rag
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Douwe Kiela and the art of looking things up
A pub quiz helped send Douwe Kiela into logic. Years later, the RAG co-inventor gave language models a way to consult the evidence - and built a company around the demands of getting an answer right.
Lewis Polansky Is Teaching AI to Find the Right File
Before Captain became a search engine for AI agents, its CEO built a translation app, tested a soy-based carton, and made a code checker review itself. The connecting idea is simple: useful intelligence begins with finding the right evidence.
Tallat Shafaat
Tallat Shafaat is the founder and CEO of Vectara, a Palo Alto based enterprise AI company that pioneered retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) as a service. A former core engineer on Google's Knowledge Graph indexing team, he holds a PhD in distributed systems from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He co-founded Vectara in 2020 with Amr Awadallah and Amin Ahmad, led the engineering behind the company's Boomerang retrieval model and the open-source HHEM hallucination detection model, and stepped up from chief architect to CEO as the company entered its next growth phase.
Chris Mahl
Chris Mahl is President and CEO of Pryon, a Raleigh-based enterprise AI company building a retrieval-augmented generation platform that turns unstructured enterprise data into accurate, source-attributed answers. With more than two decades in enterprise software, he was part of the early leadership teams at Salesforce and Informatica, later ran revenue and operations as CRO at Botkeeper and Opentron Labworks, and held an executive role at Right Media Exchange before it was acquired by Yahoo. He focuses on scaling go-to-market and operations for technology companies and positions Pryon at what he calls the 'knowledge layer' of the AI stack.
Jay Chen
Jay Chen is the interim CEO of Contextual AI, the Silicon Valley enterprise company building a 'context layer' for grounded AI agents. He stepped into the top job in 2026 after co-founder Douwe Kiela and a group of researchers moved to Google DeepMind under a licensing deal. A Wharton MBA who started as a chip engineer at NVIDIA, Chen built his career across product marketing and growth roles at Confluent, Starburst, Opendoor and Twingate before joining Contextual AI as VP of Marketing, where he helped launch its enterprise RAG platform.
Kusal de Silva
Kusal de Silva is the CEO of AptEdge, an AI-native company focused on solving the hard last mile of enterprise B2B technical support — complex tickets, scattered knowledge, and the engineers who untangle both. A Cornell-trained, Oxford-polished operator with two decades inside enterprise sales orgs at Citigroup and Meltwater, he took the AptEdge helm in 2025 with a sharp position: don't be the fastest answer, be the right one.
Lucky Gunasekara
Lucky Gunasekara is the co-founder and CEO of Miso.ai, an AI media lab that builds private answer engines for news publishers and learning platforms. A trained interaction designer who once built an RSS crawler to track global disease outbreaks, he now partners with 45-50+ publishers worldwide on what he calls 'liquid content' - adaptive, machine-readable information that pays royalties back to the writers and sources it draws from. His pitch to the news industry is blunt: AI is an asteroid coming for all of us, so we had better get to dinner and figure it out together.
Issac Roth
Issac Roth is a Silicon Valley founder, operator and investor who has spent 25-plus years turning hard infrastructure into products developers actually use. He created Red Hat OpenShift out of his startup Makara, was founding CEO of the Node.js company StrongLoop (acquired by IBM, where he became a cloud CTO), and invested as a Venture Partner at Shasta Ventures. Today he is co-founder and CEO of Orama, an open-source search and answer-engine company building a fourth-generation database that fuses full-text search, vector search and built-in LLMs to power AI agents and copilots.
Ravin Thambapillai
Ravin Thambapillai is the co-founder and CEO of Credal.ai, a New York security-first platform that lets large, regulated enterprises deploy AI agents without leaking the data those agents touch. A philosophy-politics-economics graduate from Oxford who taught himself to code into a job at Google, he spent seven years at Palantir building AI systems for banks, life-sciences firms, and public-health institutions before starting Credal in 2022, months ahead of the ChatGPT wave. Backed by Y Combinator and a $4.8M seed led by Spark Capital, Credal serves customers like MongoDB, Wise, Checkr, and the US government, processing over a million LLM queries a month.
Gabriel Paunescu
Gabriel Paunescu is the founder and CEO of Naologic, a no-code platform that lets companies build and customize enterprise software (ERP, CRM, workflow apps) without a development team, and now layers multi-agent AI on top of legacy business systems. A Romanian-born serial entrepreneur with seven startups and two exits behind him, he started exporting essential oils at 17 and now keynotes at Google Next, mentors at UC Berkeley, and writes about building AI agents that catch their own hallucinations. His core belief: buying software you cannot modify is like buying a horse instead of a car.
George Sivulka
George Sivulka is the founder and CEO of Hebbia, the AI platform that turns piles of unstructured documents into answers for asset managers, banks, and law firms. He cold-called NASA as a teenager, finished a Stanford math degree in 2.5 years, then walked away from a fully funded PhD to build software that lets AI agents do the multi-step grunt work of professional analysis. By 2024 Hebbia had raised $130M at a $700M valuation on $13M of profitable revenue, with Peter Thiel, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and Google Ventures behind it.
Sedarius Perrotta
Sedarius Tekara Perrotta is the co-founder and CEO of Shelf, a New York-based knowledge management and AI data-quality platform. A former Peace Corps volunteer turned serial software entrepreneur, he has spent two decades applying machine learning and NLP to the unglamorous problem of finding the right answer fast - building knowledge systems for the World Bank, Harvard Business School, MIT and Stanford before turning that craft into a company that raised $52.5M in Series B funding led by Tiger Global and Insight Partners.
Emil Eifrem
Emil Eifrem is the co-founder and CEO of Neo4j, the company he built from a cocktail-napkin sketch on a 2000 flight to Mumbai into the world's leading graph database platform. He coined the term 'graph database,' developed the property graph model, and has guided Neo4j to a $2.2B valuation, over $200M in annual revenue, and adoption by 84 of the Fortune 100. Beyond enterprise metrics, he launched the Graphs4Good program channeling graph technology toward cancer research, pandemic supply chains, and investigative journalism — most famously the Panama Papers investigation that won the Pulitzer Prize and toppled Iceland's government.
Brian Raymond
Brian Raymond is the Founder and CEO of Unstructured, the leading enterprise ETL platform for making raw, unstructured data LLM-ready. A former CIA intelligence officer and White House National Security Council director, Raymond pivoted from government service through investment banking and AI startup Primer before founding Unstructured in 2022. In just two years, he raised $65 million across three rounds from Menlo Ventures, Databricks, IBM, NVIDIA, and others, building the critical 'first mile of AI' infrastructure that powers enterprise RAG pipelines and GenAI applications globally.
Jeremy Suh
Jeremy Suh is a San Francisco-based software engineer and co-founder who built Browser Buddy - an AI-powered recommendation engine for high-quality internet writing - through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch. Exa, the AI search infrastructure company redefining how developers access web data for LLMs, acquired Browser Buddy in its first-ever acquisition, bringing Jeremy and co-founder Arnav Wadehra onto the team. At Exa, he works on new approaches to retrieval and web organization at a company now valued at $2.2 billion following a $250 million Series C led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2026.
Jorge Torres
Jorge Torres is the Co-Founder and CEO of MindsDB, an open-source AI data platform headquartered in Berkeley, California. He is a Visiting Research Scholar at UC Berkeley focused on machine learning automation and explainability. Torres built MindsDB to democratize AI—letting any developer query AI models directly from databases using plain SQL or natural language. Under his leadership, MindsDB has raised over $77 million in funding from investors including Benchmark, NVIDIA, Mayfield, and Y Combinator, garnering recognition from Forbes as one of America's most promising AI companies and from Gartner as a Cool Vendor for Data and AI.
Ronen Schwartz
Ronen Schwartz is the CEO of K2view, an Israeli-founded data product company at the forefront of enterprise AI readiness. With 25 years in the data industry — including a 14-year run at Informatica and a stint at NetApp where he grew the cloud storage business 12-fold to dominate a $600M division — Schwartz took the helm at K2view in December 2023. He is focused on turning fragmented enterprise data into live, governed data products that power agentic AI applications at scale, positioning K2view as the infrastructure layer that makes real-time AI not just possible, but production-ready.
Zuzanna Stamirowska
Zuzanna Stamirowska is the co-founder and CEO of Pathway, a Palo Alto-based AI infrastructure company building real-time data pipelines and post-transformer AI architectures. With a PhD in Complexity Science from Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and a background in maritime trade forecasting recognized by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, she leads a team that counts NATO, Formula 1, and La Poste among its customers. Pathway's $10M seed round in November 2024 brought total funding to $14.5M, and the company's October 2025 launch of the Dragon Hatchling (BDH) - a brain-inspired, continual-learning architecture - positions it at the frontier of post-transformer AI.
Daniel Svonava
Daniel Svonava is the Co-Founder and CEO of Superlinked, an ML infrastructure company building self-hosted inference infrastructure for vector search and document processing. A Slovak-born engineer and entrepreneur based in San Francisco, he spent six years as an ML Tech Lead at YouTube building ad performance systems powering over $10B in annual ad revenue before co-founding Superlinked in 2021. Superlinked raised a $9.5M seed round led by Index Ventures in March 2024, and the company is on a mission to make vector-based retrieval accessible and production-ready for enterprises.
Sid Manchkanti
Sid Manchkanti is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pulse, a production-grade document intelligence platform that converts complex unstructured documents into LLM-ready structured data. A Berkeley CS graduate with experience at NVIDIA and D.E. Shaw, he co-founded Pulse in 2024 after going through Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch. The company raised a $3.9M seed round led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and has processed over one billion pages for Fortune 100 enterprises across finance, healthcare, insurance, legal, and supply chain sectors.
Harrison Chase
Harrison Chase is the co-founder and CEO of LangChain, the open-source framework that became the default scaffolding for developers building LLM-powered applications. Starting as an 800-line Python package he wrote as a side project in October 2022, LangChain has grown to serve 1 million+ developers, 80 million monthly downloads, and blue-chip enterprise customers from Uber to JPMorgan - reaching a $1.25 billion valuation after a $125 million Series B in October 2025. A Harvard-trained statistician who got into machine learning through sports analytics, Chase built LangChain to solve the problem he kept running into at work: there was no good way to chain LLM calls together into reliable, production-ready applications.
Jerry Liu
Jerry Liu is the co-founder and CEO of LlamaIndex, the open-source data framework that became essential infrastructure for connecting large language models to enterprise data. What started as a weekend side project in November 2022 - an indexing tool he built to feed his own data into GPT-3 - grew into a company with $46.5M in total funding, 600,000+ monthly downloads, and clients including Salesforce, KPMG, and Carlyle. A Princeton computer science graduate who published GAN research as an undergrad, Liu moved from Quora's feed ranking team to Uber's autonomous vehicle research labs before co-founding LlamaIndex with former Uber colleague Simon Suo in early 2023.
Will Bryk
Will Bryk is the co-founder and CEO of Exa, a neural search engine built for the AI era. A Harvard CS and physics graduate who interned at SpaceX and engineered AI products at Cresta, Bryk left to answer a question that gnawed at him: what if Google was already obsolete? Exa reimagines search using transformer-based link prediction - what Bryk calls 'neural PageRank on steroids' - to help AI agents find exactly the right information rather than keyword-stuffed SEO noise. The company raised $85M in a Benchmark-led Series B at a $700M valuation in September 2025, with Nvidia and Lightspeed also backing the bet that AI systems will soon generate more search queries than humans.
Steven Banerjee
Steven Banerjee is the Founder and CEO of Nextnet, a life sciences AI platform that organizes and connects the world's biomedical knowledge. A serial biotech entrepreneur originally from New Zealand, he trained as a mechanical engineer at the University of Canterbury, served as a Doctoral Fellow at IBM Labs, and collaborated with gene sequencing pioneer Ron Davis at Stanford before founding his first venture, Mekonos - a cell and gene therapy company that raised over $40 million and was acquired. He then founded Nextnet in late 2020 to bring AI-native research tools to scientists, building a platform now used across 100+ countries by researchers at Harvard, MIT, MD Anderson, and UCSF. Nextnet's Copilot and Explorer tools are powered by a purpose-built biomedical ontology unifying data from PubMed, ChEMBL, Ensembl, and millions of scientific sources.
Aravind Srinivas
Aravind Srinivas is the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, the citation-backed AI answer engine that reached a $21B+ valuation in under three years. Born in Chennai in 1994, he earned a dual degree from IIT Madras before completing a PhD at UC Berkeley, then worked as a researcher at OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain before founding Perplexity in 2022. India's youngest billionaire at 31, he has positioned Perplexity as a direct challenger to Google Search by insisting that every AI-generated answer carry verifiable citations - a principle he lifted straight from academic paper standards.
Aurimas Griciūnas
Aurimas Griciūnas is a Lithuanian ML/AI engineer, founder of SwirlAI, and author of the SwirlAI Newsletter with 58,000+ Substack followers. A former CPO at neptune.ai (acquired by OpenAI), he now runs SwirlAI — an AI engineering education and consulting firm — and is a LinkedIn Top Voice in AI with 120,000+ followers. His newsletter covers AI engineering, LLMOps, RAG architectures, and agentic systems from a production-first, no-hype perspective.
Elvis Saravia
Elvis Saravia is the co-founder and lead AI researcher at DAIR.AI, a mission-driven organization democratizing AI research and education worldwide. Based in Belize, he is the author of the Prompt Engineering Guide - one of the most widely read AI resources on the internet with 73,000+ GitHub stars and over 3 million learners - and publishes the AI Agents Weekly newsletter. A PhD graduate from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, he has contributed to landmark AI projects including the Galactica large language model at Meta AI, and is known for bridging rigorous research with accessible, production-minded education for the next generation of AI builders.