woman-in-tech
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Ana-Maria Constantin
Ana-Maria Constantin is the CEO and co-founder of Cascade AI, a Bellevue-based startup building agentic AI that automates the grind of HR and back-office operations. A Harvard dual major in computer science and astrophysics who left Romania after high school, she spent five-plus years as a software engineer at Microsoft writing code that touched millions of users on Azure before deciding HR - the function that touches more lives than any other in a company - was the perfect place to point machine learning. She raised a $5.45M-plus seed round led by Google's Gradient Ventures with AlleyCorp, was named GeekWire's Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2024, and recognized as a 2025 Google Cloud Partner All-Star.
Debbie Marr
Dr. Debbie Marr is the co-founder, CEO and President of AheadComputing, a Beaverton, Oregon startup building high-performance 64-bit RISC-V CPU cores. A former Intel Fellow and Chief Architect of Intel's Advanced Architecture Development Group, she spent 33 years shaping processors from the i386 era to modern Core and Xeon chips, served as server architect of the Pentium Pro, turned Hyper-Threading from concept into shipping product on the Pentium 4, and was chief architect of the 4th Gen Core (Haswell). She holds a PhD from the University of Michigan, more than 40 patents and 30+ published papers, and in 2024 left Intel with three fellow architects to prove that open architectures can deliver top-tier performance because, in her words, everybody deserves better compute.