GitLab is an AI-powered DevSecOps platform that brings the entire software development lifecycle - planning, source code management, CI/CD, security, and deployment - into a single application. Born as an open-source alternative to GitHub in 2011 and run as one of the world's largest all-remote companies, GitLab now serves enterprises and millions of developers, trades on Nasdaq under GTLB, and is pushing into agentic AI development with GitLab Duo.
Akbar JM is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of BJIT Group, Bangladesh's largest IT consulting firm. He built BJIT from a 10-person startup in 2001 into a global technology company with 800+ engineers, offices across 8 countries, and clients including Google, Sony, Panasonic, and Qualcomm. Based in Palo Alto, CA, Akbar JM has bridged Bangladesh and Japan's technology ecosystems for over two decades, combining Japanese quality standards with Bangladeshi engineering talent to deliver software development, AI, IoT, and cloud services to Fortune 500 companies worldwide.
Abhinav Asthana is the co-founder and CEO of Postman, the world's leading API platform used by over 35 million developers and 500,000 organizations. Growing up in small-town Uttar Pradesh, India, he taught himself programming as a child, built virtual tour software before finishing college, and turned a side project Chrome extension into a company valued at $5.6 billion. He moved Postman from Bangalore to San Francisco in 2017 and has raised $433 million in total funding, including a $225M Series D in 2021.
Edith Harbaugh is the CEO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly, the leading feature management platform trusted by over 5,500 organizations including 25% of Fortune 500 companies. She helped pioneer the feature flag category in 2014, scaling the company to $100M ARR, raising over $330M in venture capital, and building infrastructure that evaluates 45 trillion feature flags daily. A Harvey Mudd engineering alumna, patent holder, ultramarathoner, and co-host of the 'To Be Continuous' podcast, Harbaugh returned as CEO in 2025 to lead LaunchDarkly into the generative AI era.
Gopalakrishna Kuppuswamy is Co-Founder and CTO of Cognida.ai, an enterprise AI company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, that raised a $15M Series A from Nexus Venture Partners in February 2025. With 30+ years in technology - starting at CMC Limited in 1994 and spending a decade as VP at Hitachi Vantara - he now leads the engineering behind Zunō, Cognida's agentic AI platform that cuts enterprise AI deployment timelines from 6-8 months down to 10-12 weeks. Based in Hyderabad, he holds master's degrees from both the University of Hyderabad and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and has helped grow Cognida.ai to 250+ employees and $37.7M ARR.
Haya Odeh is the co-founder and VP of Design at Replit, the cloud-based AI-powered software development platform with over 50 million users. Born in Abu Dhabi and raised in Jordan, she studied graphic design and fine arts before building the visual identity and product design of one of the world's fastest-growing developer communities. She pioneered Replit's design shift from developer-only tooling to accessible, no-code software creation - a single word change from 'deploy' to 'publish' dramatically increased app creation rates. Alongside her husband and co-founder Amjad Masad, she navigated four Y Combinator rejections before being accepted in 2018 and raising over $872 million in total funding.
Jason Warner is the co-founder and CEO of Poolside, a San Francisco-based frontier AI lab building proprietary foundation models for software development with $626M raised and a $3B+ valuation. Before Poolside, he was CTO of GitHub - where he launched Actions, Packages, Codespaces, and incubated what became GitHub Copilot - and then a Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures. A self-described 'average developer but excellent architect,' Warner is betting that reinforcement learning from code execution will make software the first domain where AI surpasses human-level intelligence.
Jeremy Baker is the Co-Founder and CTO of Zipline, the enterprise SaaS platform that connects corporate retail strategy to the frontline store employees executing it. A self-taught developer who skipped university to build a web design company at 16, he previously co-founded MightyHive (acquired by S4 Capital for $150M) and spent five years as a Senior Prototyper at Yahoo. Based in West Vancouver, BC, he built Zipline alongside CEO Melissa Wong to serve over 170,000 retail employees across brands like Gap, LUSH, Sephora, and LEGO.
Cesar Donofrio is the co-founder and CEO of Making Sense LLC, a Palo Alto-based technology consulting and software development company he built from a startup in Mar del Plata, Argentina into a 350-person nearshore powerhouse serving mid-market U.S. enterprises. Over 20+ years, he has co-founded five companies - including Doppler (email marketing), Lander (acquired by a Silicon Valley firm), and Viallion (AI-driven investment platform) - while championing a talent model where 90% of the workforce is Latin American. Named Top Midmarket IT Executive of the Year in 2017 and a Nearshore Americas Power 50 Leader, Donofrio blends engineering precision with UX philosophy and AI strategy to deliver measurable business transformation.
Igor Repeta is the CEO of Empat Tech, a Kyiv-based software development and outsourcing firm with nearly 200 engineers serving clients across 17 countries. He rose from Project Manager to Chief Executive Officer in four years, formally taking the helm in February 2026 after co-authoring the company's operational playbook as COO. Empat ranked #5 globally on the Clutch 100 Fastest-Growing Companies list in 2026 and holds back-to-back #1 Best IT Employer rankings in Ukraine (DOU 2024 and 2025). Beyond commercial growth, Repeta launched two civic tech projects during Russia's invasion of Ukraine: RevengeFor, a military fundraising platform channeling funds to ComeBackAlive, and HealUA, a peer-to-peer medical consultation platform for Ukrainian doctors.
Ken Kopilevich is the Co-Founder and CEO of NEKLO LLC, a bootstrapped custom software development firm he built from a small startup in 2008-2009 into a 200-person global operation with $15.9M in annual revenue and a 5.0 Clutch rating. Working from Novato, California, he oversees a company that spans FinTech, eCommerce, and Healthcare software, with development centers in Eastern Europe. A dual-degree engineer with an MS from UC Berkeley and an MS from Riga Polytechnic University, Ken spent years at companies like AiBUY and Connected Life before channeling that experience into NEKLO, which has completed 450+ projects and retains 85% of its clients year over year.
Lars Sneftrup Pedersen is the founder and CEO of Admin By Request, a cloud-based Privileged Access Management (PAM) platform headquartered in Aalborg, Denmark with U.S. operations in San Francisco. He built Admin By Request from the ground up starting in 2017, scaling it 900% over five years to serve enterprise clients including McLaren, the Red Cross, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Disney. A serial entrepreneur and software veteran with roots at Telenor Denmark and FastTrack Software, Lars has become one of Denmark's leading figures in endpoint security, earning the 2024 Regional Owner-Manager of the Year award for Digital Transformation in Northern Jutland. He is also a tech investor in Intellis and an unlikely sponsor of Formula 1 driver Kevin Magnussen.
Oleg Lola is the CEO and founder of MobiDev, a custom software development company he built from a startup in 2009 into a 334-person global operation serving clients across healthcare, retail, fintech, and beyond. Based in San Francisco and known for his pragmatic take on AI adoption, Lola is also a Forbes Technology Council member and co-founder of Treegress, an autonomous QA startup launched in 2023. He's the kind of engineer-turned-executive who will tell you straight up that AI is 'heavily overhyped' - and then show you exactly how to use it anyway.
Rakesh Vartak is the CEO of WAI Technologies, a Santa Clara-based AI-powered software and Microsoft solutions company with 250+ employees and offices in the US and India. With over 30 years in IT and ITES, he leads a company building next-generation developer platforms - including AI Pundit (spec-driven AI development) and Raaghu (open-source React design system) - that promise to deliver digital transformation 3x faster for enterprises across healthcare, finance, and logistics.
Siddharth Jhunjhunwala is the Founder and CEO of Web Spiders Group and co-founder of SpiderX AI, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI company he has been building since 2000. Starting his entrepreneurial journey in 1995 with network solutions out of Kolkata, he has grown Web Spiders into a 290-person global operation spanning San Jose, London, Singapore, and India, known for products like Gecko (an emotion-sensing AI recruiter that appeared on BBC One's The One Show), e2m.live (an enterprise event management platform), and SpiderX's conversational AI suite used across banking, retail, and government sectors.
Matan Grinberg is the CEO and Co-Founder of Factory, an AI platform that deploys autonomous agents called Droids to automate the entire software development lifecycle. A theoretical physicist who dropped out of his UC Berkeley PhD program in 2023 after a fateful three-hour walk with Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, Grinberg built Factory from a 72-hour hackathon demo into a $1.5B unicorn backed by Khosla Ventures, Sequoia, Blackstone, and Insight Partners. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 AI in 2025, he is one of the defining voices in the agent-native development movement.
Ryan Singer spent 17 years at Basecamp (37signals) evolving from UI designer to Head of Strategy, where he invented the product development framework that became Shape Up - a methodology that replaced sprint cycles with six-week appetite-driven building cycles. After leaving in 2020 he founded Felt Presence, a consultancy operating from Portugal, where he works as a fractional CPO and teaches teams how to stop running in circles and start shipping work that matters.