Orama is an open-source search company building an 'answer engine' for developers - a lightweight, high-performance stack that bundles full-text, vector, and hybrid search with automatic embedding generation and built-in LLMs. Started as the open-source project Lyra and incorporated as OramaSearch Inc. in 2023 by Issac Roth and Michele Riva, its core library ships in under 2KB and runs in the browser, on servers, or at the edge. Orama powers site search and AI answers for developer platforms including nodejs.org, tanstack.com, and solidjs.org, and its OramaCore runtime packages a search engine, vector database, and LLM interface into one deployable unit.
Will Bryk is the co-founder and CEO of Exa, a neural search engine built for the AI era. A Harvard CS and physics graduate who interned at SpaceX and engineered AI products at Cresta, Bryk left to answer a question that gnawed at him: what if Google was already obsolete? Exa reimagines search using transformer-based link prediction - what Bryk calls 'neural PageRank on steroids' - to help AI agents find exactly the right information rather than keyword-stuffed SEO noise. The company raised $85M in a Benchmark-led Series B at a $700M valuation in September 2025, with Nvidia and Lightspeed also backing the bet that AI systems will soon generate more search queries than humans.

Aravind Srinivas is the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, the citation-backed AI answer engine that reached a $21B+ valuation in under three years. Born in Chennai in 1994, he earned a dual degree from IIT Madras before completing a PhD at UC Berkeley, then worked as a researcher at OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain before founding Perplexity in 2022. India's youngest billionaire at 31, he has positioned Perplexity as a direct challenger to Google Search by insisting that every AI-generated answer carry verifiable citations - a principle he lifted straight from academic paper standards.

Gabriel Weinberg is the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine he built from his basement in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania starting in 2008 - while simultaneously being a stay-at-home dad. A former MIT physicist who sold his first social network for $10 million just before Facebook made it obsolete, Weinberg turned DuckDuckGo into a billion-dollar company processing over 100 million searches daily, without tracking a single user. He is also the co-author of 'Super Thinking' and 'Traction', two widely-read books on mental models and startup growth.