Kam Eshghi is Chief Business Officer at OpenInfer, the Inference OS for the agentic era. He co-founded Lightbits Labs, where he helped pioneer NVMe/TCP storage and drove its adoption across data centers and AI clouds before the company was acquired by NVIDIA. Earlier in his career he led strategic alliances at DSSD (acquired by EMC for $1B), built the NVMe controller business at IDT, and shaped server chipset and Ethernet switch roadmaps at Intel. MIT EECS and Berkeley Haas MBA. Forbes Technology Council member.
Cohesity is a Santa Clara-based data security and management company that helps enterprises back up, protect, secure, and recover their data across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS environments. Founded in 2013 by Mohit Aron, it built a hyperscale platform to consolidate fragmented secondary data, and after merging with Veritas' enterprise data protection business in December 2024 it became the world's largest data protection software provider, serving roughly 13,000 organizations including most of the Fortune 500.
MinIO is a high-performance, S3-compatible object storage company building the data layer for AI. Its software-defined storage runs on commodity hardware in private clouds, on-prem, and at the edge, and is used by more than half of the Fortune 500 to power analytics, ML training, and exascale AI workloads.
Anand Babu 'AB' Periasamy is the Co-Founder and CEO of MinIO, the world's most widely deployed open-source object storage platform with over 2 million Docker pulls per day. A serial entrepreneur from Tamil Nadu, India, he previously co-founded Gluster Inc. — the distributed file system company acquired by Red Hat for $136 million in 2011. With MinIO, he built a Kubernetes-native, Amazon S3-compatible storage engine that became foundational infrastructure for AI, machine learning, and data-lake workloads. In January 2022, MinIO closed a $103M Series B at a $1 billion valuation, cementing its unicorn status with backing from Intel Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst, and Nexus Venture Partners.
Liran Zvibel is the Co-Founder and CEO of WEKA, a Campbell, California-based AI-native data platform company valued at $1.6 billion. He co-founded WEKA in 2013 after earlier stints at XIV Storage Systems (acquired by IBM) and Fusic, bringing deep expertise in high-performance distributed storage. Under his leadership, WEKA has raised $465M+ in funding, surpassed $100M in annual recurring revenue, and built a platform powering 300+ of the world's largest AI and GPU deployments including 11 of the Fortune 50. A former Israeli military Captain who earned the Israeli Defence Award, Zvibel holds a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University.
Leander Yu is the founder and CEO of Graid Technology Inc., a Sunnyvale-based startup that invented the world's first GPU-accelerated RAID solution for NVMe SSDs - SupremeRAID. With over 25 years in the storage industry and a prior successful exit (Bigtera to Silicon Motion in 2017), Yu built Graid in 2019 to solve a fundamental bottleneck: traditional RAID controllers can't keep up with modern NVMe speeds. By offloading RAID computation to a GPU, SupremeRAID delivers up to 28 million IOPS and 260GB/s throughput from a single card. The company raised a $30M Series B in March 2025 led by Foxconn and CTBC joint venture, and signed a landmark licensing deal with Intel for VROC technology in late 2025.