the Co-Founder and CEO of TrueFoundry, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI infrastructure platform that lets companies build, deploy, and govern machine learning and generative AI applications on Kubernetes - in cloud, on-prem, or hybrid environments. An IIT Kharagpur and UC Berkeley alum, Bajaj previously led machine learning at Facebook where he helped launch the company's first on-device model on Messenger and built the Proactive Assistant. He founded TrueFoundry in 2021 alongside two IIT Kharagpur batchmates, raised $21.3M (including a $19M Series A led by Intel Capital in 2025), and counts Siemens Healthineers, NVIDIA, and Automation Anywhere among customers - compressing typical AI deployment timelines from 14 months to under four.
Vishal Sikka
Vishal Sikka is the founder and CEO of Vianai Systems, an enterprise AI company he started in 2019. A Stanford-trained computer scientist, he previously created SAP HANA as SAP's first-ever CTO and led Infosys as its first non-founder CEO. He sits on the boards of Oracle and BMW Group, advises Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute, and has championed the idea that AI should amplify - not replace - human creativity.
Yochay Ettun
Yochay Ettun is an Israeli tech founder turned venture scout at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). He co-founded cnvrg.io, a machine learning operations platform built by data scientists for data scientists, which was acquired by Intel in 2020. A coder since age seven, former Israeli intelligence unit veteran, and Hebrew University Computer Science graduate, Ettun now deploys capital as an a16z Scout, focusing on Israeli and European startups at the earliest stages.
Aurimas Griciūnas
Aurimas Griciūnas is a Lithuanian ML/AI engineer, founder of SwirlAI, and author of the SwirlAI Newsletter with 58,000+ Substack followers. A former CPO at neptune.ai (acquired by OpenAI), he now runs SwirlAI — an AI engineering education and consulting firm — and is a LinkedIn Top Voice in AI with 120,000+ followers. His newsletter covers AI engineering, LLMOps, RAG architectures, and agentic systems from a production-first, no-hype perspective.