Ariadna Bogolepova went from a curious Suno user finishing her economics degree in Russia to a UX Research Ops team member at the AI music company in Cambridge. A self-taught content creator whose Suno videos racked up millions of views, she parlayed obsessive product knowledge and a project-management background into a role studying how people actually make music with AI. She holds a Master of Science in Management Studies from Boston University's Questrom School of Business.
Alexey Aylarov is the CEO and co-founder of Voximplant, a Voice AI orchestration and cloud communications platform (CPaaS) powering 30,000+ customers and 2+ billion calls annually. A VoIP engineer turned serial entrepreneur, he spent 20+ years in telecommunications before building Voximplant into an enterprise-grade platform combining serverless infrastructure with AI-driven voice and video communications. Based in Sunnyvale, California, he co-founded the company in 2013 alongside Sergey Poroshin and Andrey Kovalenko, guiding it to profitability in under two years and through a $30M Series C raise in 2021.
Ivan Novikov is the founder and CEO of Wallarm, an AI-powered API security platform that has raised over $70 million in funding including a $55M Series C in 2025. With 24+ years in cybersecurity, he is recognized as the inventor of memcached injection attacks and a pioneer of SSRF research, having earned bug bounty awards from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tesla, and Yandex. A Y Combinator S16 alumnus with a physics background from Moscow State University, Novikov transformed hands-on offensive security expertise into a company protecting APIs for enterprises worldwide.
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.
Stepan Ilyin is the Co-Founder and COO of Wallarm, a San Francisco-based API and application security company that raised $55M in Series C funding in 2025. A former whitehat hacker and Bauman Moscow State Technical University graduate, he co-founded Wallarm in 2013 alongside Ivan Novikov and others, with the company graduating from Y Combinator's S16 batch. Wallarm now protects Fortune 500 enterprises with AI-powered API security, real-time threat detection, and CI/CD-integrated vulnerability management. Ilyin has authored over 500 publications on DevSecOps, API security, and AI threat prevention, and is a recognized conference speaker at Black Hat, RSA, and similar venues.
Natasha Alexeeva is the Founder and CEO of Friendly, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI company that automates insurance underwriting, claims processing, and reinsurance treaty analysis using deep learning. Originally from Moscow, she holds a CS degree from Lomonosov Moscow State University and an MBA from Stanford. Before Friendly, she pioneered EMR-integrated asynchronous telemedicine as founder of GoGoHealth and led new service incubation at Amazon Web Services. Her platform processes 7,000 pages per hour at 95% accuracy, delivering the 85% efficiency gains she's made her personal mission.
Daniel Kravtsov is the CEO and Co-Founder of Improvado, a San Francisco-based AI-powered marketing intelligence platform that aggregates data from 500+ sources into a unified pipeline. A serial entrepreneur with 15+ years in digital marketing and ad tech, Kravtsov previously founded RTB-Media (acquired by Between Exchange in 2016) and Rizzoma.com before pivoting in 2017 to build Improvado into a $34M-funded revenue data platform serving enterprise marketers worldwide.