open-source-intelligence
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Brett Granberg Learned to Stop Adding Features
The Vannevar CEO spent months polishing an Arabic OCR tool nobody wanted. Forty or fifty quiet sales meetings later, a weekend Mandarin model taught him the lesson that now organizes his company: begin with the mission problem, then earn the technology.
Adam Beaugh Built a Machine for the 24-Minute News Cycle. Now It Watches for What Comes Next
From campaign war rooms to agent-driven intelligence, the Zignal Labs co-founder has spent 15 years turning public noise into decisions - while insisting that useful technology starts with a human problem.
Noam Schwartz
Noam Schwartz is the CEO and co-founder of Alice (formerly ActiveFence), the trust and safety company that quietly built the moderation and adversarial-intelligence pipes behind platforms serving three billion people and seven of the ten largest AI foundation models. He founded the company in 2018 after encountering child sexual abuse material while mapping the internet at his previous startup, and has led it through Series A/B rounds totaling $100M, two acquisitions (Spectrum Labs, Rewire), and a 2026 rebrand to Alice that repositions the company from social-platform moderation to securing generative AI.
Idan Bar-Dov
Idan Bar-Dov is the co-founder and CEO of Heka Global, a New York and Tel Aviv company that turns the public web into real-time, audit-ready digital identities for banks, insurers, and pension funds. A fintech lawyer turned operator, he started Heka during the pandemic to reconnect people with lost financial assets and grew it into a fraud-fighting web-intelligence engine used by institutions like Barclays and Pictet. In July 2025 Heka closed a $14M Series A led by Windare Ventures, with Bar-Dov arguing that the credit bureaus built for a paper era cannot see a world where both consumers and risk now live online.