Rukesh Reddy is the Founder and CEO of Deccan AI, a Mountain View-based AI data and post-training company that raised a $25M Series A in March 2026 led by A91 Partners with participation from Susquehanna International Group and Prosus Ventures. Built as a 'born GenAI' company in October 2024, Deccan AI serves frontier AI labs and major tech companies - including Google DeepMind and Snowflake - with high-precision training datasets, reinforcement learning environments, and enterprise evaluation suites. Reddy brings over 15 years of experience spanning finance, strategy consulting, and digital transformation at firms including J.P. Morgan, Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte), and Citi, where he led CX and digital transformation for the global retail bank.
Wendy Gonzalez is the CEO of Sama, a mission-driven AI data annotation and model evaluation company that employs thousands of workers in East Africa. She joined Sama in 2015, rose through the ranks as COO and President, and assumed the CEO role in 2020 following the passing of founder Leila Janah. Under her leadership, Sama closed a $70M Series B - at the time the largest funding round for a woman-led AI infrastructure company - achieved Forbes AI 50 recognition, and scaled to over 3,000 employees while maintaining its B Corp certification and social mission of lifting people out of poverty through dignified work in the AI economy.
Eric Zhang is the Chief Executive Officer of Thoth AI, a Singapore-headquartered global AI data solutions company with R&D operations in Silicon Valley. Under his leadership, Thoth AI powers frontier AI models for some of the world's leading AI labs by providing high-quality training data, RLHF workflows, model evaluation, and multilingual customer experience services across 170+ countries in 200+ languages. Zhang operates at the intersection of AI safety, responsible deployment, and global scale - building the human infrastructure that makes AI smarter, safer, and culturally aware.
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.
Edwin Chen is the Founder & CEO of Surge AI, the AI data infrastructure company that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon for model training and evaluation. A former ML scientist at Google, Twitter, Dropbox, and Facebook, Chen bootstrapped Surge AI from his San Francisco apartment in 2020 to over $1.2 billion in annual revenue with fewer than 110 employees - no venture capital, no sales team. TIME named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2025, and Forbes put him on the 400 list as one of the youngest billionaires. Surge's platform powers RLHF, supervised fine-tuning, and custom evaluations for the world's leading AI labs.