operations-research
(7)
Ben Van Roo Is Building the Boring Bridges AI Needs
Before chatbots became a boardroom obsession, Ben Van Roo was tracing military supply chains and wrestling software into real workflows. At Legion Intelligence, his wager is that AI's future belongs to the unglamorous layer between a clever model and a consequential decision.
Sarang Jagdale
Sarang Jagdale is a PhD engineer turned supply chain AI co-founder who spent over two decades cracking some of the world's hardest logistics problems - from IBM's global consulting floors to the startup that eventually became Lyric. As Head of Decision Science at Lyric, he architects the algorithmic core of a platform now trusted by Coca-Cola, Google, and Mondelez to make their supply chains think for themselves. Lyric raised $43.5M in Series B funding in August 2025, bringing total funding to $67M.
Jerod Nelsen
Jerod Nelsen is a forward-deployed engineer and deployment strategist working out of the Office of the CEO at Peregrine, the San Francisco data platform that Sequoia valued at $2.5 billion for untangling the disparate systems public safety agencies rely on. A 6'7" former Princeton volleyball captain who studied Operations Research and Financial Engineering, he graduated summa cum laude in 2022, added a master's from Penn in 2024, and passed through EY-Parthenon and Audax before landing at one of the fastest-scaling govtech companies in the country. He sits where the code meets the customer: turning tangled agency data into something an analyst can actually search.
Bill Wells
Bill Wells is the CEO of AMPL Optimization Inc., the Mountain View company behind AMPL, the algebraic modeling language born at Bell Labs that has long been a gold standard for large-scale mathematical optimization. A UC Berkeley-trained mathematician, Wells runs the small but globally influential team that turns business-critical decisions in energy, finance, supply chain, and transportation into solvable models, while steering the company from a classic modeling language toward a modern, API-driven optimization platform.
Carolyn Mooney
Carolyn Mooney is the co-founder and CEO of Nextmv, a Philadelphia-based developer platform for building, testing, and deploying decision models - everything from vehicle routing to staff scheduling. A systems engineer by training, she ran missile simulations at Lockheed Martin, optimized pizza deliveries at Zoomer, and led Grubhub's systems engineering team before deciding the messy gap between data science and operations needed its own discipline. She calls it DecisionOps. In May 2026, FICO acquired Nextmv, vindicating the bet she and co-founder Ryan O'Neil made that optimization deserved the same engineering rigor as software.
Ganesh Ramakrishna
Ganesh Ramakrishna is the Founder and CEO of Lyric, a Sunnyvale-based AI-native supply chain decision intelligence platform that raised a $43.5M Series B in August 2025. A serial entrepreneur with deep roots in operations research, he previously co-founded Opex Analytics — building it from zero to 140 employees before its acquisition by LLamasoft — and then played a key role as SVP in LLamasoft's $1.5B sale to Coupa Software. At Lyric, he is rebuilding how global enterprises design and deploy supply chain models, combining composable architecture, AI foundation models, and real-time analytics to serve customers including Coca-Cola, Mondelez International, and Google.
Brian Yoo
Brian Yoo is Chief Business Officer at FriendliAI, an AI inference platform that helps enterprises deploy and scale large language models faster and cheaper. Before joining FriendliAI in April 2026, he spent nearly a decade as COO at Moloco, where he scaled the AI-driven advertising company from 10 employees to 600+ and grew revenue over 500x to $250M+, helping it reach a ~$4 billion valuation. A Cornell-trained operations research engineer turned business operator, Yoo brings deep expertise in scaling AI-native companies through go-to-market strategy, financial operations, and global team building.