Inngest is a durable execution platform that gives developers reliable background jobs, workflows, and AI-agent orchestration without managing queues or infrastructure. Founded in 2021 by Tony Holdstock-Brown and Dan Farrelly, the San Francisco company combines event streams, queues, and durable step functions into SDKs for TypeScript, Python, and Go, plus AgentKit for multi-agent systems. It has raised roughly $30 million, most recently a $21M Series A led by Altimeter in 2025, and processes over 100 million executions a day for teams including SoundCloud, Resend, and Replit.
Philong Duong is CEO and co-founder of NODA AI, an Austin-based defense technology company building an AI-native orchestration platform (Urza) that acts as the 'chess player' coordinating heterogeneous unmanned and manned assets across vendors. A Marine Corps veteran, former CH-46E and MV-22B pilot, and JTAC on multiple Middle East deployments, he was C3.ai's first Federal Product Manager, helping scale its federal ARR from under $1M to nearly $100M. NODA closed a $25M Series A in February 2026 led by Bessemer at a $125M valuation.
Arganteal Corporation is an Austin, Texas software company that helps enterprise and government IT teams design, deploy, and manage complex infrastructure across hybrid cloud environments. Its patented tools - ADepT for workflow automation and ASCOT for discovering and classifying operational scripts - turn scattered scripting knowledge into reusable, platform-agnostic automation libraries. The company pairs that technology with professional services, claiming to cut deployment time by as much as 90%, and counts the U.S. Air Force among its longstanding partners.
Ascend.io is a Palo Alto-based data engineering platform that uses AI agents to automate the building, running, and maintenance of data pipelines across Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery and beyond. Founded in 2015 by ex-Googler and Ooyala co-founder Sean Knapp, the company replaces hand-coded ETL plumbing with a metadata-driven automation engine and DataOps Agents that can write code, fix incidents and tune performance on their own.
Sean Knapp is the founder and CEO of Ascend.io, an AI-native data engineering platform that unifies ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability into a single product. A Stanford-trained computer scientist, he previously built iGoogle at Google and co-founded Ooyala — a video platform that raised $120M and sold for $400M+. At Ascend, he is building what he calls 'Agentic Data Engineering,' where AI agents handle the operational burden that buries data teams, freeing engineers for strategic work.

Gary Lerhaupt is VP of Product Architecture at Salesforce leading Agent Interoperability and Orchestration for Agentforce. He co-founded Clockwise, the AI calendar company used by Uber, Netflix, and Atlassian, and was a founding engineer at RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce for ~$390M). Earlier in his career he created DKMS, the Linux kernel module framework still baked into most Linux distributions today. He holds a BS from Ohio State and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford.