Arena is a San Francisco-based audience engagement platform that turns publishers' and brands' own websites into social-network-like communities. Through live blogs, group chats, comments, AI-powered content feeds and audience analytics, Arena helps over 20,000 organizations - including Fox Sports - keep readers on-site, collect first-party data and monetize attention they used to give away to social platforms.
Baton Systems is a post-trade infrastructure company that uses a shared permissioned ledger to give banks real-time control over collateral, payments and FX settlement. Its Core platform connects to legacy systems without ripping them out, and is already used by some of the largest banks in the world to move trillions of dollars with bank-grade safety in minutes instead of days.
ClickHouse is the open-source columnar database engineered for real-time analytics on petabyte-scale data. Born inside Yandex in 2009 and spun out as ClickHouse, Inc. in 2021, it now powers analytics for Anthropic, Tesla, Sony, Meta, Lyft, and roughly 3,000 other paying customers as a managed cloud service.
Clubhouse is a voice-first social app built by Alpha Exploration Co. It started as an invite-only live audio room platform that briefly mesmerized Silicon Valley in 2020-2021, then pivoted to friend-centric voice messaging and custom AI voices as the live-audio boom cooled.
Daily is a San Francisco developer platform for real-time voice, video, and AI. Founded in 2016 by Kwindla Hultman Kramer and Nina Kuruvilla, the company runs a global WebRTC mesh that powers video calling for products like Pitch, AppFolio, Kumospace, and HotDoc, and it created Pipecat - the open-source orchestration framework now used as the backbone for production voice agents at companies like NVIDIA, Cresta, and Epic.
Deepgram builds foundational voice AI - speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and full voice-agent APIs - used by more than 1,300 enterprises including NASA, Spotify, Twilio and Citibank to give machines the ability to listen, understand, and respond in real time.
Paulo Martins is the Brazilian-born founder and CEO of Arena (arena.im), a San Francisco-based AI-powered community engagement platform that lets brands embed live chat, live blogs, and audience interaction tools directly on their own websites with a single line of code. After stints at NASA, Ubisoft, and Hulu — where he helped grow the streaming company from 100K to 7 million paying subscribers — Martins founded Arena in 2017 with a clear thesis: businesses should own their audience, not rent it from social platforms. By 2022, Arena had grown to 25,000 customers across 150 countries and closed a $13.6M Series A led by CRV, with backing from heavyweights like David Sacks, Des Traynor, and Olivier Pomel.
Redpanda Data is a high-performance streaming data platform built in C++ that is wire-compatible with the Apache Kafka API while ditching the JVM and ZooKeeper. Founded in 2019 by Alexander Gallego, the company helps engineering teams move terabytes of real-time data per day with a simpler, faster, and cheaper architecture, and has expanded its remit toward agentic AI infrastructure.
Vapi is a San Francisco developer platform for building, testing, and deploying conversational voice AI agents over phone and web. It abstracts the messy plumbing of speech-to-text, LLMs, text-to-speech, and telephony so developers can ship human-sounding voice agents in minutes, with sub-500ms latency and enterprise-grade compliance.
Motif is a browser-based, AI-powered design workspace built for architects and the broader AEC industry. Founded by former Autodesk leaders Amar Hanspal and Brian Mathews, it streams live BIM models from Revit and Rhino into a collaborative cloud canvas, layers in architecture-tuned AI rendering, and aims to replace the file-shuffling that defines most building design today.
Russ d'Sa is the co-founder and CEO of LiveKit, the open source real-time communication platform that became the connective tissue of voice AI. When you tap the voice button in ChatGPT, your phone is talking to a LiveKit server. He has built five companies, shipped Twitter Cards, sold a launcher app (Evie) to Medium, and now runs the nervous system for OpenAI, xAI, Salesforce Agentforce, Tesla, Spotify and thousands of other voice agents.
Zelos Cloud is a San Francisco-based B2B data platform for mission-critical systems, founded in 2023 by three former Tesla and Neuralink engineers. The platform unifies data collection, remote command-and-control, real-time visualization, and automated testing for firmware and industrial systems - solving the tooling chaos that plagues teams building hardware that cannot afford to fail. Backed by Y Combinator (S23) and Human Capital, Zelos Cloud is building the operating layer that firmware and embedded systems engineers have always needed but never had.