multimodal-ai
(19)
Ananth Kashyap Is Teaching AI to Get Its Hands Dirty
The Sureform founder started with a high-school iOS app and arrived at a harder question: how do you teach AI what real work feels like? His answer begins in the wonderfully untidy places where people already know what to do.
Andriy Mulyar Is Teaching AI to Read the Blueprints
The Nomic founder went from clinical language models to open-source AI on a laptop. Now he is narrowing the map, building agents that can navigate the drawings, specifications and institutional memory behind the physical world.
Luyen Chou Is Teaching AI to Pay Attention
After nearly four decades moving between classrooms, school launches and product suites, the DeweyLearn co-founder is betting that useful AI begins with a modest act: watching how people actually learn.
Ivan Poupyrev Is Teaching Machines to Read the World Beneath the Screen
For three decades, Ivan Poupyrev has kept asking the same practical question: how can computing escape the glass rectangle? At Archetype AI, his answer begins with the signals already humming through factories, streets, clothes, and machines.
Lava Kumar
Lava Kumar is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Entropik, a Bengaluru-based Emotion AI company that reads human reactions across facial expression, voice, gaze and attention. After nearly two decades building products at Yahoo, Motorola, Wipro, Operative and Integral Ad Science, he returned from the US in 2016 to co-found Entropik and turn affective computing into a working business tool. He leads Decode, the company's integrated human insights platform, and has become a recognizable voice arguing that market research should measure how people actually feel, not just what they say.
Bharat Singh Shekhawat
Bharat Singh Shekhawat is a co-founder and Head of Engineering at Entropik, the Bengaluru-based human insights company he helped start in 2016. He builds the systems that turn signals from faces, voices, and eye movement into measurable read-outs of how people feel and decide, and has spent more than fifteen years designing data-intensive platforms and turning research ideas into shipping products.
Eitan Cohen
Eitan Cohen is the CEO and co-founder of TechSee, a Tel Aviv-based company that pioneered visual and agentic AI for customer service. Trained in computer science and psychology at Tel Aviv University, Cohen has spent two decades building and selling technology companies. He started TechSee in 2015 after realizing that voice and text support could not solve the everyday frustration of guiding someone through a technical problem they could see but not describe. Under his leadership, TechSee's computer-vision and augmented-reality platform now serves more than 1,000 customers, including Fortune 500 brands, and reports avoiding millions of technician visits each year.
Chang She
Chang She is the co-founder and CEO of LanceDB, the company behind the open-source Lance columnar format and a database built for multimodal AI. A co-author of the pandas library alongside Wes McKinney, he spent nearly two decades building data tooling - from quant research at AQR to the DataPad startup (acquired by Cloudera) to VP of Engineering at Tubi - before setting out to replace the aging Parquet-and-Spark stack with what he calls the Multimodal Lakehouse. In June 2025 LanceDB raised a $30M Series A led by Theory Ventures, with adoption at Runway, Midjourney, and Character.ai.
Max Sim
Max Jai Sim is the co-founder and CEO of Meadow AI, a Seattle startup that uses multimodal AI - computer vision, natural language, and operational data - to give restaurants and retailers real-time visibility into their physical locations and to automate the manual 'secret shopper' audits chains still run by hand. A Harvard-trained applied physicist, he previously co-founded the home-closing startup Modus, acquired by Compass in 2020, and earlier worked at T-Mobile and the lunch-delivery startup Peach. Meadow emerged from stealth in late 2025 with $6M raised, including a $4.5M seed round, and more than $2.5M in contracted annual recurring revenue.
Mohan Sivam
Mohan Sivam is the founder and CEO of Neuralzome Cybernetics, a Bengaluru deeptech startup teaching robots to drive themselves across orchards, farms and job sites no GPS map can describe. His pitch is deceptively plain: robots should learn by watching a human do the job once, not by waiting on a team of PhDs to code every turn. Neuralzome's NeuralPilot autonomy stack, RedPill simulation engine and rugged Jeeno platform aim to put off-road robots to work where labor is scarce and the terrain is unforgiving. In August 2025 the company raised $2.4M in pre-seed funding led by 8X Ventures. A serial builder who previously co-founded Flo Mobility and ran GAMASOME, Sivam describes his mission with a phrase that sticks: making robots sentient.
Amit Jain
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.
Hovhannes Kuloghlyan
Hovhannes Kuloghlyan is a co-founder and Head of Operations at Wirestock, a San Francisco-based platform that sits at the intersection of the creator economy and AI data infrastructure. With a PhD in Cosmology from Yerevan Physics Institute and early career stints in blockchain development with Ripple, he transitioned into building one of the world's leading platforms for ethically sourced multimodal AI training data. Wirestock now serves over 700,000 creators globally and surpassed a $40M annual revenue run rate, closing a $23M Series A in May 2026. Kuloghlyan also chairs Grōksmith, a software design and development company with clients including PwC, the Ethereum Foundation, and UEFA.
Nina Kuruvilla
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.
Ron Alfa
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
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
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.
Peter Lee
Peter Lee is Chief of Staff to the CEO at Coactive AI, a San Jose-based enterprise AI platform that helps Fortune 500 companies search, tag, and analyze visual content using multimodal AI. He brings over a decade of experience across algorithmic equity trading at PEAK6, strategic consulting at Booz Allen Hamilton, and high-stakes M&A advisory at Guggenheim Securities - where he worked on transactions totaling more than $10 billion in enterprise value. A Wharton MBA and MIT Management Science graduate, Peter joined Coactive in 2025 as the company scaled following its $30 million Series B round.
Andre Esteva
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
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.