Paul Puey is the CEO and co-founder of Edge, a San Diego-based self-custody crypto wallet and security platform. A UC Berkeley electrical engineering and computer science graduate who once shipped 3D graphics at Nvidia, he caught the Bitcoin bug in 2013 and launched Airbitz in 2014, rebranding it to Edge in 2017 as crypto moved beyond Bitcoin. His pitch is stubbornly simple: if you do not hold your keys, you do not own your coins, and security belongs on the edges of the network, in your hands, not on someone else's server.
Parth Shah is the co-founder and CEO of Polimorphic, the New York-based company building AI-powered constituent relationship management software for local governments. An MIT-trained electrical engineer and former NVIDIA deep learning engineer, Shah started out trying to build an 'ESPN for politics' and ended up rewiring how town halls answer phones, process permits, and serve residents in 75+ languages. In July 2025 Polimorphic raised an $18.6M Series A led by General Catalyst, bringing total funding to roughly $28M.
Christina Olmsted is Vice President of AI and Data Center Marketing at NVIDIA, where she leads global marketing and PR teams at the epicenter of the AI revolution. With nearly a decade at NVIDIA and 15 years prior at Cisco, she built and championed campaigns that repositioned entire computing paradigms - from Cisco's Internet of Everything brand movement to NVIDIA's AI and accelerated computing narrative. A UC Berkeley dual-degree alumna with a flair for connecting technology to human impact, she operates at the intersection of deep technical product marketing and culture-shaping storytelling.
Darrin Chen is the VP of Global Partners (NPN) GTM & Operations at NVIDIA, where he leads go-to-market strategy and operations for the NVIDIA Partner Network - the company's global partner ecosystem spanning solution providers, systems integrators, and channel partners. With 30+ years in technology from storage to networking to AI infrastructure, Chen joined NVIDIA through the 2020 acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, where he had spent over a decade building worldwide channel programs. In mid-2023, NVIDIA expanded his mandate as it split its global channel chief role in two, tapping Chen to oversee its entire NPN program as the company transformed into a full-stack AI computing company.
Gilad Shainer is Senior Vice President of Networking at NVIDIA, where he leads the strategy, marketing, and ecosystem development for the company's networking portfolio — including InfiniBand, Ethernet, DPUs, and interconnect technologies that power more than half the world's top 500 supercomputers. A Technion-trained electrical engineer who graduated Cum Laude at both B.Sc. and M.Sc. levels, Shainer spent nearly two decades at Mellanox Technologies before joining NVIDIA via the $6.9 billion acquisition in 2020. He founded the HPC-AI Advisory Council in 2008, which now spans 400+ organizations globally, co-founded the ISC Student Cluster Competition, holds two R&D 100 Awards (2015 and 2019), and has authored or co-authored dozens of papers across IEEE, ACM, and Springer venues. At a moment when AI factories are rewriting the rules of data center design, Shainer is the person making sure the wires — and the protocols running through them — are ready.
Jason Paul is Vice President of GeForce Platform Marketing at NVIDIA, where he has worked since 2003. Over more than two decades, he has led the marketing and launch of every major GeForce GPU generation, pioneered NVIDIA's SHIELD gaming ecosystem, championed GameWorks VR, and now spearheads the company's consumer AI push connecting RTX hardware to over 100 million Windows users. Educated at UCLA and Stanford (MBA), Paul sits at the crossroads of gaming hardware, software platforms, and the emerging era of on-device AI.
LaSandra Brill is Vice President of Global Digital Marketing at NVIDIA, one of the most influential technology companies in the world. Leading a team of 185+ people, she oversees data strategy, CRM, media, corporate social, marketing automation, NVIDIA.com, analytics, and NVIDIA's own AI marketing strategy. With 20+ years in tech marketing across Cisco and Symantec, she has been recognized as a Top 50 Influential Digital Marketer and Top 25 Women Who Rock Social Media. Beyond her work at NVIDIA, she is a published children's book author - her 2017 book 'Let's Be Friends' promotes inclusion for children with Down syndrome - and serves on the boards of LuMind IDSC Foundation, Special Olympics, and Abilities United.
Lisa Lahde is Vice President of Marketing at NVIDIA, where she leads campaign marketing for priority industries and the Omniverse platform. A veteran tech marketer with roots in social media and community management, she joined NVIDIA around 2016 and has helped shape the company's storytelling around AI, autonomous systems, and the industrial metaverse. She produced NVIDIA's 'I Am AI' docuseries, contributed to Forbes BrandVoice as an AI innovator profiler, and moderated the OpenUSD session at GTC 2024 in San Jose. Outside the GPU giant's orbit, she runs the persona of @JewelryHunter - a longtime indie fashion enthusiast who blogged about emerging jewelry designers.
Sampson Han is Vice President of AI and Data Center Marketing at NVIDIA, the Santa Clara-based technology powerhouse behind the GPU revolution driving modern artificial intelligence. Operating at the intersection of cutting-edge silicon and the enterprise market, Han oversees marketing strategy for NVIDIA's data center and AI product portfolio - the very infrastructure powering the global AI buildout. He works within one of the most influential technology companies in history, helping define how hyperscalers, enterprises, and sovereign AI initiatives understand and adopt NVIDIA's data center solutions.
Stephanie Johnson is Vice President of Global Consumer Marketing at NVIDIA, leading go-to-market strategy for GeForce NOW, NVIDIA Studio, and SHIELD. With over two decades in entertainment and gaming marketing - from Take2 Interactive to Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment - she joined NVIDIA around 2018 and has been instrumental in scaling GeForce NOW from beta to more than 30 million users. Recognized by the Silicon Valley YWCA in 2024 for outstanding professional achievements, Johnson operates at the intersection of gaming, creative tools, and generative AI, shaping how millions of consumers experience NVIDIA's products.
Armada is a San Francisco-based edge computing company that builds ruggedized, containerized data centers - the Galleon family and the megawatt-scale Leviathan - paired with Starlink connectivity and an AI orchestration platform. Its mission is to put AI and compute everywhere the cloud can't reach: oil rigs, mines, ships, forward operating bases, and remote industrial sites.
GMI Cloud is an AI-native GPU cloud built around NVIDIA's H100 and H200 accelerators. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Mountain View, it sells on-demand and reserved GPU compute, an orchestration layer (Cluster Engine), and a low-latency Inference Engine to AI labs and enterprises building generative models. In 2025 NVIDIA named it one of seven Reference Platform Cloud Partners worldwide.
Alex Yeh is the Founder and CEO of GMI Cloud, a GPU-native AI cloud infrastructure company he built from Bitcoin mining data centers into a global AI infrastructure leader in just 30 days. GMI Cloud — one of only 6 NVIDIA Reference Platform Partners worldwide — raised $82M in Series A funding in 2024 and is behind a $12 billion sovereign AI infrastructure initiative in Japan. Yeh's mission: make building AI applications as simple as building a website on Shopify.
Brett Adcock is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Figure AI, the humanoid robotics company valued at $39 billion after a $1B+ Series C in September 2025. Raised on a third-generation farm in central Illinois, Adcock built his first web companies at 16, co-founded and sold talent marketplace Vettery to Adecco for ~$100M in 2018, took eVTOL company Archer Aviation public on the NYSE at a $2.7B valuation, then pivoted to what he calls the hardest problem: building general-purpose humanoid robots. Figure's robots now work autonomously on BMW's production floor and have logged over 30,000 vehicles built. In 2025-2026, Adcock simultaneously launched Hark (personal AI hardware, $700M Series A at $6B valuation) and Cover (school weapon-detection tech). He is currently running three companies at once while publicly estimating his net worth at ~$19 billion.
Amir Sadeghian is the Co-Founder and CEO of Astrocade, the world's first agentic AI game creation platform that lets anyone build fully playable games from a text prompt. A Stanford PhD in Computer Vision and AI, Sadeghian previously co-founded Aibee Inc. - a Sequoia-backed AI unicorn - before teaming up with his brother Ali Sadeghian and AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li to build Astrocade. The platform has amassed 20 million users and 140 million monthly game plays across 80 countries within 8 months of launch, backed by $68M from Sequoia Capital, Sea, NVIDIA, Google, and Eric Schmidt.
Factory builds agent-native software development for enterprises. Its Droids - specialized AI agents for coding, reliability, product, and knowledge work - take tickets, write code, open PRs, and triage incidents alongside human engineers. Founded in 2023 by Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes, the San Francisco company raised a $150M Series C in April 2026 at a $1.5B valuation led by Khosla Ventures.
Jorge Torres is the Co-Founder and CEO of MindsDB, an open-source AI data platform headquartered in Berkeley, California. He is a Visiting Research Scholar at UC Berkeley focused on machine learning automation and explainability. Torres built MindsDB to democratize AI—letting any developer query AI models directly from databases using plain SQL or natural language. Under his leadership, MindsDB has raised over $77 million in funding from investors including Benchmark, NVIDIA, Mayfield, and Y Combinator, garnering recognition from Forbes as one of America's most promising AI companies and from Gartner as a Cool Vendor for Data and AI.
Tom Fox is the Chief Executive Officer of Fingermark, a New Zealand-founded technology company that deploys vision AI, intelligent kiosks, and digital menu systems inside some of the world's biggest quick-service restaurant chains. Based in San Francisco, Fox leads a 90-person global operation whose Eyecue platform turns ordinary restaurant cameras into real-time operational intelligence - monitoring drive-thru queues, measuring speed of service, and surfacing AI-generated performance diagnostics across fleets of McDonald's, Taco Bell, KFC, Popeyes, and Carl's Jr. locations. He brings a career built at the intersection of restaurant technology and enterprise operations, having previously served as Chief Business Officer at Omnivore (acquired by Olo), Chief Product Officer at Bite, and Head of Partnerships at Ansa.
Christopher Van Dyke is the Co-Founder and CEO of Overview AI, a San Francisco-based industrial machine vision company using deep learning to catch manufacturing defects before they cost factories millions. A Stanford-educated mechanical engineer who spent eight-plus years at Tesla launching the Supercharger network and scaling the Model 3 battery program, Van Dyke founded Overview in 2018 with a simple premise: manual inspection costs manufacturers an estimated $300 billion a year, and AI can fix that. Overview's smart cameras - running NVIDIA GPUs at the edge - now serve over 100 manufacturers across 15 countries, including Toyota, Honda, and Tyson Foods, typically delivering ROI within three to six months.
Brijesh Tripathi is the CEO and Co-Founder of FlexAI, a Paris-based AI infrastructure startup that raised $30M in seed funding in April 2024. A veteran of NVIDIA, Apple, Tesla, and Intel, he deployed Aurora (one of the world's largest supercomputers) and managed 50,000+ GPUs at Intel before co-founding FlexAI to democratize access to AI compute through a Workload-as-a-Service platform that routes AI workloads across any hardware - cloud or on-prem - without vendor lock-in.
Zain Asgar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gimlet Labs, a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure company building the world's first multi-silicon inference cloud. With a PhD from Stanford in electrical engineering focused on GPU energy modeling, Asgar previously led engineering at Google AI (where his work became Google Lens) and founded Pixie Labs, a Kubernetes-native observability platform acquired by New Relic in 2020. At Gimlet Labs, he is tackling one of AI's most pressing infrastructure challenges: making AI inference 3-10x more efficient by intelligently routing workloads across heterogeneous hardware including NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, ARM, and specialized accelerators like Cerebras.
Ambuj Kumar is the co-founder and CEO of Simbian, an AI-native security company building autonomous AI agents that run security operations 10x faster than human teams. A Gold Medalist from IIT Kanpur and Stanford EE graduate, he spent eight years designing NVIDIA's early GPUs before pivoting to security - where he invented Confidential Computing, raised $135M for Fortanix, and is now betting that AI agents can solve the industry's 3.5-million-person talent gap. With 100+ patents and recognition from IIT Kanpur's Distinguished Alumni Award 2025, Kumar stands at the intersection of the GPU revolution he helped build and the AI security era he is now shaping.
Enhao Gong is the CEO and co-founder of Subtle Medical, a Stanford-born AI healthcare company that has earned 9 FDA clearances for deep learning-powered medical imaging products. A PhD graduate from Stanford in Electrical Engineering, Gong co-founded Subtle Medical in 2017 alongside Stanford neuroradiologist Dr. Greg Zaharchuk, and has grown the company to serve 1,000+ scanner installations globally, touching 2.5 million patients annually. Before Subtle Medical, he co-founded Polarr, an AI photo-editing startup used by tens of millions. He has been recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30 (China/APAC, 2018), Fortune 40 Under 40, and Radiology Business 40 Under 40 (2024), and led Subtle Medical to TIME's World's Top HealthTech Companies list in 2025.
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.
Saket Saurabh is the co-founder and CEO of Nexla, an AI-powered data integration platform built for the age of generative AI. A serial entrepreneur who started as an engineer at NVIDIA — where he worked on GPU tech for the PlayStation 3 and automotive computing — he went on to co-found Mobsmith, a mobile ad-serving startup that was acquired by Rubicon Project (NYSE: RUBI). Armed with a BTech from IIT Kanpur and an MBA from The Wharton School, Saket founded Nexla in 2016 to automate the hardest parts of data engineering, earning recognition as a 2021 Gartner Cool Vendor and landing enterprise customers like DoorDash, Johnson & Johnson, and American Express. Nexla has raised $33.5 million in funding.
Andy Grove is the original creator of Apache DataFusion and a PMC member of Apache Arrow and Apache DataFusion. With over 30 years of software engineering experience, he specializes in query engines and distributed systems, currently serving as Principal Distributed Database Engineer at Apple. He's the author of 'How Query Engines Work' and creator of sqlparser-rs, one of the leading open-source SQL parsers for Rust. His open-source contributions have shaped the modern data processing ecosystem, with DataFusion powering hundreds of data-centric applications worldwide.
Jensen Huang is the co-founder, President, and CEO of NVIDIA, the company he has led since 1993 to become the world's most valuable semiconductor company and the first to surpass a $5 trillion market cap. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Huang immigrated to the US at age nine, washed dishes at Denny's as a teenager, and built NVIDIA from a diner booth into the engine powering the global AI revolution. His invention of the GPU and the CUDA parallel computing platform laid the foundation for modern deep learning, and his relentless long-term vision has made him one of the most influential technologists of his generation.
Dylan Patel is the founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis, a boutique AI infrastructure research and consulting firm he started as a solo blog on his 24th birthday. Growing up working night shifts at his immigrant parents' motel in rural Georgia, he taught himself semiconductor analysis while toggling between RuneScape and chip-geek forums. Today SemiAnalysis has 85+ employees, 260,000+ subscribers, and is on track to surpass $100 million in revenue in 2026 - making Patel one of the most influential voices in AI infrastructure, cited by Jensen Huang at GTC and referenced by Sam Altman.
Steph Smith is a Canadian writer, podcaster, and growth operator who went from chemical engineering to becoming one of tech's most respected content voices. She grew The Hustle's Trends newsletter to 15,000+ paying subscribers (contributing to an 8-figure acquisition), hosted the flagship a16z Podcast at Andreessen Horowitz, sold $250K+ worth of her book 'Doing Content Right', and launched Internet Pipes - a community of 2,700+ people learning to extract business insights from internet data. She's currently at NVIDIA after transitioning from Groq following Nvidia's $20B deal.
On March 31, 2026, OpenAI closed the largest private funding round in history — $122 billion in committed capital at a post-money valuation of $852 billion. Anchored by Amazon ($50B), Nvidia ($30B), and SoftBank ($30B), with continued participation from Microsoft and a sweeping syndicate of global institutions, the round dwarfs every prior private tech raise and cements OpenAI as the world's most valuable startup by a wide margin. The company is generating $2 billion in monthly revenue, counting 900 million weekly ChatGPT users, and is widely expected to pursue an IPO.