real-time-ai
(7)
Dean Leitersdorf
Dean Leitersdorf is the 27-year-old Co-Founder and CEO of Decart, an AI research lab building real-time world models and ultra-fast inference infrastructure. A Technion PhD graduate at 23 and veteran of Israel's elite Unit 8200, he co-founded Decart in late 2023 with Moshe Shalev. The company went from stealth to unicorn status in under a year, raising over $453M total including a $300M Series C in May 2026 backed by NVIDIA, Radical Ventures, Adobe, Toyota, and angel investors including Andrej Karpathy. Decart's products - DOS (inference stack), Lucy (real-time video transformation), and Oasis (the viral AI-generated Minecraft-like game) - position it as a vertically integrated AI company targeting a billion-user consumer app.
Maxim Serebryakov
Maxim Serebryakov is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sanas, a Palo Alto-based AI company building the world's first real-time Speech Understanding Platform. Born in New York and raised in Russia, Serebryakov co-founded Sanas at Stanford with two fellow international students after witnessing a friend face accent discrimination in a contact center. The company's AI modulates accents in real time while preserving a speaker's voice, tone, and emotion - serving 150,000+ live agents across 39 countries. Sanas has raised $149.2M in total funding, including a $65M Series B led by Quadrille Capital in February 2025.
Nina Kuruvilla
Nina Kuruvilla is co-founder of Daily.co, a San Francisco-based enterprise WebRTC platform that powers real-time voice and video for thousands of developers and enterprises. After co-founding Daily in 2016 through Y Combinator, she guided the company through 30x revenue growth during the pandemic and championed the open-sourcing of Pipecat - a vendor-neutral Python framework for building real-time voice and multimodal AI agents now used by NVIDIA, AWS, and thousands of startups worldwide. Her strategic bet: the infrastructure built for human-to-human video calls turns out to be exactly what voice AI agents need.
Ping Wu
Ping Wu is the CEO of Cresta, a Sunnyvale-based AI company transforming contact centers with generative AI. Before leading Cresta, Wu spent 14 years at Google where he co-founded the Contact Center AI (CCAI) Solution and Vertex AI platform. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara and a BS from Fudan University. Under his leadership, Cresta raised a $125M Series D in November 2024 and quadrupled its ARR, serving enterprise clients like United Airlines and Cox Communications.
Marty Sprinzen
Marty Sprinzen is the co-founder and CEO of VANTIQ, a Walnut Creek, California-based platform company building real-time AI orchestration and agentic AI systems for mission-critical environments. A serial entrepreneur with a BSEE from Cooper Union (class of 1970), he previously co-founded Forte Software, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems for over $1 billion in 2000. After a 15-year hiatus spent flying planes, skiing, and sailing a Russian nuclear icebreaker to the North Pole, he returned to found VANTIQ in 2015 with a mission to apply software to the world's toughest challenges - from disaster response and healthcare to smart cities and defense.
Victor Perez
Víctor Pérez is the co-founder and CEO of Krea.ai, a San Francisco-based generative AI platform that has raised $83 million and grown to 20 million users. A Barcelona native who studied audiovisual systems engineering at UPF, Perez received the prestigious laCaixa Fellowship (a scholarship from the King of Spain) to pursue graduate studies at Cornell University — but spent just one day on campus before convincing his co-founder Diego Rodriguez to drop out and build Krea instead. A researcher whose work has appeared at NeurIPS and ICCV, and a graffiti artist at heart, Perez leads a company whose mission is to put creators in control of AI — not replace them with it.
Chungin Lee
Chungin 'Roy' Lee is the 21-year-old Korean-American CEO and co-founder of Cluely, the AI startup that went viral in April 2025 with the tagline 'cheat on everything.' After having his Harvard acceptance rescinded in high school and later being suspended from Columbia University for academic integrity violations tied to Interview Coder - an AI tool he built to help engineers pass technical interviews - Lee dropped out, rebranded the product as Cluely, and raised $20.3M including a $15M Series A from Andreessen Horowitz. Cluely is a real-time AI meeting assistant that monitors screen content and audio to provide invisible live coaching during meetings, interviews, and sales calls.