Cover turned the awkward last act of dinner into an automatic payment. Its rise from New York tables to a Velocity acquisition shows both the appeal and the limits of an app designed to stay in your pocket.
Seven-week contests gave young companies too little time. AgriNovus Indiana built a longer accelerator, linking farm problems, food science and the people who might turn an experiment into a business.
Sravanth Aluru is the co-founder and CEO of Avataar, a generative AI company building spatial storytelling and 3D visualization tools for enterprises and e-commerce. An IIT Bombay engineer and Wharton MBA, he moved from a program manager role at Microsoft to technology investment banking on Wall Street before founding Avataar in 2014. He holds more than 10 US patents across AI, computer vision, and mobile data transmission, and has raised over $55 million from investors including Tiger Global, Peak XV (Sequoia Capital India). Under his leadership Avataar has shifted from interactive 3D product experiences toward AI-generated product video, serving customers such as HP, Victoria's Secret, Lowe's, Samsung, and Sleep Number.
Code Climate is a New York-based software engineering intelligence company founded in 2011. It began with automated code review and quality analysis, grew into Velocity - an analytics platform that gives engineering leaders visibility into delivery, DORA metrics and team health - and has since repositioned around helping enterprise leaders measure and manage AI-native engineering transformation, pairing a data platform with Forward Deployed Engineers.
Josh Knowles is the CEO of Code Climate, the New York software company whose Velocity platform gives engineering leaders at large organizations data on how their teams actually build software. A Ruby developer by training with more than two decades in the field, he spent years at Pivotal Labs and VMware building and running consulting and application-services teams across the US and Europe before joining Code Climate, rising from VP of Strategy and Operations to General Manager to CEO. He took the top job as Code Climate spun out its code-quality product into a separate company, Qlty Software, and refocused entirely on software engineering intelligence for large, complex enterprises.