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Mark McQuade Started Small. Then He Bet $20 Million on Open-Weight AI
Arcee AI began by making other people’s models more useful. Three years later, McQuade and a compact team trained a 400-billion-parameter model of their own - and turned a career spent translating technology into a wager on ownership.
Fawad Butt
Fawad Butt is the co-founder and CEO of Penguin AI, a Palo Alto-based healthcare AI platform company that raised $29.7M in Series A funding in September 2025. A former Chief Data Officer at Kaiser Permanente, UnitedHealthcare, and Optum, Butt spent years on the buyer side spending hundreds of millions on generic tech before deciding to build the solution healthcare actually needed. Penguin AI targets the $1 trillion annual administrative burden in US healthcare with purpose-built agentic AI, small language models, and digital workers that compress prior authorization reviews from 30 minutes to under two, positioning itself as 'the Epic of the healthcare back office.'