Matthew Shaxted is the founder and CEO of Parallel Works, a Chicago company that turns the headache of running heavy AI, machine learning, and simulation workloads across clouds and on-premises systems into a single control plane. A civil engineer who once wired 30 Linux desktops into a render farm to push building simulations, he met co-founder Michael Wilde at Argonne National Laboratory and spun the lab's parallel-workflow technology into a company in 2015. Bootstrapped and cash-flow positive, Parallel Works now powers hurricane risk models, cancer research, space-weather digital twins, and IL5-authorized defense workloads.
Panzura is an enterprise hybrid cloud data management company whose flagship CloudFS turns object storage into a single, global file system - letting distributed teams edit the same files across continents as if they were sitting in the same office. Paired with its Symphony data services platform and the newer Nexus AI connector, Panzura consolidates sprawling unstructured data, defends it against ransomware with immutable storage, and is now positioning that data to feed enterprise AI tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot.
RackWare builds enterprise-grade software that moves and protects workloads across any cloud, virtual, or physical environment. Its flagship RackWare Management Module (RMM) automates migration, disaster recovery, and backup so organizations can shift to the cloud, recover from outages, and avoid vendor lock-in - all from one policy-driven, agentless platform. Founded in 2009 and based in San Jose, California, RackWare has migrated over a million workloads and protects hundreds of thousands more for customers ranging from Fortune 50 enterprises to SMBs across 60+ countries.
SORINT.lab is a multinational, vendor-neutral 'Next Generation System Integrator' founded in Bergamo, Italy in 1985. With roughly 1,500 engineers across 17 offices in Europe, the USA and Africa, it helps over 100 large organizations run and modernize their IT through DevOps, CI/CD, cloud adoption, application modernization, next-generation IT operations and site reliability engineering. The company is a notable open-source contributor (Agola, Stolon, Ercole, Sircles) and runs on a flat, holacracy-style 'Sircles' organizational model.
Archera is a Bellevue, Washington FinOps company that turns long-term cloud commitments into short, insured ones. Its free multi-cloud platform gives teams cost visibility, forecasting, and purchasing recommendations across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, then layers on its signature Insured Commitments - reserved instances and savings plans wrapped with a money-back guarantee and terms as short as 30 days. The result is commitment-level discounts of roughly 30-40% without the multi-year lock-in. Founded in 2019 by brothers Aran and Nikhil Khanna, Archera manages over $3.4B in annual cloud spend for more than 1,000 customers.
ATAD Corp. is a Seoul-based technology company building an AI-driven multi-cloud operating platform that helps teams run AWS, Azure, and GCP environments from one place. Its flagship product, ODiiN, uses AI to forecast and self-heal infrastructure problems, claiming up to 80% cost savings and large productivity gains. Founded in 2023 by cloud and cybersecurity specialists, ATAD pairs cloud automation with a security stack built on AI, multi-factor authentication, and zero-knowledge proofs, and also runs Heiimdahl (a multi-LLM monitoring gateway) and Kraton (a blockchain-based decentralized VPN). The company has raised about $3.36M and holds a growing portfolio of patents in multi-cloud integration and secure data distribution.
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.
MegazoneCloud is South Korea's largest managed cloud service provider (MSP) and the country's first cloud MSP unicorn. Spun out of Megazone in 2018, it became AWS's first official partner in Korea back in 2012 and is now the No.1 AWS premier consulting partner across Asia Pacific. With roughly 2,800 cloud specialists, it helps more than 5,000 customers - from large enterprises and game studios to startups and public institutions - migrate to, build on, and operate AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. The company is pivoting hard toward AI, packaging its work into the proprietary AIR platform (AIR Studio, AIR AIOps, AIR Build) to help organizations become 'AI-native.'
Yeongseon Park is the founder and CEO of ATAD Corp., a Seoul-based company building an AI-powered multi-cloud operating platform called ODiiN and a multi-LLM security gateway called Heiimdahl. ATAD's pitch is blunt: most teams run too many clouds and understand none of them. Park's products promise to operate AWS, Azure, and GCP from a single panel, claim up to 80% cost savings, and wrap it all in decentralized, zero-trust security. The company has raised about $3.36M, closed a Series A, and openly targets a Nasdaq listing by 2027.
BMC Software is a Houston-founded enterprise software company that builds the IT operations, service management, and mainframe automation tools that keep large organizations running. Founded in 1980 by three former Shell engineers, BMC has spent four decades turning the unglamorous work of keeping systems alive - monitoring, scheduling, patching, recovering - into automated, increasingly AI-driven products. Its flagship lines include Control-M (workload automation), the BMC AMI mainframe suite, and BMC Helix (service and operations management). Owned by KKR since 2018, BMC split into two focused companies, BMC and BMC Helix, in early 2025.
Confluent is the data streaming company founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka. Its Data Streaming Platform - anchored by fully managed Confluent Cloud and a self-managed Confluent Platform, plus managed Apache Flink for stream processing - lets organizations connect, process, and govern data in motion across clouds in real time. Used by thousands of enterprises including a large share of the Fortune 500, Confluent went public in 2021 (NASDAQ: CFLT) and in December 2025 agreed to be acquired by IBM in a deal valuing it at roughly $11 billion.
Imply is a San Francisco-based data analytics company that built its platform on Apache Druid - the open-source real-time analytics database that its co-founders helped create. The company offers Imply Polaris, a fully managed cloud database-as-a-service for real-time analytics, and Imply Lumi, billed as the industry's first Observability Warehouse. With $215M in total funding and unicorn status at a $1.1B valuation, Imply serves 100+ enterprise customers including Atlassian, Reddit, and Cisco ThousandEyes, enabling sub-second query performance across terabytes to petabytes of streaming and historical data.
nOps is an AI-powered FinOps platform that automatically optimizes AWS cloud costs for enterprises. Managing over $4 billion in annual cloud spend across 600+ customers, nOps uses machine learning to intelligently provision compute resources, manage AWS commitments, and deliver 50%+ cost savings without operational overhead. The company's Compute Copilot product integrates with Karpenter to optimize Kubernetes workloads, while its Clara AI agent answers cost questions and executes optimization tasks.
Amitabh Sinha is the Co-Founder of Workspot, Inc., a cloud PC and virtual desktop infrastructure company based in Campbell, California. After earning a B.Tech from IIT Kanpur and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he built a career across Oracle, Informix, and Citrix - where he ran the XenDesktop product line as VP of Product Management - before co-founding Workspot in 2012 with Puneet Chawla and Ty Wang. He served as CEO for over a decade, steering the company through five funding rounds to $86.75M in total capital raised, and pioneering innovations like the industry's first cloud PC with 99.99% SLA availability. In April 2024, he transitioned to Chief Strategy Officer.
Dr. Angel Vina is the Founder and CEO of Denodo Technologies, the global leader in data virtualization and data management platforms. A former academic who spent 25 years as a university professor at institutions including the Technical University of Madrid and the University of A Coruña - with postdoctoral research stints at UCLA and Stanford - Vina founded Denodo in Spain in 1999 after asking a deceptively simple question: how can we set data free? Today Denodo operates in 25 offices across 20 countries, has secured $336 million in Series B funding from TPG, and has been named a Gartner Leader in Data Integration Tools for five consecutive years. Vina's academic obsession with real-time distributed data systems became a commercial category - and a company that turned 25 in 2025.
Balaji Ganesan is Co-Founder and CEO of Privacera (now Trust3 AI), the data security and AI governance platform built on top of Apache Ranger technology he co-created. A survivor of the Miracle on the Hudson, he co-founded XA Secure in 2013, which was acquired by Hortonworks and open-sourced as Apache Ranger — now deployed across thousands of enterprises globally. He launched Privacera in 2016 to extend that governance vision to multi-cloud environments, raised $67.3M in total funding, and counts Nike, Intuit, and Autodesk among his customers.
Kannan Kothandaraman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Selector AI, a Santa Clara-based AIOps and network observability platform that uses large language models, knowledge graphs, and causal reasoning to help Fortune 1000 enterprises detect, diagnose, and resolve infrastructure issues faster. Before founding Selector in 2019, Kannan spent nearly two decades at Juniper Networks - rising from senior software engineer to Vice President of Product Line Management - and before that at Cisco Systems. Selector has raised $104 million in total funding, including a $32M Series B in February 2026 at a valuation of $375 million, and counts Fortune 20 companies in manufacturing and healthcare among its customers.
Privacera (now operating as Trust3 AI by Privacera) is a Newark, California-based enterprise software company that runs a unified data and AI access governance platform. Built by the co-creators of Apache Ranger, it gives Fortune 500 teams a single place to discover sensitive data, set policies, and enforce access across Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, Azure, GCP, and the new generation of LLM-powered apps.
Rafay Systems is a Sunnyvale-based platform-engineering company that builds infrastructure orchestration and workflow automation software for Kubernetes, GPU workloads and AI/ML pipelines. Its cloud-based platform lets enterprises offer self-service compute to developers and data scientists while keeping platform teams in control of cost, security and compliance across AWS, Azure, GCP and on-prem environments.
Selector is an AI-powered network and infrastructure observability platform founded by ex-Juniper Networks executives. It combines a network-specific large language model, knowledge graphs, and causal reasoning to ingest telemetry from across complex hybrid environments, cut alert noise, surface root cause, and reduce mean time to resolution for telecoms, cloud providers, and global enterprises.
Spectro Cloud is a San Jose-based enterprise software company that builds Palette, a Kubernetes management platform used to run, secure and scale containerized workloads, AI infrastructure and GPU clusters across cloud, data center, bare metal and edge environments. Founded in 2019 by Cisco/Cliqr veterans, it counts GE HealthCare, T-Mobile, Nokia and the U.S. Air Force and Navy among its customers and closed a $75M Series C in November 2024 led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs.
Workspot is a cloud-native platform that delivers Windows and Linux desktops, apps, and GPU workstations as a service across Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS. Built for enterprises moving away from legacy VDI, it lets IT teams provision a global cloud PC fleet in days rather than months.
Tenry Fu is the CEO and Co-Founder of Spectro Cloud, the enterprise Kubernetes management platform trusted by the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, GE HealthCare, T-Mobile, and Nokia. A serial entrepreneur with 20+ years in system software, Fu previously co-founded CliQr Technologies - which Cisco acquired for $260M in 2016 - before returning with his same co-founders to tackle the next hard problem: making Kubernetes manageable across any environment at any scale. Spectro Cloud has raised $142.5M in total funding, including a $75M Series C led by Goldman Sachs, and holds a post-money valuation of $750M.
FlexAI is a Paris-based AI infrastructure company building a 'universal AI compute' layer that lets teams deploy, train, and serve models across diverse GPU architectures and cloud providers without wrestling with the underlying hardware. Founded in 2023 by former Intel, NVIDIA, Apple, and Tesla veterans, it raised a $30M seed round in April 2024 and is positioning itself as Europe's answer to the GPU-as-a-service crunch.
Forward Networks builds a vendor-agnostic network digital twin - a mathematically accurate model of cloud and on-prem networks that lets enterprises query, verify, and harden infrastructure that has long since outgrown human capacity to reason about.
Vendia is an AI data platform that enables real-time, governed data sharing across companies, clouds, and regions. Founded by Tim Wagner (creator of AWS Lambda) and Shruthi Rao (former AWS blockchain head), Vendia helps enterprises like BMW, Delta Air Lines, and Fannie Mae break down data silos through its flagship product Vendia Share and newer MCP Gateway - allowing multiple parties to collaborate on trusted data without sacrificing security, compliance, or control.
Yugabyte builds YugabyteDB, the open-source distributed SQL database designed for mission-critical cloud-native applications. Founded in 2016 by three ex-Facebook engineers who built Cassandra and HBase, Yugabyte combines full PostgreSQL compatibility with the horizontal scalability and fault tolerance of modern distributed systems. Deployed in 100+ countries and trusted by Fortune 100 companies including GM, Kroger, Shopify, and Charles Schwab, YugabyteDB handles over 1 million transactions per second while surviving node, zone, and region failures automatically. A $1.3B unicorn backed by Lightspeed and Sapphire Ventures, Yugabyte is the rare database company that made its entire core product fully open source - and built a thriving enterprise business around it anyway.
Bryan Gobbett is the Chief Executive Officer of RackWare, a San Jose-based multi-cloud mobility and resiliency platform that has migrated over one million workloads across 60+ countries. With nearly two decades of engineering leadership at companies including Cisco, Ericsson, Dell, and Gigamon, Gobbett brings deep technical credibility to a company quietly becoming essential infrastructure for enterprises navigating hybrid and multi-cloud complexity. Under his leadership, RackWare grew revenue 74.5% to $10.5M ARR in 2024 and secured preferred license partnerships with Oracle, IBM, and Google Cloud.
Michael Reid is the CEO and Executive Director of Megaport, a global Network-as-a-Service platform operating across roughly 1,000 data centers in 26 countries. A Brisbane-born aerospace engineer turned tech sales leader, Reid spent 15 years at Cisco - most recently as CRO of ThousandEyes, where he grew ARR by 2.4x and scaled the team from 150 to nearly 400 people. Since taking Megaport's helm in May 2023, he has led the company to its first-ever profit after tax (FY24), grown Customer Lifetime Value 50% year-on-year to $2.1 billion, and repositioned Megaport as the backbone for AI-era enterprise connectivity.
Raghu Raghuram is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he focuses on AI infrastructure and growth-stage investments. Born Rangarajan Raghuram, he spent nearly two decades at VMware - joining when it was a five-year-old startup and leaving as its CEO after guiding the company through the largest software acquisition in history: Broadcom's $69 billion deal. Before VMware, Ben Horowitz hired him at Netscape during the browser wars. That 30-year relationship brought him back together at a16z in October 2025, where he now helps lead the firm's AI infrastructure charge while serving as a consigliere to Horowitz himself.