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.
Luis Hernandez Garrido is the co-founder and CEO of Uptodown, the world's largest alternative app store, which he launched in 2002 as a university project in Malaga, Spain. Over two decades he has grown it into a platform with 130 million monthly active users and 450 million APK downloads per month - all without a single outside investor. Now based in Berkeley, California, he champions open internet principles, device neutrality, and democratized software distribution, and is an active voice in the Coalition for App Fairness pushing back against Google and Apple's app store dominance.
Bismarck Lepe is a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur and the Co-Founder and CEO of MiSalud Health, a bilingual AI-powered telehealth platform serving Latino and blue-collar workers across the U.S. and Mexico. The son of Mexican immigrant farmworkers, he spent early childhood following seasonal harvests before attending Stanford and building a $1B+ career at Google, Ooyala (sold to Telstra for $400M+), and Wizeline. At MiSalud, he applies his nearshore technology playbook to a deeply personal mission: making quality healthcare accessible to the communities that shaped him.
Avi Schiffmann is a 23-year-old American technologist and founder who first went viral at 17 when his hand-built COVID-19 tracker hit 36 million daily users. He dropped out of Harvard after one semester, built Ukraine Take Shelter to house 100,000 refugees, then bet nearly his entire $2.5M seed round on a single domain - spending $1.88M on friend.com. His company Friend makes a $99 AI pendant that listens to your life and texts back like a companion, sparking a national debate about loneliness, surveillance, and what it means to connect.
Dr. Manu Kumar is the founder and Chief Firestarter of K9 Ventures, the firm credited with coining the term 'pre-seed' and pioneering institutional pre-seed investing in Silicon Valley. A serial entrepreneur who bootstrapped his first company with $5,000 and sold it for $100M+ before age 25, Manu holds a PhD from Stanford and has backed companies like Lyft, Twilio, and Carta from their earliest days. He is also co-founder and CEO of HiHello, reimagining professional identity for the digital age.
Umair Azam is the Founder and CEO of Integration Xperts, Pakistan's leading cloud implementation and enterprise software firm with 180+ employees and offices across Pakistan, UAE, Malaysia, Australia, and the USA. As Pakistan's first Salesforce Value-Added Reseller and one of the largest Oracle and SAP Gold partners in the country, he built the company from scratch in 2016 after a career spanning Oracle, Avaya, and Inbox Business Technologies. He secured a seven-figure USD investment from the Atlas Group in 2020 and has set his sights on an IPO on the Pakistan Stock Exchange by 2027.