open-source-ai
(10)
Adam Wenchel
He was studying how AI fails before most people believed it worked. Now he builds the guardrails that keep everyone else's models honest.
Dillon Rolnick
Dillon Rolnick is the chief executive of Nous Research, an applied AI lab building open-source, human-centric language models and the decentralized Psyche training network. A Vanderbilt graduate who came up through quantitative FX trading at Effex Capital and founded the litigation-claims firm Crysknife Capital, he moved from finance into AI research leadership, helping steer Nous through a Paradigm-led $50M Series A and, by 2026, a reported $75M round near a $1.5B valuation. His focus is proving that world-class models can be trained openly and over the internet rather than behind the walls of a few large labs.
Charles Packer
Charles Packer is the co-founder and CEO of Letta, the San Francisco startup building the memory layer for AI agents. He is the original author of MemGPT, the viral research project that reframed large language models as operating systems that manage their own memory. A UC Berkeley computer science PhD out of the BAIR and Sky Computing labs, Packer walked away from offers at OpenAI and Google DeepMind to build stateful agents that remember, learn, and improve after deployment - the layer he argues sits above the base models and separates a real agent from a chatbot with a nice interface.
Drishan Arora
Drishan Arora is the co-founder and CEO of Deep Cogito, a San Francisco AI lab building toward general superintelligence through openly released reasoning models. A former senior engineer at Google who led large language model work for its generative search, Arora left to chase a contrarian bet: that intelligence improves not by searching harder but by building better intuition. His team trained the Cogito family of hybrid reasoning models - which can answer instantly or stop to think - in roughly 75 days, then scaled to a 671-billion-parameter model his company calls the strongest open-weight LLM from a US firm. The method underneath it all, iterated distillation and amplification, lets the models internalize their own reasoning paths and self-improve.
Emmanouil Koukoumidis
Emmanouil 'Manos' Koukoumidis is the CEO and co-founder of Oumi (Open Universal Machine Intelligence), a Seattle-area public benefit corporation building what he calls AI's 'Linux moment' - an unconditionally open platform where data, code, model weights and training recipes are all transparent and reproducible. A Princeton PhD who scaled Google Cloud's PaLM with a 300-person virtual team before it became Gemini, and who earlier built emotionally intelligent chatbots at Microsoft, Manos left big tech to give researchers and the wider world the truly open AI he believes they deserve. Oumi raised a $10M seed in early 2025 and launched its commercial custom-model platform in 2026.
Misha Laskin
Misha Laskin is the co-founder and CEO of Reflection AI, a New York lab building open-weight frontier models and autonomous coding agents. A theoretical physicist by training (Yale, University of Chicago), he led reward modeling for Google DeepMind's Gemini and worked in reinforcement learning at Berkeley and DeepMind before launching Reflection in 2024 with AlphaGo co-creator Ioannis Antonoglou. In 2025 the company raised roughly $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, positioning itself as America's open-source answer to DeepSeek.
Misha Herscu
Misha Herscu is the co-founder and CEO of Cake, a New York based platform that bundles more than 100 open-source AI components into managed, production-ready infrastructure so mid-market teams get the control of a build with the ease of a buy. A Harvard physics graduate turned full-stack engineer, he previously founded the radiology AI marketplace EnvoyAI (McCoy Medical Technologies), which TeraRecon acquired in 2018. After running over 200 customer-discovery calls as an operator in residence at Primary Venture Partners, he started Cake in 2022 with CTO Skyler Thomas and raised a $13M seed round led by Google's Gradient in late 2024.
Ying Sheng
Ying Sheng is the co-founder and CEO of RadixArk, an AI infrastructure company that spun out of SGLang, the open-source inference engine she helped create in 2023. SGLang now runs across hundreds of thousands of GPUs and serves trillions of tokens a day for Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, xAI and others. A Stanford computer science PhD and former xAI technical staff who co-led the inference team behind Grok, she launched RadixArk in May 2026 with $100 million in seed funding led by Accel at a $400 million valuation, on a mission to make frontier-level AI infrastructure open and accessible to everyone.
Mukunda S
Mukunda Srinivasagowda is a seasoned technologist and Co-Founder of SuperAGI, a Palo Alto-based AI company building a full-stack agentic intelligence platform. With over 13 years spanning Amazon, Zomato, and fintech unicorn Navi, he co-built SuperAGI from the ground up in 2023 alongside CEO Ishaan Bhola. The company's open-source autonomous agent framework earned 17,500+ GitHub stars, attracted a $10 million Series A led by Jan Koum's secretive Newlands VC, and spawned a suite of AI-native products including SuperSales, SuperMarketing, and SuperCoder - all targeting the shift from LLMs that generate content to agents that actually take action.
Dean Ball
Dean Ball is a leading AI policy scholar, writer, and former White House advisor who shaped America's AI strategy from the inside. As Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, co-host of the AI Summer podcast, and author of the widely-read Hyperdimensional newsletter, he makes the case for market-driven, light-touch governance of frontier AI - arguing that private governance mechanisms, not government mandates, are the right framework for the most transformative technology of our time.