
The Featherless AI co-founder turned a side-door pricing test into an open-model platform. His bigger wager is stranger and more consequential: useful intelligence should be smaller, steadier and owned by more people.

Before workplace software became his brief, Leon Leong was building online communities from a 90-square-foot university incubator. Two exits and one Y Combinator batch later, his durable product is a way of turning trust into infrastructure.

The Circular founder is betting that access can beat ownership - and that a phone passed from one careful user to the next can become a better business, not merely a greener one.
Yoeven Khemlani is the CEO and co-founder of Interfaze, a Y Combinator-backed AI company building a purpose-built model for deterministic developer tasks like OCR, web scraping, classification and speech-to-text. A second-time founder, he previously built JigsawStack, a suite of small, custom AI models for backend engineering, and before that was CTO and co-founder of the Southeast Asian prop-tech startup Stayr/Staytion, which he scaled and exited. A former game developer and edge computer-vision researcher, he moved from Singapore to the San Francisco Bay Area to build AI infrastructure that prizes reliability over raw intelligence.