DSP Concepts is the Silicon Valley audio software company behind Audio Weaver, the embedded audio development platform that powers more than 50 million devices, from Tesla cabins and GoPro cameras to Amazon Alexa-built-in microphones and the first single-SoC Dolby Atmos soundbar.
Kannan Kothandaraman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Selector AI, a Santa Clara-based AIOps and network observability platform that uses large language models, knowledge graphs, and causal reasoning to help Fortune 1000 enterprises detect, diagnose, and resolve infrastructure issues faster. Before founding Selector in 2019, Kannan spent nearly two decades at Juniper Networks - rising from senior software engineer to Vice President of Product Line Management - and before that at Cisco Systems. Selector has raised $104 million in total funding, including a $32M Series B in February 2026 at a valuation of $375 million, and counts Fortune 20 companies in manufacturing and healthcare among its customers.
PayNearMe runs PayXM, a payment experience management platform that lets non-commerce billers (lenders, iGaming operators, tolling agencies, property managers and credit unions) accept and disburse money across cash, cards, ACH, and every major mobile wallet from a single integration. Founded in 2009 in Santa Clara by serial entrepreneur Danny Shader, it started by digitizing cash at 7-Eleven and has grown into a platform processing payments for thousands of organizations including the State of California, Comcast and Santander.
Selector is an AI-powered network and infrastructure observability platform founded by ex-Juniper Networks executives. It combines a network-specific large language model, knowledge graphs, and causal reasoning to ingest telemetry from across complex hybrid environments, cut alert noise, surface root cause, and reduce mean time to resolution for telecoms, cloud providers, and global enterprises.
John Kibarian is the co-founder, President, and CEO of PDF Solutions (NASDAQ: PDFS), a Santa Clara-based semiconductor analytics company he has helmed for over 35 years. Armed with a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon, Kibarian started building yield-improvement algorithms while still a researcher at SEMATECH - then turned those algorithms into a company. Today PDF Solutions generates $219 million in annual revenue helping chipmakers, test facilities, and battery manufacturers squeeze more quality out of every wafer, with flagship products like the Exensio Analytics Platform and the Sapience Manufacturing Hub driving AI-powered collaboration across global semiconductor supply chains.
Shivkumar Thiagarajan, known as Shiv, is Co-Chief Executive Officer of DynPro Inc., a global IT consulting powerhouse he helped build over more than two decades. Based in Santa Clara, California, Shiv leads an organization of 1,600+ professionals spanning North America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific, delivering enterprise transformations across SAP, Salesforce, cloud, data, and AI platforms. With 30 years of institutional momentum behind DynPro and a newly minted partnership with Turgon AI that compresses year-long modernization projects into weeks, Shiv is steering one of the IT industry's most enduring firms into its AI-native chapter.
Jane Ren is the Co-Founder and CEO of Atomiton, a Santa Clara-based industrial IoT and sustainability software company she co-founded in 2013. With a rare combination of a medical degree from Peking Union Medical College and an MBA from UC Berkeley Haas, she bridges the gap between operational technology and enterprise sustainability. At Atomiton, she leads a 33-person team building AI-powered platforms that help data centers, manufacturers, and buildings reduce energy costs, optimize water use, and hit their carbon targets - work that earned the company the 'Most Innovative Platform in Energy and Sustainability 2025' award from Energy Business Review Magazine.