software-testing
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Aakash Mahalingam
Aakash Mahalingam is the cofounder and CEO of Canary (YC W26), a startup building an AI QA engineer that reads your source code to catch broken user flows before they hit production. Before Canary he built Windsurf's enterprise product and helped push its self-serve plan to roughly $20M ARR in six months. An ICPC APAC finalist with earlier stints at AWS and Morgan Stanley, he now works out of Mountain View on the problem of testing keeping pace with AI-accelerated coding.
Ryo Chikazawa
Ryo Chikazawa is the co-founder and CEO of Autify, an AI-powered software testing automation company based in San Francisco and Tokyo. A software engineer who worked in Japan, Singapore, and the US, he kept running into the same problem everywhere: testing software takes too long. After eight pivots and interviewing 70+ prospects, he built Autify into a no-code test automation platform used by companies like Unity, DeNA, and ZOZO, raising roughly $32M through Series B and launching Autify Genesis, an autonomous AI testing agent.
Vu Lam
Vu Lam is the founder and CEO of Katalon, one of the world's most widely used software test automation platforms, trusted by more than 30,000 teams. A Vietnamese-American engineer who arrived in the United States as an 11-year-old refugee, he built a career at Bell Labs before founding a string of technology companies including KMS Technology, QASymphony, Kobiton and Grove HR. Katalon began as an internal productivity tool inside KMS Technology and grew into a standalone company that raised $27 million in Series A funding in 2021. Lam is known for championing quality-assurance professionals and pushing testing into the AI era.
Toffer Winslow
Toffer Winslow is the CEO and a board member of Diffblue, an Oxford-spun AI company that uses reinforcement learning - not large language models - to automatically write unit tests for Java code, at a pace of roughly one test every two seconds. A three-decade enterprise-software operator, he has run go-to-market and led companies through the growth-and-exit cycle at Dynatrace, RSA Security, Lavastorm, Tamr, and StackState (which he steered into an acquisition by SUSE). At Diffblue he is selling deterministic, on-premises AI to some of the most security-anxious buyers on earth: four of the ten largest U.S. banks, plus Citi, ING, Cisco, AstraZeneca, and BNY Mellon.
Yunhao Jiao
Yunhao Jiao is the co-founder and CEO of TestSprite, a Seattle startup building an autonomous AI testing agent that aims to be the verification layer for AI-generated code. A competitive programmer turned AWS engineer, he left a five-year run at Amazon after a single production regression on an on-call shift convinced him that verification, not generation, had become software's weakest link. Since founding TestSprite in 2023 with Shawnie Shan and Rui Li, he has grown it to roughly 100,000 developers and raised about $8.1 million across pre-seed and seed rounds, led most recently by Trilogy Equity Partners.
Fred Stevens-Smith
Fred Stevens-Smith is the British co-founder and CEO of Rainforest QA, a San Francisco-based no-code test automation platform that has run over 60 million software tests for more than 10,000 product teams. A Y Combinator W2012 alumnus who self-describes as 'pretty unemployable,' Fred pivoted from failed AWS analytics ideas to QA 30 days before Demo Day after cold-emailing his entire network and finding universal demand for better software testing. Backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Jason Lemkin, Marc Benioff, and Garry Tan, Rainforest QA has raised $42.3M and now leads the market in AI-powered, self-healing test automation.
Summer Weisberg
Summer Weisberg is the CEO of Testlio, an AI-powered managed crowdsourced testing platform headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Appointed to the role in February 2026 after serving as COO and Interim CEO, she brings over 15 years of experience spanning software engineering, enterprise testing, professional services, and customer success. Before Testlio, she held senior roles at CloudBees, CA Technologies, FedEx, and Silicon Graphics. An advocate for diversity in tech and a sharp critic of AI-for-AI's-sake, she champions human judgment in quality engineering - insisting that AI without a solid quality foundation just makes mistakes faster.
Israel Felix
Israel Felix is the CEO and Founder of CBQA Solutions Inc., a Pleasanton, California-based technology services firm specializing in QA automation, software development, cybersecurity, and cloud migrations. With 30+ years of experience spanning Nortel Networks, Cisco Systems, and Veeva Systems, Felix built CBQA from scratch in 2015 into an 80-person operation with offices in the US, Mexico, and Colombia, serving Fortune 500 clients including Honda, Toyota, Bio-Rad, iRhythm, and United Airlines. He is also co-founder and CTO of Auditate, a fixed asset management platform, and a member of LBAN (Latino Business Action Network) Cohort 16.
Rohan Marfatia
Rohan Marfatia is the CEO of DataCRaiM, Inc. (formerly Beround), a technology consulting firm specializing in Data, AI, and CRM solutions for equipment leasing, finance, and MedTech/healthcare sectors. With over 20 years of experience across India, the UK, the Netherlands, and the United States, he has built a career at the intersection of enterprise technology and human-centered leadership. A TEDx and keynote speaker, President of IAMCP Northern California, and a 2024 Fremont mayoral candidate, Marfatia is also running for Alameda County Supervisor in 2026. He holds an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis and an engineering degree from Sardar Patel University.