ParadeDB is an open-source PostgreSQL extension that brings Elasticsearch-quality full-text search and analytics directly into Postgres, removing the need to copy data into a separate search engine. Built in Rust on the Tantivy library, its pg_search extension delivers BM25-ranked search, faceting, and columnar analytics while preserving Postgres ACID guarantees and avoiding the brittle ETL pipelines that connect Postgres to Elasticsearch. Founded in 2023 by Philippe Noel and Ming Ying and backed by Y Combinator and Craft Ventures, ParadeDB raised a $12M Series A in 2025 and counts Alibaba, Modern Treasury, and Bilt Rewards among its users.
Michael Schechter is Corporate Vice President of Search Growth and Experiences at Microsoft, where he has spent over two decades shaping how people discover information on the web. A computer science graduate of the University of Maryland, he has been at the center of Bing's evolution - from leading the captions feature in its early days to orchestrating the AI-powered transformation of Bing with Copilot Search. Known for his candid voice on search industry trends and his willingness to engage publicly on topics like citation transparency and AI reliability, Schechter represents the rare executive who can speak both engineer and user fluently.
A data-driven editorial report mapping how the AI-native internet will reshape search, content, attention and brand visibility between 2026 and 2029. The piece argues the web is shifting from 'search and click' to 'ask and act' — answer engines synthesize replies, agents transact on users' behalf, and the open link economy is being renegotiated in real time. Drawing on 30+ primary sources including Pew Research, McKinsey, Cloudflare, Stanford HAI, and Similarweb, it covers the adoption explosion (900M weekly ChatGPT users), the great decoupling of searches from clicks (69% zero-click), the stumbling first steps of agentic commerce, the rise of synthetic content (52% of new articles AI-generated), and a practical playbook for publishers, brands, and e-commerce operators navigating the shift.
Constructor is an AI-powered product discovery and search platform for enterprise ecommerce. Its clickstream-trained models run search, browse, recommendations, autosuggest, quizzes, and agentic shopping experiences for retailers like Sephora, Petco, Under Armour, Birkenstock, and The Very Group - tying every result back to KPIs like revenue per visitor.
Eli Finkelshteyn is the co-founder and CEO of Constructor, an AI-native product discovery and search platform for e-commerce. With a background in computational linguistics and natural language processing, he built Constructor over four years in stealth before launching in 2019. Today the company powers over 400 billion requests annually, counts Sephora, Under Armour, Gap, and REI among its clients, and has raised $91M in funding at a $550M valuation. Finkelshteyn's core belief: world-class search is a competitive moat, and no retailer should have to build it from scratch.
Jeremy Suh is a San Francisco-based software engineer and co-founder who built Browser Buddy - an AI-powered recommendation engine for high-quality internet writing - through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch. Exa, the AI search infrastructure company redefining how developers access web data for LLMs, acquired Browser Buddy in its first-ever acquisition, bringing Jeremy and co-founder Arnav Wadehra onto the team. At Exa, he works on new approaches to retrieval and web organization at a company now valued at $2.2 billion following a $250 million Series C led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2026.
Luke Jinu Kim is the Founder and CEO of Liner, a San Francisco-based AI search engine used by over 12 million people across 220+ countries. Starting with $50,000 in seed money and a month on a Silicon Valley Airbnb, he turned a Chrome highlighter into the world's #2 AI search product — ranked four consecutive times on a16z's Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps list, with 2024 revenue up 341% year-over-year and $32M raised to date, including a $29M Series B backed by Samsung Venture Investment.
Maxx Lobo is the Chief Executive Officer of Ask Media Group, the IAC-owned digital media and performance marketing company behind Ask.com and other properties reaching 245 million people monthly. A two-decade veteran of ad-tech, cloud infrastructure, and digital media, Lobo rose through the ranks as CTO and COO/President before taking the top role in 2025. Under his operational leadership, Ask Media Group tripled its EBITDA from $50 million to over $100 million in four years, cementing his reputation as one of the more quietly effective operators in the digital media landscape.
Jason Cui is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) investing at the intersection of foundational AI, developer tooling, and scientific platforms. A Harvard computer science graduate, he co-founded Jemi (acquired by Brat TV in 2023), led product at Databricks, and previously worked at Uber and Hulu. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2021, he joined a16z to back the infrastructure layer of the AI era, with bets like the $150M seed round for Inferact, the next-generation commercial inference engine built by the vLLM maintainers.
Bill Coughran is a Partner and Founder's Coach at Sequoia Capital who spent two decades at Bell Labs - where C, Unix, and C++ were born - before scaling Google's engineering organization from a few hundred to over 10,000 people across four continents. A mathematician by training (Caltech BS/MS, Stanford PhD in Computer Science), he oversaw Chrome, YouTube, Maps, and Search at Google before joining Sequoia in 2011. He is one of Silicon Valley's most seasoned operator-turned-investors, known for his belief in small teams, deep technical rigor, and the kind of coaching that only someone who has actually built the thing can offer.
Rand Fishkin is the co-founder and CEO of SparkToro, an audience research platform that helps marketers understand where their audiences spend time online. Previously, he built Moz into the world's leading SEO software company before stepping down as CEO in 2014 after a public battle with depression. Author of 'Lost and Founder' (Penguin/Random House, 2018), he is known for radical transparency about the messy reality of startup life, pioneering the Whiteboard Friday video series, and championing a 'chill work' philosophy that rejects hustle culture in favor of sustainable, sub-30-hour work weeks.
Perplexity AI is a San Francisco-based AI company that built the world's leading 'answer engine' ? replacing traditional link-based search with real-time, AI-generated responses that cite their sources. Founded in August 2022 by four AI researchers from OpenAI, Meta, Databricks, and Quora, Perplexity has grown from a scrappy post-ChatGPT prototype to a $20B+ company with 45 million monthly active users, over $1.7B in total funding, and a product suite spanning a conversational search engine, a developer API platform, and the Comet AI browser.