AI Builders
GTM conversations with founders building the future of AI.
Episodes
The head of AI who had never heard of an ontology | Rob Buller
Cyberhill Partners builds and deploys enterprise AI solutions, including Cerebro, an enterprise AI platform Rob describes as AI in a box, and Wolverine, a digital twin product, drawing on eight years of AI work inside the intelligence community.In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Rob Buller, Chief Executive Officer of Cyberhill Partners, to learn how the company is bringing intel
The 90% trust artifact that opened OPAQUE's market | Aaron Fulkerson
In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of OPAQUE, to learn how the company found its market in sovereign AI deployments after discovering that customers would accept 90% verifiability with known gaps rather than waiting for perfect end-to-end confidential computation.Topics Discussed:Why Aaron joined OPAQUE from ServiceNow only after the founders agreed to apply
How Guild AI discovered their real buyers weren't developers — and rebuilt their GTM motion around CIOs and CSOs | James Everingham
Guild AI is building the infrastructure layer that enterprises need to deploy, manage, and govern AI agents operating inside their systems. Founded by James Everingham — a five-time founder who most recently led developer infrastructure at Meta, overseeing a team of more than a thousand engineers — Guild AI is solving a problem James watched emerge firsthand inside one of the world's most
How The Biological Computing Co timed its stealth exit | Alexander Ksendzovsky
Two months before this conversation, The Biological Computing Co (TBC) was still in stealth. Three years of building, rebranding, and accumulating experimental data — all before showing the world a single thing. In this episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Alexander Ksendzovsky, Co-Founder and CEO of TBC, to hear how a neurosurgeon-scientist turned a 20-year research obsession into a commerci
Why EverWorker targets "boring billion-dollar companies" | Anton Antich
Most AI companies in 2023 raced to own a vertical. EverWorker made the opposite bet — build a horizontal platform that lets anyone create agents for any purpose, no code required. In this episode of BUILDERS, Anton Antich, CPO and Co-Founder of EverWorker, gets into what it actually takes to sell AI inside enterprises that are stuck between the hype and the reality, why he's making the cas
How Yutori landed enterprise contracts without a sales team by letting prosumer word of mouth do the work | Abhishek Das, Co-CEO at Yutori
Yutori is building web agents — AI that can monitor, navigate, and eventually act on the web on your behalf. Their first product, Scouts, launched in beta in June 2024 with one deliberate constraint: read-only web monitoring. No booking, no form-filling, no write actions. Just signal extraction from the open web. That narrow framing, paired with a $25K launch video that went viral on Twitter, dro
How Cassidy achieved 90% content performance consistency across TikTok and Instagram | Justin Fineberg
Justin Fineberg built a 500,000+ follower audience on TikTok and Instagram before launching Cassidy, an AI automation platform for non-technical users. By consistently creating content about AI and technology, he turned inbound interest into his initial customer base and market validation. In this episode of BUILDERS, Justin breaks down how he leveraged short-form video to identify product oppo
How Positron AI is driving sales ahead of product | Mitesh Agrawal
Positron AI is a 2+ year old silicon company targeting decode-heavy AI inference workloads where memory bandwidth, not compute, is the bottleneck. Launching end of 2025/early 2026, their architecture delivers 2TB of on-chip memory capacity versus Nvidia Rubin's 0.4TB—enabling 3-5x better performance per dollar and per watt for reasoning models, code generation, and video generation. In this ep
Why Radical AI targets markets frozen by innovator's dilemma | Joseph Krause
Radical AI is building scientific superintelligence—AGI for science—through a closed-loop system that combines AI agents with fully robotic self-driving labs to accelerate materials discovery. The materials science industry has a fundamental innovation problem: discovering a single new material system takes 10-15+ years and costs north of $100 million. This economic reality has frozen innovation a
How Parable achieved a 100% POC win rate in enterprise AI sales | Adam Schwartz
Parable is building an end-to-end intelligence platform that quantifies how organizations spend their collective time—the foundation for measuring real AI impact. With a thousand data connectors ingesting activity and log data across the enterprise software stack, Parable constructs proprietary knowledge graphs that size opportunities and measure outcomes in hard dollars, not adoption metrics. In
How Datawizz discovered the chasm between AI-mature companies and everyone else shaped their ICP | Iddo Gino
Datawizz is pioneering continuous reinforcement learning infrastructure for AI systems that need to evolve in production, not ossify after deployment. After building and exiting RapidAPI—which served 10 million developers and had at least one team at 75% of Fortune 500 companies using and paying for the platform—Founder and CEO Iddo Gino returned to building when he noticed a pattern: nearly ev
How Dataiku serves 700+ enterprise customers by becoming the AI governance layer | Florian Douetteau
Florian Douetteau founded Dataiku in 2013 with a contrarian thesis: enterprise AI transformation must come from business operators, not centralized data science teams. While Silicon Valley built for tech companies, Dataiku built the translation layer between fragmented IT infrastructure and the business users who understand actual enterprise processes. With over $850 million raised, $350 millio
Inside the Race to Build AI Infrastructure w/ Sheldon Kimber
Intersect is solving AI's fundamental constraint: gigawatt-scale power delivered outside traditional grid infrastructure. The company builds behind-the-meter renewable and gas generation paired directly with data centers in locations like West Texas, bypassing the Balkanized regulatory system that makes grid expansion nearly impossible. Currently constructing $9 billion in assets across multip
How ClickUp survived the 2021 growth at all costs era and came out stronger ($300M ARR)
ClickUp is redefining workplace productivity by converging multiple software categories into one flexible platform. With over $400 million raised and a valuation exceeding $4 billion, ClickUp has grown from a bootstrapped internal tool to serving millions of users globally. In this episode of Unicorn Builders, I sat down with Zeb Evans, Founder & CEO of ClickUp, to explore the company's un
How TwelveLabs sells AI to federal agencies: Mission alignment over process optimization | Jae Lee
TwelveLabs is building purpose-built foundation models for video understanding, enabling enterprises to index, search, and analyze petabytes of video content at scale. Founded by three technical co-founders who met in South Korea's Cyber Command doing multimodal video understanding research, the company recognized early that video requires fundamentally different infrastructure than text or im
How Freeplay built thought leadership by triangulating insights across hundreds of AI implementations | Ian Cairns
Freeplay AI emerged from a precise timing insight: former Twitter API platform veterans Ian Cairns and Eric Schade recognized that generative AI created the same platform opportunity they'd previously captured with half a million monthly active developers. Their company now provides the observability, evaluation, and experimentation infrastructure that lets cross-functional teams—including non
How Cerebrium generated millions in ARR through partnerships without a sales team | Michael Louis
Cerebrium is a serverless AI infrastructure platform orchestrating CPU and GPU compute for companies building voice agents, healthcare AI systems, manufacturing defect detection, and LLM hosting. The company operates across global markets handling data residency constraints from GDPR to Saudi Arabia's data sovereignty requirements. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, I sat down with M
How Hamming AI accidentally created a new category by focusing on customer problems instead of category creation | Sumanyu Sharma ($3.8M Raised)
Hamming AI has emerged as a pioneer in voice agent quality assurance, creating what founder Sumanyu Sharma calls a "new category" of QA for conversational voice agents. After spending a decade building data products at scale at companies like Tesla and Citizen, Sharma recognized an acute pain point as voice agents began proliferating: enterprises desperately needed confidence that their
Why Typedef starts go-to-market activities during the design partner phase instead of after | Kostas Pardalis ($5.5M Raised)
Typedef is building an inference-first data engine designed for the new era of AI agents and machine-to-machine interactions. With $5.5 million in funding, the company is reimagining data infrastructure for a world where both humans and AI systems need seamless access to data processing capabilities. In this episode of Category Visionaries, I sat down with Kostas Pardalis, Co-Founder & CEO of
How Personal AI scales enterprise contracts by selling to COOs and business users first | Suman Kanuganti ($16M Raised)
Personal AI is pioneering the next generation of artificial intelligence with their memory-first platform that creates personalized AI models for individuals and organizations. Having raised over $16 million, the company has evolved from targeting consumers to focusing on enterprise customers who need highly private, precise, and personalized AI solutions. In this episode of Category Visionaries,
How Wispr Flow manufactured viral moments by personally onboarding 500 users on Google Meet | Tanay Kothari ($56M Raised)
Wispr Flow has transformed voice dictation from a frustrating novelty into a seamless productivity tool that users trust implicitly. With a recent $30 million Series A led by Menlo Ventures, the company has achieved remarkable product-market fit through 90% word-of-mouth growth and users who share the product organically without prompting. In this episode, I sat down with Tanay Kothari, CEO and Co
Sauraj Gambhir, Co-Founder of Prior Labs: $9 Million Raised to Build Foundation Models for Structured Data
Prior Labs is pioneering foundation models for structured data, bringing transformer technology from the generative AI world to tabular data that sits in databases and spreadsheets across every business. With $9 million in funding and over 1.5 million downloads of their open-source model, Prior Labs is revolutionizing how data scientists work with structured data by creating universal models that
Carmen Li, CEO of Silicon Data: $5M+ Building the World's First GPU Compute Risk Management Platform
Carmen Li spent decades in financial services across trading floors and data companies before spotting a massive inefficiency in the AI/compute economy. After managing global data partnerships at Bloomberg, she witnessed AI startups struggling with unpredictable compute costs that could swing their margins from healthy profits to devastating losses overnight. Drawing parallels to how airlines hed
Vahan Petrosyan, CEO & Co-Founder of SuperAnnotate: $53 Million Raised to Build the Future of AI Training Data Infrastructure
SuperAnnotate is revolutionizing how companies manage their AI training data with a comprehensive infrastructure platform. Having raised over $53 million in funding, SuperAnnotate has evolved from a specialized algorithm for autonomous vehicles to a centralized data hub that enables enterprises to collaborate with multiple service providers and internal teams. In this episode of Category Visionari
Amr Awadallah, CEO & Founder of Vectara: $53 Million Raised to Build the RAG-as-a-Service Category
Vectara is pioneering the field of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), addressing the critical challenge of hallucinations in AI systems. With over $53 million in funding, Vectara has positioned itself as the go-to platform for enterprises seeking to combat "RAG sprawl" while building AI assistants and agents that are accurate, secure, and explainable. In this episode of Category Visio
James O'Brien, Co-Founder & COO of Ducky: $2.7 Million Raised to Build Internal Data Search for LLMs
Ducky AI operates as a pre-LLM compute layer, enabling businesses to make their proprietary data accessible to large language models without compromising security or privacy. In this episode of Category Visionaries, James O'Brien shares the journey of pivoting from a customer support solution to becoming a machine learning infrastructure tool that helps developers find and transform internal b
Krishna Gade, CEO & Founder of Fiddler: $68 Million Raised to Build the Future of AI Observability
Fiddler is pioneering AI observability technology to help enterprises deploy trustworthy artificial intelligence. With $68 million in funding, Fiddler provides a "watchdog" platform that continuously monitors AI models, enabling companies to maximize ROI while minimizing risks. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, I sat down with Krishna Gade, CEO and Founder of Fiddler, to discu
William Gaviria Rojas, Field CTO & Co-Founder of CoactiveAI: $44 Million Raised to Build the Future of Multimodal AI Applications
CoactiveAI is pioneering the multimodal application platform (MAP) category, enabling companies to unlock value from their visual content through AI-powered search, tagging, and analytics. In this episode of Category Visionaries, I sat down with William Gaviria Rojas, Field CTO & Co-Founder of CoactiveAI to discuss his inspiring journey from Colombian refugee to MIT graduate and successful fou
John Belizaire, CEO of Soluna: $180 Million Raised to Power the Future of Renewable Computing for AI
Soluna is pioneering a new category of renewable computing, building data centers co-located with renewable energy power plants to monetize stranded or wasted energy while providing sustainable compute power for AI workloads. With over $180 million in funding, Soluna is constructing a distributed network of facilities around the country that enables massive AI compute capabilities while driving de
Aron Kirschen, CEO of SEMRON: $7.3M Raised to Build Ultra-Efficient 3D AI Chips
SEMRON is pioneering the development of revolutionary 3D AI chips that pack massive computing power into a tiny silicon area without overheating. By leveraging an innovative semiconductor device that's ultra-efficient, SEMRON aims to enable the next generation of edge AI capabilities. In this episode of Category Visionaries, I sat down with Aron Kirschen, CEO and co-founder of SEMRON, to explo
Inna Tokarev Sela, CEO & Founder of illumex: $13 Million Raised to Power the Future of Enterprise LLM Deployments
illumex is pioneering the future of enterprise data access through their generative semantic fabric platform, which enables self-service data analytics for every employee within large organizations like banks, insurance companies, and pharma corporations. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Inna Sela shared how with $13 Million in funding, illumex is transforming how business users intera
Robert Nishihara: The GTM Story of Anyscale ($1+ Billion Valuation)
Welcome to another episode of Unicorn Builders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Robert Nishihara, Co-Founder of Anyscale, an AI compute platform that has raised over $250 Million in funding. Here are the most interesting points from our conversation:Anyscale's Origin Story: The company began as a commercialization effort for Ray, an open-source project tackling AI compute c
Kevin McNamara, CEO & Founder of Parallel Domain: $44 Million Raised to Power the Future of Autonomy
Welcome to another episode of Category Visionaries — the show that explores GTM stories from tech's most innovative B2B founders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Kevin McNamara, CEO & Founder of Parallel Domain, a synthetic data generation and simulation platform that's raised over $43.9 Million in funding.Here are the most interesting points from our conversation:P
Funding the Future: Roger Luo, Managing Partner at Embedding VC
Welcome to another episode of Category Visionaries — Funding the Future. In today's episode, we're speaking with Roger Luo, Founder & Managing Partner at Embedding VC, a venture capital firm specializing in AI-driven startups that has raised $15 Million in funding.Here are the most interesting points from our conversation:Roger's AI Journey: With a PhD in AI and over 15 years o
Nikola Borisov, CEO & Co-Founder of Deep Infra: $9 Million Raised to Build the Future of AI Model Hosting
Welcome to another episode of Category Visionaries — the show that explores GTM stories from tech's most innovative B2B founders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Nikola Borisov, CEO & Co-Founder of Deep Infra, an AI company that has raised $9 Million in funding.
Here are the most interesting points from our conversation:
Inception and Focus: Deep Infra was founded in September 2022,
Malte Pietsch, CTO & Co-Founder of Deepset: $45 Million Raised to Build the Future of LLMs
Welcome to another episode of Category Visionaries — the show that explores GTM stories from tech's most innovative B2B founders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Malte Pietsch, CTO & Co-Founder of Deepset, an enterprise LLM platform that has raised over $45 Million in funding.
Here are the most interesting points from our conversation:
Deepset's Mission: Deepset aims to enable the t
Jeff Denworth: The GTM Story of VAST Data ($9.1 Billion Valuation)
In this episode of Unicorn Builders, we're speaking with Jeff Denworth, co-founder of VAST, an AI data platform that has raised an impressive $381 million in funding.Key topics discussed in this episode:Jeff's journey as a "consummate startup guy," having been involved in five startups and working in distributed scalable systems for most of his career.The foundational thesis of V
Jason Corso, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of Voxel 51: $15.5 Million Raised to Build the Future of Developer Tools for Machine Learning
Welcome to another episode of Category Visionaries — the show that explores GTM stories from tech's most innovative B2B founders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Jason Corso, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of Voxel 51, an AI software company that has raised $15.5 Million in funding.
Here are the most interesting points from our conversation:
Academic Foundations in AI and Transit
Bob van Luijt, CEO and Co-Founder of Weaviate: Over $67 Million Raised to Power the Future of Vector Databases
Welcome to another episode of Category Visionaries — the show that explores GTM stories from the tech's most innovative B2B founders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Bob van Luijt, CEO and Co-Founder of Weaviate, a cloud native real-time vector database that has raised over $67 Million in funding.
Here are the most interesting points from our conversation:
Early Beginnings: Bob's foray
Harry Xu, CEO and Co-Founder of Breeze ML: $4.6 Million Raised to Create the Future of AI Governance
In today's episode of Category Visionaries, we speak with Harry Xu, CEO and Co-Founder of Breeze ML, an AI governance platform that's raised $4.6 Million in funding.
Topics Discussed:
Harry’s background as a professor of computer science
Some common misconceptions people have about academia and being an academician
Why it’s difficult for companies to comply with AI regulations, and how Breez
Douwe Kiela, CEO and Co-Founder of Contextual AI: $20 Million Raised to Build the Future of Enterprise Language Models
In today's episode of Category Visionaries, we speak with Douwe Kiela, CEO and Co-Founder of Contextual AI, an enterprise large language model company that's raised $20 Million in funding.
Topics Discussed:
Why Douwe thinks Nvidia’s Jensen Huang deserves far more credit than he gets
The challenges Douwe has met when working in a multicultural environment
Problems with language models today,
Davit Baghdasaryan, Co-Founder and CEO of Krisp: $19 Million Raised to Build the Voice Productivity Category
In today's episode of Category Visionaries we speak with Davit Baghdasaryan, CEO and Co-Founder of Krisp, a voice productivity platform that's raised $19 Million in funding.
Topics Discussed:
Davit’s background as a software and security engineer and as an Armenian immigrant pursuing the American Dream in Silicon Valley
Why entrepreneurs Jeff Lawson and Aaron Levy are inspirations for Davit, a
Gabriel Bayomi, CEO and Co-Founder of Openlayer: $4.8 Million Raised to Power the Future of Machine Learning Testing
In today's episode of Category Visionaries we speak with Gabriel Bayomi, CEO and Co-Founder of Openlayer, a debugging workspace for machine learning that's raised $4.8 Million in funding.
Topics Discussed:
Gabriel’s background as a Brazilian student of engineering, moving to the US, and working on Apple’s then-secret Vision Pro project
Why Henrique Dubugras is Gabriel’s greatest inspiration as
Arvind Jain: The GTM Story of Glean ($1 Billion Valuation)
In today's episode of Category Visionaries, we speak with Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean, an AI-powered workplace data search and management platform that has raised $155 Million in funding.Topics Discussed:Arvind’s background, including a decade in Google in the early 2000s and being a unicorn builder twice in a rowWhy Arvind thinks luck plays a big role in building unicorns, what his superpow
Rodrigo Liang: the Story of SambaNova ($5+ Billion Valuation)
In today's episode of Unicorn Builders, we speak with Rodrigo Liang, Co-Founder and CEO of SambaNova, an enterprise generative AI platform that's raised over $1 Billion in funding.Topics Discussed:Rodrigo’s decades-long background in the tech industry, including Sun, Oracle, and HPWhat are the two qualities that Rodrigo most admires in the great CEOs he has met, and what it was like to
Kaycee Lai, CEO and Founder of Promethium: $34.5 Million Raised to Make Building Data Products Easy
In today's episode of Category Visionaries, we speak with Kaycee Lai, CEO and Founder of Promethium, a data fabric platform that's raised $34.5 Million in funding.Topics Discussed:Kaycee’s background, including his time as a Federal Reserve analystWhy Martha Stewart is the CEO Kaycee admires the most, and why his favorite book is a classic 19th-century French novelThe difficulties comp
Igor Jablokov, CEO of Pryon: $50+ Million Raised to Build the Future of Enterprise Knowledge Management
In today's episode of Category Visionaries, we speak with Igor Jablokov, CEO of Pryon, an AI-powered enterprise knowledge management platform that's raised more than $50 Million in funding.
Topics Discussed:
Igor’s background in the tech industry, working with Apple to create Siri, and the state of AI today
A great Bill Gates quote about our biases when thinking about the short and the long te
Jorge Torres, CEO and Co-Founder of MindsDB: $50 Million Raised to Enable Developers to Integrate Machine Learning into Applications
In today's episode of Category Visionaries we speak with Jorge Torres, CEO and Co-Founder of MindsDB, an open source software company that has raised $50 Million in funding.
Topics Discussed:
Jorge’s background in technology, his love for computers and his professional motivation
Why Jorge loves sci-fi, and his favorite books in the genre
The state of AI today and the dangers posed by unrefl
Sarah Nagy, CEO of Seek AI: $7.5 Million Raised to Modernize Business Analytics with Generative AI-Powered Database Queries
In today's episode of Category Visionaries we speak with Sarah Nagy, CEO of Seek AI, a company that has raised $7.5 Million in funding.Topics Discussed:Sarah’s manifold interests as a kid, her talent for math and her studies in Economics, Astrophysics and FinanceHow Seek AI is working on increasing companies’ ROI on their data stacksWhat Sarah learned from fundraisingMaking brand messaging
Dan DeMers, CEO of Cinchy: Over $24 Million Raised to Build a Data Collaboration Platform That Makes Data Integration Obsolete
In today's episode of Category Visionaries, we speak with Dan DeMers, CEO of Cinchy, a data collaboration platform that's raised over $24 Million in funding, about why the time has come for an alternative to rigid data contracts and the integration-heavy approach to business unit collaboration. By evolving isolated data silos into meshed products where data is well-governed white being
Ryan Janssen, CEO and Co-Founder of Zenlytic: $5.4 Million Raised for AI-Assisted Business Intelligence to Drive Better Decisions
In today's episode of Category Visionaries, we speak with Ryan Janssen, CEO and Co-Founder of Zenlytic, a business intelligence tool for commerce brands that's raised $5.4 Million in funding, about why siloed data can obscure all kinds of critical business insights, and how automation with a human touch can help everyone get a better idea of what’s going on. With an easy-to-access port
Alan Cowen, CEO and Founder of Hume AI: Over $17 Million Raised to Measure and Improve How Technology Affects Human Emotion
In today's episode of Category Visionaries, we speak with Alan Cowen, CEO and Founder of Hume AI, a research lab and technology startup that's raised Over $17 Million in funding, about how unchecked machine learning can lead very quickly to exploitation, and why we need to develop technology more in line with people’s mental health. With algorithms targeted specifically for more positive behaviora
Andy Berman, CEO and Founder of Vowel: $13 Million Raised to Power the Future of Meetings
In today's episode of Category Visionaries, we speak with Andy Berman, CEO and Founder of Vowel, an AI-powered meeting platform that's raised $13 Million in funding, about why most contemporary video conferencing tools fail to really deliver a working environment conducive to the collaboration so essential for modern business. With a suite of collaboration features that help everyone s
Jeong-Suh Choi, CEO Bobidi: Nearly $6 Million raised to Deliver Better, More Inclusive AI Solutions for Developers
In today's episode of Category Visionaries, we speak with Jeong-Suh Choi, CEO of Bobidi, an AI training platform that’s raised nearly $6 Million in funding, about why inclusive AI needs to be developed together, and how Bobidi’s global network is making it happen. By field-testing AI programs with the audiences they’re intended to serve, Bobidi is helping make the machine learning of tomorrow more
Tom Lee, Co-Founder of LOVO AI: $7 Million Raised to Build the Future of AI Voiceovers
Tom Lee is the Co-founder of LOVO AI, a California-based AI voice & synthetic speech company. LOVO’s platform accelerates content production by giving creators access to highly adaptable AI voiceovers, synthetic speech, and custom voice cloning capabilities.In this episode, Tom shares how having the right team culture and employing a product-led growth approach has helped LOVO rise above th
Krish Ramineni, CEO of Fireflies: $19 Million Raised to Build the Future of AI Meeting Assistants
In today’s episode of Category Visionaries, we speak with Krish Ramineni, CEO of Fireflies.ai, an AI meeting assistant promising to revolutionize the value of videoconferencing by unlocking actionable insights from our meetings. Harnessing a unique combination of machine learning, transcription technology and analytics, Fireflies.ai is on a mission to make our meetings better or reduce the need fo
Ryan Sevey, CEO of Mantium: $12 Million Raised to Help Teams Deploy and Monitor their AI Process Automations
In today’s episode of Category Visionaries, we speak with Ryan Sevey, CEO of Mantium, about his journey from one man show to becoming the head of a major machine learning platform. In the era of AI, Mantium's unique perspective regarding machine learning is that it's not going to replace humans in terms of sales and communication, but will help us achieve more by taking care of the small things wh
