RAISE Summit

NYSE, ICONIQ, NFDG/ AI Grant: From SaaS to Superintelligence How AI Is Rewriting Growth Economics

Hirsch, Sarah

Investors from NFDG and Iconic discuss a private AI market defined by unprecedented valuations for young firms, where aggressive growth expectations now outweigh traditional age-based benchmarks. The dialogue highlights shifting financial mechanics, such as the prevalence of hybrid pricing models and the critical importance of velocity over static data moats in defending against hyperscalers. Looking forward, the speakers identify biology and service-heavy verticals like legal and healthcare as primary arenas for disruption as AI transitions from cloud-enabled tools to native operational infrastructures.

Chris Stephens (Groq) & Judith Gardiner (Equinix): Enabling AI Inference for the European Market

Chris Stephens, Judith Gardiner, Christopher Coleman-

Grok and Equinix have formalized a strategic partnership to deploy AI inference services across Equinix's 270 global data centers, initiating operations in Helsinki with a roadmap for rapid expansion into Southern Europe and Africa. Leveraging specialized 14nm chips that significantly reduce power consumption and Equinix Fabric for low-latency connectivity, the collaboration addresses surging enterprise demand for sovereign cloud solutions and data residency in regulated sectors. This alliance prioritizes speed to market, evidenced by previous 30-day deployment cycles, while integrating sustainability measures such as waste heat recovery and renewable energy sourcing to support the industry's shift toward distributed inference workloads.

A fireside Chat with Mati Staniszewski, CEO & Co-Founder of Eleven Labs ft. Balderton Capital

Mati Staniszewski, James Wise

Founded by Mati Kovacs and Peter, Eleven Labs has evolved from addressing Polish film dubbing limitations into a global AI voice leader operating with offices in the US, Europe, India, and Japan. The company currently executes a dual strategy of frontier research and application development, delivering production-ready voice agents for healthcare scheduling and interactive entertainment while distinguishing itself through high-fidelity dialect recognition and a creator marketplace that has paid over $5 million. Looking forward, leadership is prioritizing a three-tier trust framework for safety and a technical pivot toward combining cascaded reliability with end-to-end Duplex models to achieve human-like latency in the coming year.

Paul Copplestone (SupaBase) & Abel Samot (Commit): Open Source Backend for the AI Age

Paul Copplestone, Abel Samot, DAN GALPIN, FRANCESC CAMPOY, ALEXIS MOUSSINE

Supabase has achieved a $2 billion valuation following a $200 million funding round, driven by a user base that tripled to over 3 million developers and a strategy positioning the open-source platform as a default modern web backend. Founder Paul Copplestone highlights rapid adoption fueled by AI-assisted "vibe coding" tools while the company pursues enterprise growth through "configuration over customization" and upcoming infrastructure breakthroughs like the Multigress sharding solution. Operating as a fully remote organization of 140 specialists, the firm continues scaling by launching Pico instances for zero-to-one applications and recruiting senior talent to support petabyte-scale database capabilities.

Guillaume Verdon, Extropic AI: Thermodynamic Computing and the Energy Efficiency Crisis of AI

Guillaume Verdon

Xtropic is addressing the impending AI energy crisis by developing thermodynamic hardware that leverages natural electron fluctuations for probabilistic computation rather than traditional deterministic logic. Founders Trevor and colleagues have successfully miniaturized this technology to room temperature on standard silicon, currently testing chips with hundreds of degrees of freedom that consume attojoules per operation while promising a 100 million-fold efficiency gain over current GPUs. With mass production scheduled for 2025 and early customer deployments targeted for the end of summer, the company aims to disrupt the multi-billion dollar semiconductor market by making energy efficiency the primary driver for scaling future artificial intelligence.

Scaleway & SemiAnalysis: Unlocking AI's Potential Insights from Deploying Europe's Most Advanced

Scaleway launched Europe's largest Hopper GPU cluster in 2023 to secure data sovereignty and prevent U.S. hyperscaler dominance, now hosting major AI players like Mistral for training and inference. The provider is advancing "Project ION," a consortium-backed initiative aiming to build capacity equivalent to 280,000 H100 chips with private capital while seeking government demand assurance rather than direct subsidies. Operating across five European regions, Scaleway positions itself as a full-stack public cloud solution that prioritizes legal immunity from U.S. laws over domestic hardware manufacturing, targeting a consolidated market of EU-based public and private AI consumers.

Anish Agarwal, Traversal: Production Software Keeps Breaking, and It Will Only Get Worse

Anish Agarwal

Founded by MIT PhDs and Citadel alumni, Traversal employs causal machine learning, advanced reasoning models, and agent swarms to automate root cause analysis for large enterprises overwhelmed by AI-generated code complexity. The platform processes petabyte-scale telemetry to distinguish symptoms from causes, delivering proven results such as a 38% reduction in resolution time for DigitalOcean and sub-five-minute identification for a major financial firm. By converging on solutions through agentic MapReduce rather than traditional AIOps, the company aims to automate the full software reliability lifecycle while addressing the growing maintenance burden in modern development workflows.

A Keynote with Guillaume Bonneton, GP Bullhound & Carlos de la Esperanza, Bullhound Capital

Guillaume Bonneton, Carlos de la Esperanza, Carlos Franza

GP Bullhound's 11th annual "Titans of Tech" report defines Europe's current technological renaissance, noting that the continent's unicorn count has nearly tripled since 2020 while total venture capital funding has recovered to $15 billion annually. Despite a stagnation in initial public offerings, the ecosystem is scaling through a surge in larger deals and strategic secondary liquidity rounds, with AI-native companies and dual-use technologies driving the majority of new capital allocation. Looking ahead, the firm projects 50 new unicorns within 24 months, a wave dominated by aggressive hiring and the development of sovereign hardware infrastructure rather than consumer applications.

Nils Pihl, CEO & Co-Founder, AUKI Labs: Teaching Machines to See the World

Nils Pihl

Speaker forecasts a tenfold global economic expansion within two decades driven by Artificial Intelligence, provided that technology evolves to interact with the physical world rather than remaining limited to digital interfaces. Aukey addresses critical gaps in current positioning infrastructure by developing a decentralized spatial computing protocol and lightweight smart glasses that replace unreliable GPS with user-generated maps, enabling autonomous systems to navigate high-density urban environments. This strategy unlocks significant efficiency gains in sectors like retail by reducing staff travel time and enabling secure, self-hosted data collection for both human and robotic coordination.

A fireside Chat with May Habib, CEO & Co Founder of Writer ft. Rana Yared, GP, Balderton Capital

May Habib, Rana Yared

Writer is an enterprise AI company accelerating the transition to "Era 3.0" agentic systems by deploying vertically specific, revenue-impacting solutions that integrate with legacy infrastructure while maintaining full-stack control over security and reliability. The organization addresses adoption barriers like traceability and scalability through a frugal, synthetic-data-driven architecture that enables rapid model iteration and distinct competitive moats against infrastructure providers. By structuring implementation around 30-to-365-day value increments, Writer facilitates deep corporate transformation from efficiency tools to autonomous agents capable of executing complex, high-stakes business workflows.

Kevin Cochrane, CMO, Vultr: Building the AI-ready Enterprise, Modernizing Your Cloud Infrastructure

Kevin Cochrane

Vulture CMO Kevin Cochran outlines a strategic shift from the Kubernetes era to a new decade of production-scale agentic AI, driven by survey data indicating that 2,000 global decision-makers prioritize centralized governance and open ecosystems to avoid vendor lock-in. The company addresses these needs through its hybrid cloud platform, which unifies CPU and GPU resources in 32 regions to enable secure, sovereign infrastructure that prevents data from leaving controlled environments while supporting specialized verticals like healthcare and manufacturing. This approach positions Vulture as a distinct public cloud contender capable of transforming experimental AI initiatives into scalable, compliant production architectures.

Steve Lucas, CEO & Chairman, Boomi: The Next Era of Enterprise Leadership Transformation & Trust

Steve Lucas

Steve Lucas, Chairman and CEO of Boomi, outlines the industry shift from deterministic digital transformation to "agentic transformation," where AI-driven systems dynamically learn and adapt alongside human workforces. Backed by McKinsey's projection of $15 trillion in new AI value over five years, Boomi has launched an agentic platform serving 24,000 customers while internally reducing support costs by 75% through a strategy that prioritizes automating mundane processes and building an "Agent Control Tower" for governance. Lucas emphasizes that successful adoption relies on high-quality data, bottom-up innovation, and aligning organizational change speeds with the critical "speed of trust" required for reliable human-AI collaboration.

Arm, PsiQuantum, Intel, NextSilicon, Lightspeed: Moore’s Law vs AI’s Appetite The Compute Collision

Jean-Anne Philippe, Will Abbey, Elad, Pete Chabot

Intel's Jean-Luc Philippe, ARM's Will Abbey, and experts from Next Silicon and PsiQuantum convened to analyze the shift from traditional transistor scaling toward software-hardware co-design and heterogeneous computing architectures. The discussion highlighted critical advancements in quantum error correction and RISC-V integration while emphasizing that future AI infrastructure requires billions in capital to support hybrid edge-cloud systems and post-quantum cryptography. Industry leaders concluded that the end of Moore's Law necessitates fundamental architectural innovation over brute-force scaling, with a consensus that value is forged through massive, power-intensive supercomputing deployments rather than isolated component optimization.

Poolside AI, IREN, Forbes: From 10x to 100x Building AI Systems for Real World Scale

Emma Allen, Dennis Skriniop, Isa Kent

Dennis Skriniop of Iron and Isa Kent of Poolside discuss the critical infrastructure and energy requirements for scaling foundation models toward human-level intelligence. Kent outlines Poolside's $500 million investment in automating a "model factory" that executes 1,800 monthly experiments, emphasizing that 80% of success relies on distributed systems engineering rather than algorithmic discovery. Skriniop and Kent further analyze the necessity of hybrid power grids, disaggregated storage architectures, and the emerging role of specialized "Neo-Clouds" to address the exponential complexity of operating clusters exceeding 10,000 GPUs.

Dr. Walden C. Rhines, Cornami: Scalable Secure AI Deploying LLMs with Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Dr. Walden C. Rhines

Facing the impending threat of quantum computers breaking current encryption, Kornami deploys its TrueStream software and hardware architecture to make Fully Homomorphic Encryption practical by eliminating the computational bottlenecks that traditionally limit its use. Their "sea of cores" system delivers banking security benchmarks in seconds rather than days and achieves performance levels orders of magnitude more efficient than NVIDIA H100s for AI and blockchain workloads. With beta units scheduled for deployment this quarter and volume production targeted for late this year, the company aims to resolve global power constraints while enabling secure data monetization and privacy compliance without exposing raw information.