
The former esports founder and AI investor is betting that useful agents will be shaped less by bigger prompts than by disciplined feedback, repeated practice and rewards that measure the work.
Nikola Borisov is the co-founder and CEO of Deep Infra, a Palo Alto cloud company that runs open-source AI models as a low-cost, low-latency inference service. A former competitive programmer who scaled messaging backends to hundreds of millions of users at imo.im and helped build HalloApp's founding backend, he bet early that inference, not training, would become the real bottleneck of the AI era. Deep Infra now processes close to five trillion tokens a week and raised a $107M Series B in May 2026 backed by NVIDIA, 500 Global, Felicis and others.