nvidia
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Ljubisa Bajic and the art of doing less
He started Tenstorrent in a Toronto basement. At Taalas, Ljubisa Bajic took a sharper turn: build the computer around a single AI model, and see how much machinery could disappear.
Luis Ceze and the computer that doesn't look like one
He helped put a music video into DNA, turned a university compiler project into OctoAI, and joined NVIDIA when it bought the company. Luis Ceze keeps finding computing problems in places that other people file under something else.
Samurdhi Karunaratne and the Art of Knowing When to Help
A physics medalist, an NVIDIA engineer, and a friend from age six. Samurdhi Karunaratne brings all three histories to Logical, a desktop assistant built to follow the work before the user asks.
Ashish Vaswani and the Idea That Kept Moving
He helped a Google team rethink how machines read a sentence. Nine years later, after two startups and an open model release, the question of who gets to build on that idea still follows him.
Alix Hart Has Spent a Career Teaching Complex Companies to Listen
From magazine subscriptions on Facebook to AI-era research platforms, Verily Health’s chief marketing officer has followed one durable principle: hear the audience before asking for its attention.
Alison Wagonfeld
Before taking on NVIDIA's story, Alison Wagonfeld spent three decades learning how technology businesses are built - from a mortgage website and Harvard case studies to venture capital and Google Cloud.
Rochan Sankar
Rochan Sankar is the founder and CEO of Enfabrica, a Silicon Valley startup building networking silicon to move data between the GPUs, CPUs and memory that power large-scale AI. A 26-year semiconductor veteran who ran Broadcom's data center Ethernet switching business before striking out on his own in 2019, he bet the company on a single idea: that AI's real bottleneck is not compute but the plumbing that feeds it. In September 2025, Nvidia paid more than $900 million to license Enfabrica's technology and bring Sankar and much of his team in-house.
Seyed Madaeni
Seyed Madaeni is the co-founder and CEO of Verse, a San Francisco energy-software company that uses AI to help large enterprises and AI data centers buy, plan, and dispatch clean power. A systems engineer with a PhD from Ohio State, he spent a decade building grid-scale market software at PG&E, SolarCity, Tesla, AMS, and Fluence before starting Verse, which raised a $54M Series B led by Bessemer in June 2026 with backing from NVIDIA and GV.
Steve Xie
Steve Xie is the founder and CEO of Lightwheel, a physical AI infrastructure company building simulation and synthetic data systems that teach robots to learn and operate in the real world. A physicist by training with a Columbia PhD, he led autonomous driving simulation at Cruise, NVIDIA, and NIO before starting Lightwheel in 2023. The company supplies SimReady 3D assets, egocentric human data, and robot evaluation tools to labs including NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, and Figure, and raised roughly $137.5 million in 2026 to expand its data and evaluation infrastructure.
Jay Chen
Jay Chen is the interim CEO of Contextual AI, the Silicon Valley enterprise company building a 'context layer' for grounded AI agents. He stepped into the top job in 2026 after co-founder Douwe Kiela and a group of researchers moved to Google DeepMind under a licensing deal. A Wharton MBA who started as a chip engineer at NVIDIA, Chen built his career across product marketing and growth roles at Confluent, Starburst, Opendoor and Twingate before joining Contextual AI as VP of Marketing, where he helped launch its enterprise RAG platform.
Gilad Shainer
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.
Michelle Lee
Michelle Lee is the founder and CEO of Medra, a San Francisco company building 'Physical AI Scientists' - robot arms with cameras and sensors, governed by AI, that run wet-lab biology experiments around the clock. A Stanford AI Lab PhD who worked at NVIDIA, SpaceX, and McKinsey, she walked away from an assistant professor post at NYU after AlphaFold 2's 2021 release convinced her that biology's real bottleneck was not algorithms but data, and that data is a robotics problem. Medra runs in production with partners including Genentech and raised a $52M Series A in December 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $63M.
Meijie Wang
Meijie Wang is the co-founder and CEO of MetaNovas, an AI-driven biotech that designs functional peptides for skincare, supplements and drug discovery. A former NVIDIA AI infrastructure engineer who built VR games and worked on AI at Stanford's School of Medicine, he now runs a Silicon Valley and Shanghai operation whose knowledge-graph platform aims to compress the decade-long hunt for new bioactive ingredients into something far shorter. MetaNovas counts L'Oreal, Beiersdorf, Haleon, Takeda and Unilever among its partners and raised a Series A led by GL Ventures.
Paul Puey
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
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
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
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.
Jason Paul
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
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
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
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
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.
Alex Yeh
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
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
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.
Jorge Torres
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
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.
Chris Dyke
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
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
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.