Latest Interviews
Showing 1–15 of 51 transcripts.
Clear all filters- RAISE Summit20 min
Indexing Humanity: A Fireside With the Simulation Company | Simile | RAISE Summit 2026
Joon Sung Park, Sahir Azam, Jun
Simile, founded by former Stanford researchers including CEO Jun, has launched a foundational model of human behavior that replicates individual subpopulations with 85% accuracy for enterprise clients like CVS and Fortune 500 companies. Leveraging strategic partnerships with Gallup and Dynata to access a 20-million-person data panel, the company differentiates itself by prioritizing human imperfections and biases over pure algorithmic efficiency to augment corporate decision-making in market research and product development. Supported by Index Ventures, Simile operates on a four-stage simulation hierarchy ranging from individual dynamic testing to society-wide forecasting, while adhering to strict ethical principles regarding data consent and transparency.
- RAISE Summit22 min
Inception Fund & AI: From Inception to Exit Building AI Giants from Europe and the Nordics
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.
- RAISE Summit23 min
Alex Ratner, CEO & Co-Founder, Snorkel AI: Data Centric AI in the Agentic Era
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.
- RAISE Summit37 min
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.
- RAISE Summit40 min
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.
- RAISE Summit23 min
Oege De Moor (XBOW) & Apoorv Agrawal (Altimeter): Hackers with GPUs Offensive Security in the AI Era
Oege De Moor, Apoorv Agrawal, Uhey Dhimur
Altimeter Capital-backed startup Expo has deployed an autonomous AI agent that ranks as the world's top ethical hacker, identifying over 1,200 vulnerabilities including critical zero-days in enterprise giants like Palo Alto Networks and Salesforce within a single week. This superhuman capability forces a strategic industry shift toward AI-driven defense to combat a "skill shortage" in malicious actors that has enabled nation-states to automate attacks with unprecedented speed. While the market anticipates a major cyber incident within twelve months due to rising AI-generated code risks, human security roles are expected to evolve from technical execution to the strategic orchestration of these autonomous systems.
- RAISE Summit37 min
Fractile AI, Rogo, Scribble VC, San Francisco Compute: The AI Trillion-Dollar Opportunity
Eric Manisse, Elizabeth Weill, Walter Goodwin, John Willett
San Francisco Compute CEO Eric Manisse, Scribble Ventures' Elizabeth Weill, and founders Walter Goodwin and John Willett convened to analyze strategies for scaling AI infrastructure, hardware, and enterprise solutions amidst rapid technological evolution. The panel detailed critical operational frameworks, including balancing hardware development timelines with software agility, mitigating hallucination risks in financial applications, and proactively shaping export control regulations rather than merely complying with them. Experts concluded that long-term success in this sector relies on specialized human expertise for deep tech, the creation of durable data moats, and a shift toward treating global compute as a utility to drive the next industrial revolution.
- RAISE Summit39 min
Data Overload into Actionable Gold: AI’s Rescue Mission for Enterprises Tackling Unstructured Data
Nassime Reyholt, Victoria, Samuel Cohen, Harry Folliter, Robert, Alonzo Garcia
Representatives from Doctolib, Databricks, Alorica, Fergen, and Blackbox AI convened to discuss the critical transition from structured legacy systems to leveraging unstructured data for enterprise decision-making. The panel emphasized that successful AI deployment requires strict governance, real-time evaluation frameworks, and the use of synthetic data to ensure agents can reliably execute tasks without the 80% pilot failure rate common in the industry. By prioritizing data intelligence over model architecture, these leaders outlined a roadmap for moving from experimental playground agents to autonomous systems that self-correct in live production environments.
- RAISE Summit21 min
Fireside Chat with George Robson, Partner @ Sequoia & Felix Blossier, Co-Founder & COO @ Pennylane
Penny Lane, founded by seven entrepreneurs after the Price Match acquisition, transitioned from a service-led hybrid model to a pure software platform designed to empower SMB accountants through AI-driven co-pilot tools rather than automation. The company navigates the complex regulatory landscapes of Continental Europe, particularly France and Germany, by leveraging a business rule management system that allows non-engineers to manage compliance updates without code changes. With a recruitment strategy prioritizing curiosity and domain expertise over experience, Penny Lane aims to scale its all-in-one bookkeeping and tax solution across Europe despite the severe scarcity of local accounting talent.
- RAISE Summit31 min
Clarifai, Oracle, TensorWave, Cherry & Vaire: Sovereign AI in a Borderless Tech World
Nadia, Rodolfo, Don Barnetson, Peter Tomasik, Hakim Lumi, Matt Zehler
Panelists including Peter Tomasik, Hakim Lumi, and Don Barnetson established that physical infrastructure and talent are the primary prerequisites for Sovereign AI, warning that Europe faces a competitive deficit while the Middle East leverages energy wealth to emerge as a third global contender. The discourse highlighted significant risks regarding stranded hardware assets due to rapid obsolescence and emphasized that current enterprise adoption remains driven by pragmatic cost and performance rather than theoretical sovereignty. Strategic recommendations from the session urge diverse silicon sourcing, cohesive national policy frameworks, and a shift toward "security by design" to address the complex vulnerabilities inherent in large language model deployment.
- RAISE Summit40 min
Antoine Bordes (Helsing) & Gaël Varoquaux (INRIA): Where Public Research Meets Innovation
Antoine Bordes, Gaël Varoquaux, Rob, Isabelle Riel, Joëlle Barral
At the expanded RAISE conference, experts from institutions including INRIA, Google DeepMind, and Helsing discussed the critical friction between public research and private innovation in the European AI ecosystem. Panelists outlined a 2035 vision where generative AI transforms healthcare and defense through rapid commercialization, while warning that bureaucratic bottlenecks and a "one-way door" for talent are stifling Europe's competitive growth. The discussion emphasized a need to shift from funding isolated technologies to building scalable products that bridge the gap between foundational academic discovery and urgent market application.
- RAISE Summit34 min
Ori, PolyAI, Cresta, Writer & Fireworks AI: Is Enterprise Defensibility Possible in an AI's World?
Mike Butcher, May Habib, Russell Banzon, Nicola, Lynn, Amalia, Mahdi
Industry leaders convened to declare that traditional SaaS and seat-based pricing models are collapsing as enterprises pivot to agentic AI, where value is derived from direct outcomes and autonomous revenue generation rather than software access. The consensus emphasizes that architectural advantages are temporary, with true defensibility emerging only through proprietary data flywheels and comprehensive organizational adoption strategies that integrate AI into core workflows. Looking toward 2025, the panel predicts a surge in production-level deployments driven by a tenfold reduction in infrastructure costs, forcing companies to prioritize offensive scaling over defensive postures to survive rapid market disruption.
- RAISE Summit29 min
Anjney Midha of a16z: Algorithmic Independence The Next Frontier in National Infrastructure
The event defines Sovereign AI as a four-tiered strategy for achieving technical and cultural independence, utilizing methods like mid-training to correct deep-seated biases rather than simple fine-tuning. As nations transition from closed-source prototypes to open-source models, a geopolitical divide is emerging where "hypercenters" like the US and China face competition from Europe's "Mistral Compute" initiative while non-hypercent nations adopt joint-venture models to retain value. The discussion concludes with predictions that general-purpose robotics and universal computer use will mature within two years, leveraging Europe's specific strengths in computer vision to secure its strategic position in the global AI landscape.
- RAISE Summit35 min
AI Visionaries Panel: Collaboration is All You Need! Open Source as AI's Great Accelerator
Olivier, Ankit, Matt, Mitchell, Jim, Jonathan
Leaders from Nvidia, Red Hat, Mozilla, and the Linux Foundation convened to analyze the symbiotic relationship between AI-driven investment strategies and the accelerating open-source ecosystem. The panel emphasized that while artificial intelligence boosts code velocity, the primary value in commercial open source now lies in community coordination and neutral standards that prevent market fragmentation. Key outcomes included the identification of a "reverse venture capital" approach for selecting durable projects and a consensus that human oversight remains critical for navigating the legal and architectural challenges of AGI development.
- RAISE Summit34 min
Bruno Gagliardo, Global Head of Data & AI @ Sanofi : Molecule to Market, Driving AI Transformation
Bruno Gagliardo, Larry Orimoloe
Sanofi CEO Bruno Gagliardo unveiled a five-year strategy to transform the pharmaceutical giant into a "pharma tech" leader by migrating 85,000 employees to a cloud-based data mesh architecture powered by large-scale AI. The initiative integrates the RAISE governance framework and a $100 million impact barrier to mitigate hallucination risks while accelerating drug discovery and regulatory submissions from 19 weeks down to five. This cultural shift prioritizes AI augmentation over replacement, utilizing agentic systems and a hybrid build-or-buy approach to deliver substantial efficiency gains across research, manufacturing, and commercial operations.