Waseem Alshikh is a seasoned technology leader and entrepreneur with extensive experience in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. He is the co-founder and CTO of Writer, a leading generative AI platform built for enterprises that enables companies to create content that is consistent and on-brand. Platform used by companies such as Marriott, Braintree, UnitedHealthcare, Accenture, Intuit, UiPath, HubSpot, Spotify, Hilton, Uber and Deloitte. Additionally he has held senior positions at iMENA and Danat eVentures. Waseem holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Beirut Arab University and a Master’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Damascus Polytechnic for Electronics.

Jim Belosic is the CEO and Founder of SendCutSend, a software-driven manufacturing company modernizing American fabrication through speed, accessibility, and automation. Under his leadership, SendCutSend has surpassed a $110 million annual revenue run rate, serving more than 300,000 customers, including 59% of the Fortune 500.

A serial entrepreneur for over 25 years, Jim has founded and scaled multiple ventures across software, marketing, and manufacturing. His rare combination of software expertise and hands-on fabrication experience enabled him to design a vertically integrated manufacturing platform that delivers custom parts in as little as 24 hours.

Jim is focused on expanding domestic manufacturing capacity by building a distributed network of high-tech facilities across the United States. His emphasis on customer experience and continuous improvement has helped SendCutSend achieve a 92 Net Promoter Score and earn recognition as #131 on the 2024 Deloitte Technology Fast 500.

Jordan Black is the CEO and Co Founder of Senra Systems, a manufacturing technology company modernizing wire harness production.

Jordan began his career as a technician repairing roller coasters at the Santa Monica Pier, where he developed a hands on appreciation for complex electromechanical systems. After internships at Ford and Enerpac, he became deeply focused on rebuilding American manufacturing culture and attracting technical talent back into the workforce.

Following graduation, Jordan joined SpaceX as a manufacturing development engineer for wire harnessing, supporting new product introduction across Dragon, Falcon, and Spacesuit programs. He was later promoted to become the youngest manager in Avionics, leading a research and development team and traveling globally to identify and improve suppliers.

After five years solving supply chain and production challenges, he left SpaceX to build a new approach to manufacturing. Within weeks of incorporating, Senra was building harnesses out of an apartment. Three years later, the company operates multiple factories in Southern California and supplies major aerospace primes and emerging industrial leaders.

Senra is now focused on scaling skilled assembly into high throughput production using software driven manufacturing and automation, with plans to deploy factories globally.

A mathematician and physicist, Bodnia earned a Ph.D. in quantum information and algebraic topology from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

At UCSB, her thesis was under her chair advisor Dirk Bouwmeester, Jon McCammond, Ben Bazin and Michel Devoret, who shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for “the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.”

She also worked on neuroscience and brain development at UCSB with collaboration of Google Quantum AI, which helped inspire her pursuit of AI reasoning that does not rely on the text-based models used in many LLMs.

She also built expertise in topology, the study of geometric properties and spatial relations, which has proved essential in understanding how to handle large information sets of almost infinite size.

Bodnia earned her undergraduate degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied with the physicists Robert Cahn and Daniel McKinsey. She considers Cahn, a global leader in elementary particle theory, to be her “true mentor.”

Bodnia is the author or co-author of 22 academic papers on dark matter, quantum mechanics, and particle physics.

Erica has spent most of her career as a founder and executive operator prior to joining Redpoint in early 2021. Most recently, she served as COO of GitHub, where she was brought in to mature and scale the company following the Microsoft acquisition. She was fortunate to be a part of the GitHub Copilot launch as well as many others and drove global business expansion among other aspects of the business. Prior to GitHub, she co-founded Bitnami, which went through Y Combinator in 2013 and was acquired by VMware in 2019, as well as BitRock prior to that. She has also served on the board of the Linux Foundation, which shepherds over 200 core open source projects (including Linux and Kubernetes), since 2016. At Redpoint, Erica focuses on bringing her nearly 20 years of open source, infrastructure and developer tools experience to bear to support founders from the earliest days of building.

Ivan Burazin co-founded Codeanywhere, a pioneer in cloud development, back in 2009. Concurrently, he established Shift, a premier developer conference in Europe, which was later acquired by Infobip—a global communications cloud giant—in 2021. Following the acquisition, Ivan served on the executive board of this 4,000-person company and as the Chief Developer Experience Officer, where he oversaw global developer-oriented operations. In 2023, Ivan co-founded Daytona, a fast-growing open-source platform addressing the limitations of AI coding agents by enabling them to programmatically and securely interact with runtime environments. Backed by $7M in funding, Daytona empowers developers—from startups to Fortune 500 companies—to utilize agents to their full potential.

Ian Cinnamon is the CEO and Co-Founder of Apex, a high-rate configurable satellite bus platform manufacturer named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2025. Backed by over $500 million from the world’s best investors, Apex’s first satellite bus set a world record as the fastest cleansheet design to production spacecraft operating in space. Focused on meeting the needs of the rapidly expanding space industry and advancing critical national security missions like Golden Dome, Apex provides scalable platforms to both the commercial and government sectors. Apex's Los Angeles production facility can deliver satellite buses to customers in weeks rather than the industry standard of months or years, with the capacity to produce over 200 buses per year at full scale. Prior to his work with Apex, Ian founded Synapse, a company specializing in artificial intelligence for security and defense. Ian led the company through acquisition by Palantir. Earlier in his career, Ian co-founded Superlabs, which was sold to Zynga, where he served as Director of Product after the acquisition. Ian is a Forbes "30 Under 30" honoree and an alumnus of Y Combinator. He received his B.S. from MIT and his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Miles Clements joined Accel in 2009 and focuses on software, consumer internet, and online marketplace businesses. 

He helped lead Accel's investments in Atlassian (TEAM), Bird, DJI, Hudl, lynda.com (acquired by LinkedIn), MessageBird, Podium, SeatGeek, and UiPath.

Miles also helps manage the firm's Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and robotics initiatives through his work with DJI and ongoing leadership of the DJI-Accel SkyFund. Previously Miles worked in product management at lynda.com. 

Miles is from New Orleans, Louisiana and graduated from the University of Virginia and Harvard Business School.

Lukas Czinger serves as Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Divergent Technologies, Inc. and Founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer of CZV, Inc. Czinger Vehicles is an American car company driving the future of the performance automotive industry. Divergent is the creator of the Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPSTM), the world’s first end-to-end digital manufacturing platform enabling rapid design, additive manufacturing, and automated assembly. Headquartered in Torrance, California, Divergent is reshaping the future of defense, aerospace, and automotive production.

Lukas joined Divergent in 2017 as a member of the founding team and has held various technical and leadership positions over the past 8 years, expanding his responsibility from leading the automation and robotics department to overall company operations. Notable achievements include hiring the core management team, leading the development of the Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPSTM), inventing the company’s fixtureless robotic assembly system, leading the company’s capital raising, and directing the company’s strategy to serve the aerospace and defense market at scale.

Lukas has been recognized by Forbes as a leader in Manufacturing & Industry on the 30 Under 30 list for 2023 and is a recognized speaker on the future of digital manufacturing and the transformation of the American industrial base. He further serves as a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Prior to Divergent, Lukas led a career in investment banking at Centerview Partners. Lukas graduated from Yale University with a degree in Electrical Engineering.

Sam D’Amico is the founder and CEO of Impulse - a San Francisco based hardware startup focused on driving electrification through next-gen home appliances. Impulse's first product is a battery-integrated induction stove that solves common installation challenges, unlocks impressive performance, and provides grid energy storage. Sam comes from an extensive background in hardware engineering, and has worked on consumer tech across Meta and Google.

Russ is the cofounder and CEO of LiveKit, the voice AI platform behind ChatGPT, Character.ai and ElevenLabs. He started his first company in the 2007 batch of YC and was the 2nd frontend engineer at Twitter.

Matthew Gallagher is the founder of MEDVi, a leading telehealth provider that has redefined the ceiling for startup velocity. Under his leadership, MEDVi became one of the fastest-growing companies in history, scaling from $0 to $1 Billion in ARR in just 14 months.

A pioneer in hyper-efficient organizational design, Matthew has built MEDVi into a case study for modern operational excellence. Despite its billion-dollar scale and serving hundreds of thousands of patients nationwide, the company operates with an unprecedented lean structure, supported by only a handful of contractors and one employee. This model leverages a sophisticated ecosystem of AI, API-driven technology, strategic partnerships, and operational automation to dominate health markets and provide excellent service to patients.

Matthew’s expertise lies at the intersection of technical infrastructure and rapid market penetration. By democratizing access to clinicians through a seamless, consumer-first digital experience, he has positioned MEDVi as the primary challenger to traditional healthcare delivery models.

Hannan Happi is the CEO and co-founder of Exowatt. A mechanical engineer by training, Hannan studied at the Technical University of Munich and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Before founding Exowatt, Hannan held leadership and engineering roles at General Electric, Siemens, Accenture, and Tesla. He later co-founded and led Volansi, a vertical take-off and landing drone startup focused on autonomous logistics, which was acquired by a major defense firm. Now based in Miami, Florida, Hannan and the Exowatt team are focused on solving one of the most urgent infrastructure challenges of our time: delivering scalable, dispatchable, onsite energy solutions that keep pace with the digital world’s accelerating demands. 

Carl Hoiland is the Co-founder and CEO of Zanskar, a Utah-based company deploying proprietary AI to discover and develop geothermal resources at unprecedented speed, cost, and scale. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University, was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, and later an Activate Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Carl's industry experience includes geothermal, shale gas, and critical minerals exploration. Drawing on his research and exploration background, and inspired by a growing scientific consensus that the vast majority of geothermal resources remain undiscovered, he co-founded Zanskar to meet surging demand for carbon-free baseload power. In just five years, Zanskar has grown to become the most successful geothermal explorer in U.S. history and is now advancing a gigawatt-scale pipeline of greenfield geothermal assets across the western United States. Zanskar's recent Series C financing, led by Spring Lane Capital with participation from Obvious Ventures, USV, Lowercarbon Capital, and many others, brought its total equity funding to >$180 million and marked the largest ever investment into AI discovery for geothermal resources. 

Richard Kerris is the vice president and general manager of media and entertainment at NVIDIA. He is responsible for the industry strategy, business development, product management, developer rela@ons, and marke@ng of media and entertainment. With a career spanning Alias|Wavefront, Apple, Lucasfilm and other major tech brands, Richard has extensive experience driving product development and marke@ng with a focus on bringing new ideas to life. At Alias|Wavefront, he was director of Maya technologies and led the teams that brought the groundbreaking 3D soKware to manufacturers and new plaLorms such as Macintosh. At Apple, he was senior director of developer rela@ons and managed the ProApps teams for Final Cut Pro, Logic and Aperture. At Lucasfilm, he served as chief technology officer, managing research and development, IT and informa@on services. Richard has given keynote addresses at NVIDIA GTC, Asia Broadcast and China Joy Expo and delivered mul@ple Apple Worldwide Developers Conference presenta@ons with the company’s CEO. He serves on the Bay Area Board of the Visual Effects Society and is an ac@ve member of the Society of Mo@on Picture and Television Engineers. He is also an accomplished photographer and musician.

Justin leads operations and technology at Base Power. Prior to starting Base, Justin led Manufacturing at Anduril, a leading defense technology company serving the US and allied nations. Prior to Anduril, Justin led manufacturing & operations for SpaceX’s Starship vehicle, building the South Texas launch site from the ground up. As the COO at Base, he brings that same hands-on approach to software, hardware, and operations, ensuring reliable power when people need it most.

Nathan Mintz is the co-founder and CEO of CX2, an electronic warfare startup based in El Segundo, California. He previously founded and led Spartan Radar, which was acquired by John Deere in 2024, and Epirus, a defense technology unicorn. Prior to entrepreneurship, Nathan spent 13 years as a systems engineer at Boeing and Raytheon.

Nathan holds a BS and MS in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University and is the inventor on 10 U.S. patents. He is also an active advisor to and investor in multiple venture capital funds and early-stage technology startups.

Tori Shivanandan is the Chief Operating Officer of Radiant, where she leads a team of world-class engineers and business leaders who are building the world’s first factory-built portable nuclear microreactor. Tori brings extensive experience in operations, consulting, and management across a variety of sectors and industries, giving Radiant the jump-start it needed to deliver on its mission to build the world's first portable mass-produced nuclear microreactors. Prior to joining Radiant three years ago, Tori was a consultant at Happy Returns and supported PayPal’s $350M acquisition of the business. In the first eight years of her career, Tori climbed the ranks of industrial supplier McMaster-Carr, leading teams numbering in the hundreds. Tori earned her B.A.Sc. from Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Michael G. Smayda is founder and CEO at Fortastra Corporation. Previously, he was co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Hermeus Corporation, a venture-backed high-speed aircraft company, where he led internal product development as well as external business development, requirements generation, and congressional engagement. Prior to Hermeus, Michael spent 5 years at SpaceX on the Falcon 9 launch vehicle working aerodynamics and aerothermodynamics for booster entry, descent and landing, design criteria, systems engineering, and hardware design for Falcon Heavy. Dr. Smayda has a PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from the University of Virginia and a BS in the same from Cornell University. He lives in Hermosa Beach, CA.

Auriel Wright has pioneered production machine learning systems throughout the modern AI era—from advanced computer vision modeling at Harvard to generative AI at Google Brain and autonomous agentic modeling for Gemini. Most recently at Google DeepMind, she led Product for Gemini's self-coding Agentic Modelling effort, driving the development of next-generation reasoning and agentic capabilities on Gemini that enable transformative real-world applications.

Her contributions span foundational computer vision to state-of-the-art generative AI across Google Brain and DeepMind. She developed high-precision human detection models that underpin essential technologies, including Pixel Real Tone, Google Search, and Waymo's autonomous vehicle perception systems and has even earned a Cannes Lion award for her work on the Pixel Real Tone. She subsequently directed human alignment initiatives for leading generative models like NanoBanana and Imagen, impacting billions of users globally and enabling advanced human image editing capabilities. Her research on supervised fine-tuning data and rater optimization has been published at NeurIPS.

Before joining Google, Auriel was a Y Combinator-backed founder (W20). She is now an active angel investor in AI infrastructure and the rapidly evolving agentic systems space. She holds a Computer Science degree from Harvard.

Kobie has been a General Partner at Upfront since 2016, with a core investing focus in SaaS, marketing technology, and emerging technologies including VR and AR. His notable Upfront investments include Bevy, Wave, Cordial, MetaCX and Valence, which he also founded. Prior to Upfront, Kobie was an investor at Accel, helped found OpenView Venture Partners, and was an investor at Insight Venture Partners; over his career he invested early in companies including Exact Target (sold to Salesforce for $2.5B) and Oculus (sold to Facebook for $2B). He was also the Chief Marketing Officer at LA-based REVOLVE, one of the largest global fashion e-commerce players. Kobie graduated from Harvard College.

Nick is a general partner at Upfront Ventures. He focuses on early-stage investments in hard tech and national infrastructure sectors like advanced manufacturing and robotics, industrial automation, energy and utilities, aerospace and defense, and more. Prior to joining Upfront, Nick was at Crosscut Ventures leading seed investments. Before Crosscut, Nick was an early employee at Warby Parker, where he was the general manager of the Home Try-On business. Nick also served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Human Ventures and as an investor with the Dorm Room Fund, First Round Capital’s student-run investment fund.

Nick graduated with a degree in economics from UC Berkeley and earned his MBA from The Wharton School.

Aditi Maliwal is a General Partner at Upfront Ventures, investing in early stage companies across financial technology and enterprise software. Aditi partners with founders at their earliest stages of inception and supports them throughout the stages of company building. While at Upfront, she has partnered deeply in this way with Arcade, Clair, Renew, Stem, WriterAI and ZestAI amongst others.

Before joining Upfront, Aditi was at Google, first on the Corporate Development team leading acquisitions across various sectors including AI, commerce and fintech, and then on the Next Billion Users team building products for users in emerging markets. Prior to Google she worked in early stage venture at Crosslink Capital where she invested in Chime, BetterUp, and PowerToFly among other companies. She began her career in investment banking at Deutsche Bank, in the technology banking group. She has a B.A. from Stanford University. She has lived between Mumbai, New Delhi, Hong Kong, Singapore and San Francisco.

Sarah is a Founder and Managing Partner at Voyager. She has been building and investing in transformative technology companies since 2009 and brings expertise in mobility, biotech, food and materials production, and carbon removal. Prior to Voyager, she co-founded car-sharing firm Getaround and served as the founding business director of Modern Meadow, the world’s first company making bio-fabricated leather. Sarah is a technical advisor to Frontier, the $1B fund to purchase carbon removal.

Sarah is a graduate of Harvard and of MIT, where she researched energy technologies and carbon removal technologies. She lives in New York City.

Jacques Sisteron joined the Upfront investment team in 2022. Before Upfront, Jacques worked at Apeel as a manager in the Strategy division, where he focused on bringing their materials-based shelf-life extension product to market in the EU, developing new pricing models, and prioritizing and quantifying value for new product introductions.

Jacques graduated early cum laude from Cornell with a B.S. in Applied Economics & Management, focusing on environmental, resource, and energy economics. He received a Cornell merit scholarship for his Master of Engineering in Materials Science and Engineering after obtaining his B.S.

Peter joined Upfront in 2023 after spending most of his career as a founder. Before Upfront, Peter co-founded Macro, a workflow automation company, and Hyper Travel, a corporate travel solution that was acquired by Tradeshift in 2016. Prior to Hyper Travel, Peter was an early employee at Venmo, where he worked as a software engineer and product manager.

He graduated from Princeton University with degrees in Philosophy and Computer Science. He is also a former YC founder (Summer, 2010) and member of South Park Commons.