Andy Markoff is the co-founder and CEO of Smack Technologies, an El Segundo defense startup he calls the first frontier AI lab built for national security. A former Marine Raider who served as an operations officer during the Battle of Mosul and later worked on Palantir's strategy team, Markoff is building AI products - Omega for the command center and Alpha for the edge - aimed at compressing military planning from days into minutes. In March 2026 the company announced $32 million in combined Seed and Series A funding led by Geodesic Capital and Costanoa Ventures, behind a thesis Markoff sums up bluntly: 'Decision Dominance will be the deciding factor in preventing WWIII because it's the only goal achievable before 2027.'
Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz is the CEO and co-founder of Chapter, an AI-powered Medicare navigation platform he started in 2020 after watching his own parents struggle to enroll. Built with co-founder Vivek Ramaswamy and early backing from J.D. Vance, Chapter crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue and raised a $100 million Series E in April 2026 at a roughly $3 billion valuation. A former Palantir government-team lead with degrees from Wharton and Cambridge, he calls himself one of the most hated people in the Medicare brokerage business precisely because Chapter's advisors are paid to recommend the best plan rather than the most lucrative one.
Daniel Bardenstein is the CEO and co-founder of Manifest, a cybersecurity company building the platform that tells organizations what is actually inside their software and AI systems. He started Manifest in the wake of the Log4Shell crisis, when the world's biggest institutions discovered they could not answer a simple question: what code are we running? Before Manifest, he was chief of technology strategy at CISA, ran cybersecurity programs at the Pentagon's Defense Digital Service including Hack the Pentagon, co-led cyber protection for Operation Warp Speed's COVID-19 vaccine effort, and built products at Palantir and Exabeam. He treats software like an ingredients list the public has a right to read.
Shreya Murthy is the cofounder and CEO of Partiful, the text-first party invitation app that became Gen Z's default way to gather. Launched in 2020 during pandemic lockdowns, the New York company has grown past millions of users, raised a $20M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, won Google's Best App of 2024, and landed Murthy on the 2025 TIME100 Next list. A Princeton politics grad and ex-Palantir operator, she left mission-fatigued tech jobs to build the social layer for offline life, betting that parties are not frivolous but infrastructure for community.
Will Kim is the co-founder and co-CEO of Karat Financial, the West Hollywood fintech that treats YouTubers, streamers and TikTokers as the businesses they actually are. After watching top creators with great credit scores get rejected for ordinary credit cards because banks called their income 'risky,' Kim and co-founder Eric Wei built a credit card, then a bank, underwritten on social-media metrics instead of W-2s. Karat has issued more than $1.5 billion in credit and advances, counts Alexandra Botez, Ludwig and Nick DiGiovanni on its roster, and raised a $70M Series B in 2023 backed by Union Square Ventures, SignalFire, Will Smith's Dreamers VC, Biz Stone and Steve Chen.
Alex Atallah is the CEO and co-founder of OpenRouter, the unified API and marketplace that routes developer requests across hundreds of large language models. He previously co-founded OpenSea, the NFT marketplace, where he was CTO before leaving in 2022 to build from zero to one again. A Stanford computer scientist and Palantir alum, he turned a side project that connected browsers to AI models into infrastructure now routing roughly 25 trillion tokens a week, and raised a $113M Series B in 2026.
Pratap Ranade is the CEO and co-founder of Arena (Arena Physica), a New York startup building Atlas, an AI hardware engineer grounded in applied physics that helps semiconductor, aerospace, automotive, medical-device and defense companies design and test physical hardware. A Stanford and Columbia-trained physicist who left a PhD to join McKinsey, he previously co-founded Kimono Labs (acquired by Palantir) and led engineering and machine learning at Enigma. Arena raised a $30M Series B in April 2025 and counts AMD, Bausch & Lomb and Anduril among its partners.
Anirban Gangopadhyay is the co-founder and CTO of Angle Health, an AI-native health insurance platform serving small and mid-sized businesses across 44 U.S. states. A Columbia University computer scientist and former Palantir machine learning engineer, he previously served as a Stokes Scholar at the U.S. Department of Defense and co-founded Zircon Technologies - an AI-enabled clinical trial recruitment startup that was acquired - before building Angle Health through Y Combinator's W20 batch. Angle Health raised $134 million in a December 2025 Series B and has grown revenue 26x since its Series A, with a mission to redesign healthcare delivery through AI-first technology.
Dan Woods is the Founder and CEO of Socotra, the AI-native cloud-native insurance core platform he built from scratch starting in 2014. A Stanford AI researcher and former Palantir engineer (employee #20), he left the data-intelligence world to fix insurance technology - an industry he describes as 'a decade behind banking.' Under his leadership, Socotra has raised $87M+ in total funding including a $50M Series C led by Insight Partners, and powers carriers and insurtech MGAs who can now launch insurance products in weeks instead of years.
Eliot Hodges is the CEO of Anduin Transactions, a Silicon Valley fintech company building critical infrastructure to modernize the $14 trillion private capital markets. A Harvard and Kellogg MBA graduate fluent in five languages, Hodges came up through Palantir, Blend, and Anchorage before being recruited by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale to lead Anduin. Under his leadership, the platform has grown to serve 510+ funds and facilitate $55B+ in capital raises for 27,000+ investors globally.
Erez Cohen is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of August Health, a San Francisco-based healthtech company building the modern EHR platform for senior living communities. A serial founder and former Apple engineering leader, Cohen sold his first company, Mapsense, to Apple for approximately $25-30 million in 2015. He founded August Health in 2020 after meeting physician co-founder Dr. Justin Schram at a San Francisco playground - both pushing their two-year-olds on the swings - and the company has since raised $44 million in total funding, with a $29 million Series B led by Base10 Partners in August 2025.
Tylon Wang (Ty Wang) is the Co-Founder and CEO of Angle Health, an AI-native health insurance platform that builds custom, full-service health plans for small and medium-sized businesses across 44 states. A former Palantir deployment strategist and Y Combinator alumnus, Wang founded Angle Health in 2019 after watching his immigrant parents navigate a healthcare system that wasn't built for people like them. Under his leadership, Angle Health has raised nearly $200 million in funding — including a $134 million Series B in December 2025 — and grown revenue 26x since its 2022 Series A, now serving more than 3,000 employers.
Eric Rosenblum is a General Partner at Xora Innovation, a Temasek-backed early-stage venture firm investing in AI infrastructure, applied AI, and deep tech. Based in Silicon Valley, he is the firm's first US-based GP, bridging Southeast Asian capital with American innovation. Before Xora, he built Foothill Ventures into a leading deep-tech seed fund and spent his career as an operator at Google, Palantir, and as founder/executive at two acquired startups. A Harvard and MIT Sloan graduate raised in Steubenville, Ohio, he brings a rare combination of big-tech product leadership, China market experience, and hands-on startup scaling to his role as investor.
Anthony Lye is Chairman and CEO of Quid, the AI-powered consumer and market intelligence platform based in Santa Clara, California. A Silicon Valley veteran with over 25 years in enterprise software, he previously served as CEO of Amplience, Global Head of Apollo at Palantir Technologies, and EVP & GM of NetApp's Public Cloud Business Unit — which he grew from $500K to $550 million over five years. He is also an Operating Advisor at Bessemer Venture Partners, a Board of Trustees member at the University of Bath, and an active angel investor.
Mohamed Elgendy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kolena, a San Francisco-based AI testing and validation platform that raised $21M to help enterprises build reliable, trustworthy AI systems. An Egyptian-American technologist and author of the widely-read 'Deep Learning for Vision Systems' (Manning Publications, 20,000+ copies sold), Elgendy cut his teeth building AI/ML organizations at Amazon, Twilio, Rakuten, and Synapse (acquired by Palantir) before founding Kolena in 2021. His mission: bring software engineering rigor - unit testing, regression analysis, scenario-level validation - to a field that has long relied on aggregate accuracy scores that mask real-world failures.
Arjun Prakash is the Co-Founder and CEO of Distyl AI, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI company valued at $1.8 billion after raising $175M in a September 2025 Series B led by Lightspeed and Khosla Ventures. Drawing on nearly a decade at Palantir Technologies where he built and led a 30+ person team of Forward Deployed strategists and engineers, Prakash co-founded Distyl to help Fortune 500 companies become genuinely AI-native - not by layering AI onto existing processes, but by rearchitecting how enterprises operate. Distyl claims a 100% production success rate against an industry norm of 95% failure, serves clients across healthcare, manufacturing, telecom, and financial services, and reached profitability in Q3 2024.
Erin Price-Wright is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads the firm's American Dynamism practice alongside Katherine Boyle. Focused on AI for the physical world, she backs early-stage companies in robotics, energy, defense, manufacturing, and critical minerals. A Stanford and Oxford-trained mathematician who grew up on a reservation in Arizona, she spent most of her pre-investing career at Palantir - starting as a Forward Deployed Engineer and rising to Head of Product for its data analytics platform - before becoming a partner at Index Ventures. She joined a16z in April 2024 to focus on the energy and industrial AI side of America's technological renaissance.
Jon Chu is a Partner at Khosla Ventures where he invests at the intersection of machine learning and enterprise infrastructure. A Carnegie Mellon computer science graduate, he has lived on both sides of the table - as a founder (sold his company to Docker), a principal engineer at Palantir during its hyper-growth phase, a product and engineering leader at Opendoor and Facebook/Meta, and now as one of Silicon Valley's most active early-stage AI/ML investors. In 2024, Business Insider named him one of 45 rising stars of the VC industry.
Vu Pham is an Operations Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms. As a deal operations partner supporting the Venture teams, he bridges strategy and execution at a firm that has backed companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, GitHub, and Roblox. His career traces a methodical rise through fintech and enterprise tech - from being the second support agent at WePay to leading product programs at Chime, technical programs at Palantir, and operations at Stripe - before landing at a16z where he helps portfolio companies scale and operationalize their ambitions.
Wyatt Horan is a Scout at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he focuses on early-stage investments in AI applications and infrastructure. A Stanford engineer turned venture operator, Horan spent five years as a Deployment Strategist at Palantir Technologies in Europe before earning his MBA at Stanford GSB. He then joined Anthropic's Go-to-Market team, gaining rare front-row exposure to the AI boom before transitioning to the investment side at one of Silicon Valley's most influential VC firms. Outside of tech, Horan has been an engaged civic figure, volunteering with Team Rubicon disaster relief and running for International Secretary of Democrats Abroad.
Trae Stephens is a co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril Industries, the defense-tech startup that hit $1 billion in revenue in 2024 and reached a $30.5 billion valuation in its 2025 Series G. A partner at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund since 2014, Stephens has spent his career at the intersection of national security and Silicon Valley - from Arabic computational linguistics in the US intelligence community, to early days at Palantir, to co-founding Anduril with Palmer Luckey in 2017. A devout Christian from Lebanon, Ohio, he frames building autonomous weapons as a moral imperative and became a billionaire in June 2025.
Michael Ovitz is the most powerful talent agent in Hollywood history and co-founder of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), which he built from a $21,000 bank loan into the dominant force reshaping how entertainment deals are made. After departing with a $140 million severance from Disney's presidency, Ovitz reinvented himself as a Silicon Valley investor and advisor, backing Palantir, helping architect Andreessen Horowitz, and investing in 200+ companies. At 79, he remains a live wire: he reportedly convinced Bill Ackman to pursue a $64 billion takeover of Universal Music Group and is slated to become its chairman.
Joe Lonsdale is a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded Palantir Technologies, Addepar, OpenGov, and 8VC — a firm managing over $6 billion in assets. A chess prodigy turned PayPal intern turned Peter Thiel protege, Lonsdale built his empire around the belief that the most important companies are the ones governments and defense establishments can't function without. Based in Austin, Texas, he hosts the American Optimist podcast, co-founded the University of Austin, and runs the Cicero Institute — all while backing defense tech titans like Anduril at a $30.5 billion valuation.
Gilman Louie is a fourth-generation Chinese-American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and national security strategist who built the CIA's venture capital arm In-Q-Tel from scratch, co-founded Alsop Louie Partners, and now leads America's Frontier Fund — a nonprofit deep-tech investment vehicle aimed at securing U.S. technological leadership against China. Before any of that, he was the video game pioneer who brought Tetris to the West and built the Falcon F-16 flight simulator so realistic it trained actual Air National Guard pilots.