RAISE Summit

Lin Qiao, Co-Founder & CEO, Fireworks AI: Open Models: The future of AI agent development

Lin Qiao

Fireworks CEO Lin positions 2025 as a pivotal year for AI agents, highlighting the platform's deployment for major enterprises like Cursor, Uber, and UiPath through a unique "data flying wheel" strategy that aligns model distributions with proprietary product data. The service scales 5 trillion tokens daily across 1,000 models while utilizing multilora compression and reinforcement fine-tuning to achieve up to 15x performance gains in coding and research tasks. By offering enterprise-grade security and bringing custom models to production with 100x faster iteration speeds, Fireworks enables organizations to transform AI from a utility into a core intellectual property asset.

Together AI & SemiAnalysis: In Conversation Together AI's Vision For the Future of AI Infrastructure

Vipul Vaid-Prakash, Dylan Patel

Founded in late 2022, Together AI challenges hyperscaler dominance by reengineering the cloud stack to achieve 75% maximum FLOP utilization on H100 GPUs, significantly outpacing the 50% industry standard. Led by chief scientist Tri Dao and the ClusterMax initiative, the firm drives down inference costs for massive models like DeepSeek from $8 to 30 cents per million tokens through architectural innovations and Reinforcement Learning frameworks. These technical advancements enable new MoE-based workloads and position the company to define emerging optimization surfaces before new hardware generations are fully adopted.

Adrian Blair, CEO & Co-Founder, TrustPilot: Winning Customers. Trust in the Age of AI

Adrian Blair

Trustpilot CEO Adrian Blair outlines a strategic pivot where the company deploys its "Trust Layer" API to inject 350 million verified human experiences into autonomous AI systems, addressing a crisis where over half of Americans currently reject AI decision-making due to opacity. This infrastructure combats unreliable frontier models by ingesting structured feedback data while utilizing AI-driven fraud detection that removed 4.5 million reviews in 2024 to ensure content integrity. The platform aims to guide "agentic" AI in executing real-world actions like financial transactions with cultural nuance, thereby shifting the technology from passive chat interfaces to trusted, action-oriented tools.

WEKA, Intel, Graphite, InstaDeep & AWS: Scaling Without Crashing. AI Framework for Enterprise Growth

Eduardo, Mary, Damien, Val, Karim, Murray, Fula Ousmane

The event details the industry shift from experimental AI in 2023 to the scaling of autonomous agents in 2024-2025, driven by urgent economic pressures that are forcing a 75% reduction in cached input pricing. Industry leaders outline a strategic framework prioritizing top-level governance and data transparency to mitigate security risks while navigating a market where compute cost competitiveness will determine the survival of AGI-era businesses. Specific sector applications, ranging from diagnostic health agents to AI-driven code review systems, illustrate how organizations must integrate these tools as central transformation enablers rather than isolated initiatives.

A Fireside Chat with Nicolas Dessaigne (YC-Combinator) & Jean de la Rochebrochard (Kima Ventures)

Nicolas Dessaigne, Jean de la Rochebrochard, Nicolas Tassin

Kima Ventures' Jean de la Rochebrard and Y Combinator partner Nicolas Tassin discussed their investment strategies, emphasizing that AI has shifted from a distinct category to a de facto standard comparable to cloud computing. The investors outlined distinct regional dynamics, noting that US founders leverage superior risk tolerance and speed while European entrepreneurs must overcome cultural humility to access the capital pools required for billion-dollar growth. They concluded that future market leaders will likely emerge in vertical applications within "boring" industries rather than horizontal platforms, provided founders prioritize authentic execution over hype and build defensible data moats.

Inception Fund & AI: From Inception to Exit Building AI Giants from Europe and the Nordics

Peter Sarlin, Oliver

Former professor Peter Sarlin founded the private AI lab Silo AI in 2017 and led the bootstrapped company to a $700 million exit when acquired by AMD in 2022, establishing the largest pure-play AI acquisition in Europe. Sarlin attributes this success to a contrarian philosophy that prioritized functional machine learning over hype while hiring primarily from academia, resulting in a workforce of over 220 AI scientists before the strategic sale. Beyond this specific case study, Sarlin highlights that the fragmentation of the European single market remains the primary barrier preventing regional startups from scaling into trillion-dollar enterprises, forcing founders to adopt a global-first strategy despite Europe's strengths in industrial AI applications.

Lambda, Hugging Face, SemiAnalysis: The Neural Network Is the Computer

The discussion outlines a fundamental shift from traditional programming to "neural software," where generative models act as dynamic interfaces that execute user intent through natural language rather than static code. Key developments in video, audio, and multimodal integration are enabling consistent, real-time content creation while replacing fixed graphical user interfaces with adaptive, semantic environments. This evolution promises to eliminate conventional coding barriers by 2030, though it simultaneously introduces complex challenges regarding state retention and the societal implications of AI-driven interactions.

Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, Co-Founder & CEO, Artisan: How We Generate 1000s of Leads with AI

Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, Jasper

Founded by CEO Jasper in September 2023, Artisan has rapidly scaled to over $6 million in annual recurring revenue as the second-fastest-growing AI startup globally following its Y Combinator Winter '24 graduation. The company distinguishes itself through a controversial "Stop Hiring Humans" marketing campaign that generated over one billion impressions and a proprietary AI agent named Ava, which recently delivered nearly $1 million in ARR from a $20,000 investment by autonomously managing outbound sales cycles. Looking ahead, Artisan is preparing a major Q4 product expansion while refining its strategy to leverage AI-generated content for high-volume marketing, reserving human oversight for SEO and brand-critical communications.

Alex Ratner, CEO & Co-Founder, Snorkel AI: Data Centric AI in the Agentic Era

Alex Ratner

Alex, co-founder of Snorkel.ai, argues that specialized agentic systems require robust evaluation benchmarks composed of prompt datasets, rubrics, and verifiers to serve as functional product requirements. His company provides data operations platforms to major US banks and federal agencies while demonstrating that custom-trained models using programmatic evaluators can outperform GPT-4 on complex insurance underwriting tasks. This approach establishes high-quality data and verification logic as the foundational prerequisites for optimizing Reinforcement Learning in enterprise environments.

Dr. Ilya Burkov (Nebius): Powering Next‑Gen Biotech Research with High‑Performance AI and Cloud GPUs

Dr. Ilya Burkov

Nebius, a vertically integrated Dutch cloud provider, leverages its unique pay-as-you-go infrastructure and top-tier supercomputer ranking to support biotech and healthcare firms in overcoming hardware bottlenecks. The platform enables critical advancements in drug discovery and radiology diagnostics for organizations like Converge Bio and Simulacra AI, which achieved significant accuracy gains and speedups over hyperscaler alternatives by utilizing on-demand H100 GPU capacity. Looking toward 2025, the company aims to expand its global footprint by integrating agentic AI and multi-omics data processing to address workforce shortages and accelerate time-to-market for new treatments.

Shaun O’Meara, CTO @ Mirantis: All Infrastructure is AI Infrastructure

Shaun O’Meara

Addressing critical constraints such as GPU scarcity and the need for unified management of hybrid AI and legacy workloads, Mirantis launched Cordant as an open-source platform designed to deliver composable, multi-cloud infrastructure. The solution utilizes a declarative, pattern-based approach to enable performance contracting and seamless resource orchestration across edge, on-prem, and bare-metal environments. By overlaying open-source management on strategic vendor hardware, the platform aims to eliminate single-vendor lock-in while providing an "AI Factory" reference architecture for accelerated deployment.

OVH Cloud, ClickHouse, Neon, Aiven, Airbyte & Commit: Open Software Infrastructure 2.0

Abel, German, Oskari, Heike, Michel, Alexei, Francois Beaufort

Executives from Aiven, Neon, Airbyte, ClickHouse, and OVHcloud converged to discuss how open-source data platforms are securing $10 billion in combined valuations while addressing enterprise needs for data sovereignty and interoperability. The panel detailed how the AI boom is driving a shift from human-led development to agentic provisioning, creating demand for storage-centric architectures that support short-lived, unstructured data workloads. Looking ahead, industry leaders predict a five-year trajectory where hundreds of millions of citizen developers leverage commoditized AI to compress development cycles, necessitating hybrid infrastructure strategies that balance local model execution with scalable cloud data management.

Yuri Frayman, Co-Founder & CEO, Cast AI: Robots Will Feed the World… If We Build the Rails

Yuri Frayman

SoftBank Vision Fund portfolio companies are constructing the physical infrastructure necessary to transition AI from knowledge work into the global economy, aiming to replicate the prosperity seen with previous industrial revolutions. While addressing critical constraints in energy and compute, these initiatives prioritize workforce re-education and decentralized, open-source architectures to navigate regulatory fragmentation and ensure fair access against well-funded commercial labs. The deployment of large-scale, cloud-agnostic inference networks over the next decade will ultimately determine which entities successfully harness this AI abundance.

Alix, SAP, Daytona, Feedly, Prosus & Handelsblatt: The Future Agentic AI & Autonomous Workflows

Alix, Edwin Kodabachan, Paul Van der Boor, Alexander Maisor, Emmanuel Casimates, Ivan Bourazin

Experts at a recent industry gathering defined Agentic AI as a shift from simple request-response models to autonomous systems capable of multi-step planning, emphasizing that security and governance remain critical barriers requiring strict human oversight. SAP and other leaders proposed frameworks like "agentic quality controls" and locally hosted environments to manage agent identities and comply with regulations, while anticipating a workforce evolution where humans supervise "digital teammates" rather than performing manual tasks. Despite concerns over the hype cycle, participants agreed that organizations with mature data and processes will soon leverage these tools to exponentially increase productivity, provided they implement robust guardrails to direct this technological capability toward tangible business value.

A fireside Chat with Paddy Srinivasan, CEO of DigitalOcean ft. Semafor

Paddy Srinivasan, Patti, Reid

DigitalOcean CEO Patti and Reid Hoffman discuss the platform's role in serving 3 million developers by providing specialized AI infrastructure for both native startups and traditional firms integrating large language models. The conversation highlights critical global bottlenecks, including power constraints necessitating nuclear energy and a talent war driving new hiring protocols for AI automation engineers. Hoffmann forecasts a massive economic expansion where AI increases the technology sector's share of global GDP to 25% within a decade, alongside a predicted dispersion of value beyond current market leaders.