Brandon Hill, co-founder and CEO of Vori, discusses how his company is digitizing the $1.5 trillion grocery industry with an all-in-one OS. He covers their journey from a simple ordering app to a full-stack platform, the use of AI agents to automate pricing and inventory, and their vision for the 'self-driving' grocery store.
Simon Hørup Eskildsen, founder of turbopuffer, shares his journey from scaling Shopify's infrastructure to creating a new search engine for the AI era. He discusses how a prohibitively expensive experiment at Readwise inspired him to build a cost-effective vector search solution based on object storage and NVMe. Eskildsen breaks down turbopuffer's architecture, its role in cutting costs for companies like Cursor and Notion, his philosophy on building a 'P99' engineering team, and how agentic workloads are changing the future of retrieval.
Siyethaba Nxumalo, the 22-year-old founder of CipherGenix, outlines the critical need for AI-specific cybersecurity in healthcare, where compromised models directly impact patient lives. He details his journey of building a global startup from South Africa, emphasizing a customer-first approach, a multi-layered security architecture to combat threats like data poisoning and model theft, and the non-negotiable role of ethical, explainable AI in building trust and ensuring patient safety.
Jacqueline Cheong and Robin Tang, founders of real-time data streaming platform Artie, discuss their journey from identifying the critical need for fresh data at companies like OpenDoor to building a production-ready solution, acquiring their first major customer Substack via a cold email, and navigating the complex technical challenges of real-time data processing at scale.
Markus Villig recounts the story of Bolt, from a €5,000 loan from his parents to a global mobility leader. The journey is defined by counterintuitive pivots: first, competing against the very taxi companies they initially served, and second, using a first-principles data model to ignore conventional wisdom and expand into overlooked African markets, which proved to be a massive success. This data-driven, pragmatic approach allowed Bolt to triple its market share during the COVID-19 crisis by choosing not to lay off staff and instead focusing on growth while competitors were paralyzed.
Tanay Tandon, co-founder and CEO of Commure, discusses his journey from building a medical device in college to creating an AI operating system for healthcare. He covers the pivot from hardware to software, the power of LLMs in automating revenue cycle and clinical documentation, and his vision for a future where AI liberates physicians from administrative burdens and fundamentally reshapes patient care.