People in AI.

Jonathan King is co-founder and Chief Scientist of Atom Computing, a neutral-atom quantum computing startup. Before Atom Computing he was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley working on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy with Alex Pines. He holds a BS in chemical engineering from Kansas State and a PhD in chemistry from UC Berkeley.

Jonathan Ross is the founder and CEO of Groq, an AI inference chip company he started in 2016 with several former Google engineers. At Google he began what became the Tensor Processing Unit as a 20% project and designed core elements of the original TPU. Groq's Language Processing Unit (LPU) is built for low-latency LLM inference. In December 2025 Nvidia announced a $20B non-exclusive license for Groq's inference technology, with most Groq employees including Ross joining Nvidia.

Josh Goldman is co-founder and president of KoBold Metals, the AI-powered critical minerals exploration company launched in 2018. He earlier advised energy clients at McKinsey & Company and led commercial work at Phase Change Resources. He holds a BA in physics from Cornell, master's degrees from Cambridge (as a Marshall Scholar) and Imperial College London, and a PhD in physics from Harvard.

Josh James is the founder and CEO of Domo, the business intelligence platform he launched in 2010. He earlier co-founded Omniture in 1996 and served as its CEO through its 2006 IPO and 2009 sale to Adobe for $1.8 billion. He studied business management and entrepreneurship at Brigham Young University and was Ernst & Young's 2006 Entrepreneur of the Year.

Josh Kamdjou is founder and CEO of Sublime Security, an email detection and response company he launched in 2019. He previously spent nearly a decade at the US Department of Defense doing offensive cyber work and red teaming, and earlier was VP of Penetration Testing at Pervade Security. He holds a BSc in computer science from the University of Maryland.

Julien Chaumond is co-founder and CTO of Hugging Face, the open-source AI platform he started in 2016 with Clément Delangue and Thomas Wolf. He oversees model and infrastructure development for the Hugging Face Hub, Transformers library, and inference services. He previously co-founded Glose, a social reading platform, and advised the French Ministry of Economy and Finance. He holds a master's in electrical engineering and computer science from Stanford.

Julien Perolat is a co-founder of H Company, the Paris-based agentic AI startup launched in 2024. He previously was a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, where he co-led work on the Stratego-playing DeepNash system and other multi-agent reinforcement learning projects. He attended the University of Lille.

Jure Leskovec is co-founder and Chief Scientist of Kumo.ai and a professor of computer science at Stanford. He previously served as Chief Scientist at Pinterest and pioneered the field of Graph Neural Networks, co-authoring the widely-used PyG library. He holds a BSc from the University of Ljubljana and a PhD in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon University.

Kai-Fu Lee

Beijing, CN

Chairman of 01.AI. Former president of Google China, CEO of Sinovation Ventures. Author of "AI Superpowers".

Karan Malhotra is co-founder and Head of Behavior at Nous Research, the open-source AI lab he started in 2023 with Jeffrey Quesnelle, Shivani Mitra, and Teknium. Earlier he was a machine learning researcher at the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab. He studied at Oxford College of Emory University and Emory University, where he focused on religion and philosophy.

Karl Tuyls is a co-founder of Paris-based AI startup H Company, established in 2023, and now serves as Director of AI Research at Meta. He previously joined Google DeepMind in 2017 and led the Game Theory and Multi-Agent teams. He earned his PhD from Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2004 and held academic posts at Maastricht University and the University of Liverpool.

Karol Hausman is co-founder and CEO of Physical Intelligence, a robotics foundation-model startup launched in 2024 with Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, and others. He previously was a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford working on robot learning. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Southern California.

Kevin Peterson is co-founder and CTO of Bedrock Robotics, a 2025-launched autonomous construction startup that raised $80 million from former Waymo engineering leaders. He previously was Head of Perception for Waymo Via, served as autonomy architect at Caterpillar following its acquisition of his earlier startup Marble, and was CTO of lunar lander company Astrobotic. He holds an MS from Carnegie Mellon University.

Kevin Ryan is founder and CEO of AlleyCorp and co-founder of Pearl Health. He previously led DoubleClick as president then CEO, taking it public in 1998 before its acquisition by Google in 2007, and co-founded MongoDB, Business Insider, Gilt Groupe, Zola, and Nomad Health. He holds a BA from Yale and an MBA from INSEAD.

Kim O. Johansen is co-founder and COO of Vespa.ai, which spun out of Yahoo in 2023. He has more than 20 years of experience managing development of large distributed systems, with prior leadership roles at Yahoo, Verizon Media, and Fast Search & Transfer. He holds an MSc in computer science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Kiran Darisi is co-founder and CTO of Atomicwork, an employee experience platform launched in 2022. He spent over a decade at Freshworks as a founding team member, helping take the company from zero to IPO with a focus on reliability and platform engineering. He studied at Sri Venkateswara University and is an active angel investor in early-stage startups.

Kritin Vongthongsri is co-founder and CTO of Confident AI, an LLM evaluation and observability platform he started in 2024 with Jeffrey Ip as part of Y Combinator W25. The company builds DeepEval, an open-source LLM evaluation framework. He holds a BSE from Princeton, where he studied operations research, financial engineering, and computer science.

Kurt House is co-founder and CEO of KoBold Metals, an AI-driven mineral exploration company founded in 2018. He earlier founded C12 Energy, worked at Bain & Company, and held research roles at MIT and Stanford, where he chairs the Mineral-X Advisory Council. He holds a BA in physics from Claremont McKenna and a PhD in earth and planetary sciences from Harvard.

Laurent Sifre is co-founder and CTO of H Company, a Paris-based agentic AI startup that raised a $220 million seed round in 2024. He spent a decade at DeepMind as a principal scientist contributing to AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and AlphaStar, and led the Chinchilla and RETRO LLM research. He holds a PhD in applied mathematics from Ecole Polytechnique.

Leonardo Vieira is co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Tractian, a Sao Paulo-based predictive maintenance and asset monitoring company founded in 2019 with Gabriel Lameirinhas and Igor Marinelli. He has led go-to-market across Latin America and the United States, and Tractian has raised over $100 million from leading Silicon Valley investors. He is a Forbes 30 Under 30 North America honoree.

Lilian Weng is an AI researcher and co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab, launched in February 2025. She previously spent nearly seven years at OpenAI, most recently as VP of AI Safety, where she helped build the Applied AI Research and Safety teams. Educated at Peking University and Indiana University Bloomington, she also authors the widely-read technical blog Lil'Log.

Lin Qiao is CEO and co-founder of Fireworks AI, which she started in 2022 to provide generative AI inference and fine-tuning infrastructure. She previously spent over seven years at Meta, where she was Senior Director of Engineering leading the PyTorch team and AI frameworks supporting Meta's entire AI workload. She holds a PhD in computer science from UC Santa Barbara.

Lior Hakim is co-founder and CTO of Hour One, the synthetic video startup he launched in 2018 with Oren Aharon and that was acquired by Wix in 2025. He did his compulsory service in Israeli intelligence and later studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before Hour One he worked in cryptocurrency and machine learning infrastructure.