PlayerZero is a predictive software quality platform that uses agentic AI to help enterprises fix, learn from, and prevent software bugs before they reach customers. Its CodeSim technology, powered by a custom model called Sim-1, simulates how code changes will behave across large codebases without unit tests or human intervention - acting as an 'immune system' for code in an era when more than 20% of new enterprise code is AI-generated. Founded by Animesh Koratana out of Stanford's DAWN lab and based in Atlanta and San Francisco, the company raised $20M total across seed and Series A rounds in 2025.
Nominal builds the software stack that lets hardware engineering teams test, validate, and operate complex physical systems - fighter jets, nuclear reactors, satellites, rockets, robots - as fast as software teams ship code. Its platform unifies high-frequency telemetry, logs, video, and simulation data so teams can analyze and trust every test. Founded in 2022 by veterans of the U.S. Navy, Anduril, Palantir, and Lockheed Martin, Nominal reached a $1 billion valuation in 2026 and now counts four of the five largest defense contractors among its customers.
New Relic is a San Francisco-based, AI-powered observability platform that gives engineering teams a single place to see everything running in their software - from application code and infrastructure to logs, user experience, and AI models. Founded in 2008 by Lew Cirne, it helped popularize application performance monitoring (APM) and later coined much of the modern 'observability' category. After going public in 2014 and being taken private in a $6.5 billion deal in 2023, New Relic now serves thousands of companies with usage-based, consumption pricing and a strong bet on AI and agentic observability.
Cribl is a vendor-agnostic data engine for IT and security teams that routes, shapes, reduces, and enriches observability and security telemetry between any source and any destination - letting enterprises escape vendor lock-in and tame runaway data costs.
Clint Sharp is the Co-Founder and CEO of Cribl, a data infrastructure company valued at $3.5 billion that helps Fortune 500 enterprises route, filter, and control their telemetry data at scale. Before building Cribl, he spent five years as Senior Director of Product Management at Splunk, where he and his co-founders identified the problem that would become Cribl's founding mission: data volumes were exploding, budgets were not, and enterprises needed a vendor-agnostic way to manage what goes where. Under Sharp's leadership, Cribl grew from a 2017 idea to more than $200M in ARR, serving 43 Fortune 100 companies - all while he also briefly served as interim Chief Revenue Officer during a pivotal growth moment.
Jonathan Trevor is a Co-Founder of Observe, Inc., an AI-powered observability platform built on a streaming data lake that unifies logs, metrics, and traces to help engineering teams detect, investigate, and resolve incidents faster. He came to Observe from Wavefront (now VMware Tanzu Observability), where he served as Frontend Lead, and before that led frontend engineering at Shocase. Trevor holds a PhD in Computer Science from Lancaster University. Observe - co-founded with Jacob Leverich (ex-Splunk), Jon Watte (ex-Roblox), and Philip Unterbrunner (ex-Snowflake) and incubated by Sutter Hill Ventures - raised $156M in Series C funding in July 2025 before Snowflake announced its intent to acquire the company for approximately $1 billion in January 2026, its largest acquisition to date.
Mansour Karam is the founder and CEO of Aria Networks, the AI-native networking company that raised $125M to rethink how GPU clusters talk to each other. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer with a Lebanese-American background, he helped build Arista Networks from a handful of employees to a $4B IPO, then founded Apstra - the company that coined 'intent-based networking' - and sold it to Juniper in 2021. A piano player who names companies after musical terms, Karam has spent 25 years at the bleeding edge of how data moves, and now bets that the network - not the GPU - is the real bottleneck in the AI era.