James Brown is the co-founder and CEO of Schemata, a San Francisco startup building an AI-powered spatial intelligence platform that turns ordinary 2D imagery into photorealistic 3D environments with a built-in AI instructor. A former US Marine Corps infantry and information operations officer who once briefed the Secretary of the Navy, he was the first in his family to earn a college degree, went on to a Stanford MBA and MS in Symbolic Systems, and now sells rapid-deployment virtual training to defense, energy, and infrastructure customers. Schemata emerged from stealth in May 2025 with a $5M seed round led by Owl Ventures and $3.4M in early Department of Defense contracts.

Ananth Packkildurai is a principal engineer, newsletter editor, angel investor, and advisor at the intersection of data engineering and community building. He founded Data Engineering Weekly, a Substack newsletter with 50,000+ subscribers covering vendor-neutral data engineering topics across 267+ issues. He built data pipeline observability at Slack during its hyper-growth years, shaped next-generation analytical platforms at Zendesk, and created Schemata - one of the earliest open-source data contract frameworks. He currently serves as Principal Engineer at Mural, while his newsletter and podcast continue to inform tens of thousands of data professionals worldwide.