LanceDB builds the data backbone for multimodal AI. Its open-source Lance columnar format and lakehouse let teams store, search, and train on text, images, video and embeddings in one system - replacing the brittle stack of Parquet files, vector stores and feature pipelines that AI teams usually stitch together. Used by Midjourney, Runway, Character.AI, WeRide and others, LanceDB raised a $30M Series A in 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $41M.
Daily is a San Francisco developer platform for real-time voice, video, and AI. Founded in 2016 by Kwindla Hultman Kramer and Nina Kuruvilla, the company runs a global WebRTC mesh that powers video calling for products like Pitch, AppFolio, Kumospace, and HotDoc, and it created Pipecat - the open-source orchestration framework now used as the backbone for production voice agents at companies like NVIDIA, Cresta, and Epic.
Amit Jain is the Co-Founder and CEO of Luma AI, the Palo Alto-based AI company behind Dream Machine - a text-to-video platform with over 25 million users - and Ray 3, the world's first reasoning video model. Before founding Luma AI in 2021, he spent four years at Apple leading development of the Passthrough feature for Apple Vision Pro and integrating the first LiDAR sensors into iPhones. Under his leadership, Luma AI has raised over $1 billion in funding including a $900M Series C led by HUMAIN at a $4 billion valuation, and is building unified multimodal intelligence systems that blur the line between reasoning and reality synthesis.
Nina Kuruvilla is co-founder of Daily.co, a San Francisco-based enterprise WebRTC platform that powers real-time voice and video for thousands of developers and enterprises. After co-founding Daily in 2016 through Y Combinator, she guided the company through 30x revenue growth during the pandemic and championed the open-sourcing of Pipecat - a vendor-neutral Python framework for building real-time voice and multimodal AI agents now used by NVIDIA, AWS, and thousands of startups worldwide. Her strategic bet: the infrastructure built for human-to-human video calls turns out to be exactly what voice AI agents need.
TwelveLabs is a San Francisco-based AI company building video-native multimodal foundation models that give machines the ability to see, hear, and understand video the way humans do. Its flagship models - Marengo for embedding and retrieval and Pegasus for video-to-text generation - power enterprise applications in media, government, sports, and security, enabling precise semantic search, summarization, and insight extraction from video at scale. With 30,000+ developers on its platform and backing from NVIDIA, Databricks, Snowflake, and In-Q-Tel, TwelveLabs is becoming the standard infrastructure layer for video intelligence.
Ron Alfa is Co-Founder and CEO of Noetik, an AI-native biotech building foundation models trained on one of the world's largest collections of multimodal human tumor data. A physician-scientist with an MD-PhD from Stanford and an MA in the History of Medicine from UCL, Alfa spent six years at Recursion Pharmaceuticals rising to SVP Head of Research before co-founding Noetik in 2023. The company's OCTO-VC virtual cell models and TARIO-2 autoregressive transformer are designed to predict which cancer patients will respond to which therapies - attacking the 95% failure rate of cancer clinical trials from the data side rather than the pharmacology side. In January 2026, Noetik signed a landmark $50M licensing deal with GSK, one of the first large-scale transactions to monetize a biological foundation model as a scalable enterprise asset.
Cody Coleman is the CEO and Co-Founder of Coactive AI, a San Jose-based enterprise AI platform that brings structure to unstructured visual content - images and video - using multimodal AI. Born in prison and raised by grandparents on Social Security, he earned a BS from MIT and a PhD from Stanford, where he co-created DAWNBench and MLPerf, the industry-standard ML benchmarking suite. Today he leads a 63-person company backed by $44M in funding from Emerson Collective, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Andreessen Horowitz, with a mission to make AI accessible regardless of background.
Jae Lee is the Co-founder and CEO of TwelveLabs, a San Francisco-based AI company building the world's most advanced video understanding platform. A UC Berkeley computer science graduate and former cyber security leader for the South Korean army, Lee co-founded TwelveLabs in 2021 to solve a problem no one else wanted to tackle from scratch: teaching machines to understand video the way humans do. The company has raised over $107 million from NEA, NVIDIA NVentures, Databricks, Snowflake, and SK Telecom, and now serves 20,000+ developer organizations across media, sports, advertising, automotive, and government sectors with its proprietary Marengo and Pegasus video AI models.
Andre Esteva, PhD, is the co-founder and CEO of ArteraAI, a medical AI company whose test for personalizing prostate cancer therapy is included in NCCN clinical guidelines, reimbursed by Medicare, and deployed internationally. A Stanford-trained AI scientist whose Nature cover paper first demonstrated that AI could match dermatologists at diagnosing skin cancer, Esteva has co-founded four companies with a combined market cap of $2.2B. Named to TIME100 Health 2025 and Modern Healthcare's 40 Under 40 for 2025, he leads a company that raised $175M total and was named a TIME 2024 Best Invention.
Mehak Aggarwal is the Co-Founder, CPO, and Head of AI at Sybill, an AI-powered sales assistant platform that analyzes sales calls, writes follow-up emails, and updates CRMs automatically. A product of IIT Delhi's dual-degree program in Mathematics and Computing, she went on to conduct research at Harvard's biomedical imaging center (where she developed a patented CT scan fracture-detection algorithm), Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Singapore University of Technology and Design. She and her co-founders - including her brother Gorish Aggarwal - built Sybill into a 700+ customer platform with $14.6M in total funding. In 2025, she was named a fully funded Knight-Hennessy Scholar at Stanford Graduate School of Business, continuing to lead Sybill while studying.