Latest Interviews
Showing 16–30 of 88 interview transcripts.
Clear all filters- RAISE Summit18 min
High Performance Compute: Building the Cloud for AI Teams | Erik Bernhardsson | RAISE Summit 2026
Erik Bernhardsson, Hanel Baveja, Eric, Stephanie Wong, Jose Quinonez
Founded by former Spotify executive Eric in the wake of a pandemic sabbatical, Modal addresses the AI infrastructure gap by rebuilding cloud systems from scratch to manage over 20,000 GPUs without relying on Kubernetes or Docker. The company’s usage-based model currently derives roughly 67% of revenue from LLM inference while introducing proprietary tools like AutoEndpoints to automate deployment and enable dynamic performance optimization. Facing a renewed global GPU shortage, Modal plans to expand its network of cloud partnerships and build proprietary data centers to support the industry's shift toward open-source model fine-tuning and real-time audio-video processing.
- RAISE Summit18 min
Fireside Chat with Anastasis Germanidis, Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Runway | RAISE Summit 2026
Anastasis Germanidis, Grace Isford
Founded in 2019, Runway is pivoting from generative video leadership to creating "world models" that simulate physical physics and 3D consistency through pixel prediction rather than explicit architectural rules. This technical approach enables efficient real-time inference for robotics and gaming, allowing the company to license policy models to clients while achieving superior performance with significantly less compute than larger competitors. Driven by founder Anastasis's philosophy of intentional growth, the firm recently expanded its global headcount to nearly 200 and opened a Paris office to deepen its research focus on physical AI and interactive storytelling.
- RAISE Summit20 min
AI for Work, and Security for AI | ServiceNow | RAISE Summit 2026
Amit Zavery, Yevgeny Dibrov, Jennifer Johnson
As enterprise AI shifts from passive tools to autonomous agents projected to outnumber human assets tenfold, organizations face critical risks of uncontrolled data access and rapid cyber exploitation without centralized governance. To counteract these threats, ServiceNow has integrated Vesa's technology to launch an AI Control Tower, enabling CIOs and CISOs to discover, monitor, and secure non-human identities across all platform integrations. This strategic shift transforms security from reactive to proactive, allowing enterprises to realize billions in efficiency savings while preventing catastrophic breaches in high-stakes environments like retail and supply chain management.
- RAISE Summit17 min
Vibe Coding for the Next Billion | Michele Catasta, Replit | RAISE Summit 2026
Replit President Michele Zanini outlined the company's trajectory toward $1 billion in annual revenue by deploying agentic workflows that target over 60 million users and non-technical citizen developers. The platform utilizes a heterogeneous model strategy combining open-weight and proprietary systems to enable autonomous agents that handle end-to-end business goals without manual UI interaction. This approach forecasts a 2025 workforce shift where employees evolve into agent managers, prioritizing strategic oversight over repetitive execution to drive exponential productivity gains.
- RAISE Summit18 min
Fast by Design: The Infrastructure Powering the Agentic Era | Rodrigo Liang | RAISE Summit 2026
Rodrigo Liang, Monti Saroya, Dylan Patel
SambaNova has secured the first close of a $1 billion funding round at an $11 billion valuation, establishing itself as JP Morgan's preferred inference provider for multi-trillion parameter models. The company differentiates its heterogeneous architecture by delivering up to 10x faster decode performance in full precision, avoiding the accuracy trade-offs of quantization while integrating with NVIDIA and Intel infrastructure. By leveraging a distribution network of 94 subsidiaries, SambaNova targets enterprise adoption through hybrid air-gapped and cloud solutions that prioritize data sovereignty and model choice over direct competition with general intelligence labs.
- RAISE Summit19 min
Inference's Scaling Era | Tuhin Srivastava, Baseten & Corinne Riley, Greylock | RAISE Summit 2026
Tuhin Srivastava, Corinne Riley
Base10 CEO Thuy Hinh projects that AI inference will consume $2.5 trillion of the estimated $5 trillion global AI spend by 2030, prompting the company to deploy an inference cloud with clusters across 90 regions to lower customer infrastructure costs. Driven by open-source models closing the performance gap with frontier closed-source alternatives in just three months, enterprises are increasingly shifting spend to custom models to reduce costs by 70% and retain data sovereignty. Hinh predicts that within 12 to 18 months, a Fortune 500 company will achieve 90% open-source adoption as the market moves toward verticalized cloud solutions capable of supporting high-volume tasks like code generation and biological compound synthesis.
- RAISE Summit18 min
AI Sticker Shock: Open Source as the Answer to Broken Tokenomics | Vipul Ved Prakash | RAISE 2026
TogetherAI, led by Co-founder Vinod Khosla, recently achieved a $8.3 billion valuation after scaling inference volume to 400 trillion tokens monthly while expanding its user base from $100 million to over $1 billion in annual revenue. The company is driving a strategic pivot toward open-source models to address economic pressures and geopolitical sovereignty concerns, countering the dominance of closed ecosystems like Anthropic and OpenAI by offering data residency on U.S. and European infrastructure. To overcome global compute constraints, TogetherAI is executing a sovereign infrastructure strategy that partners with nations facing data center moratoriums, aiming to prevent industrial capture and establish a collaborative commons for future AI development.
- RAISE Summit18 min
How Data Became the Most Indispensable Resource for AI | Or Lenchner, Bright Data | RAISE 2026
Bright Data re-architected its infrastructure to serve exploding demand for visual data in physical AI and robotics, successfully defending its operational model against major legal challenges involving Meta and X. The privately held company, which achieved a $300 million revenue run rate without external funding, distinguishes its Western outsourcing strategy from Chinese competitors' focus on internal data stack development. While navigating potential market corrections, Bright Data maintains a long-term outlook on the necessity of its data ecosystem for global AI training and continues to prioritize hyper-growth over an imminent IPO.
- RAISE Summit17 min
Fireside Chat with Sid Sheth, Founder & CEO of d-Matrix | RAISE Summit 2026
D-Matrix, founded in 2019, has transitioned its SRAM-based Corsair accelerator into mass production while partnering with NVIDIA to deploy heterogeneous compute solutions for the inference-focused agentic era. Moving beyond current SRAM limitations, the company is developing a 3D stacked In-Memory Compute architecture scheduled for a 2027 tape-out, which aims to simultaneously optimize latency and throughput for high-interactivity workloads. This strategic trajectory envisions a market where specialized inference accelerators coexist with HBM-based GPUs, handling distinct layers of the AI pipeline from heavy pre-fill computations to memory-intensive decoding.
- RAISE Summit18 min
Fireside Chat with Philip Johnston, Starcloud & Chetan Puttagunta, Benchmark | RAISE Summit 2026
Philip Johnston, Chetan Puttagunta
StarCloud is a Seattle-based company that has successfully launched StarCloud 1, proving that terrestrial-grade GPUs can perform high-power training and inference in space while overcoming thermal and radiation challenges. The firm plans to rapidly scale its operations through partnerships with SpaceX and other launch providers, targeting a gigawatt-scale constellation of 88,000 satellites by late 2028 to provide near-instant data processing for government, telecommunications, and lunar exploration clients. With a founding team split between aerospace and cloud engineering giants, StarCloud aims to bypass terrestrial energy permitting delays by establishing a fully vertical infrastructure capable of delivering up to 10 terawatts of compute capacity.
- RAISE Summit20 min
Beyond the Helpdesk: AI Turning IT Into a Strategic Function | Serval | RAISE Summit 2026
Serval is an AI-native platform that completely rebuilds IT Service Management infrastructure to replace legacy systems like ServiceNow by integrating dual-agent architecture for full automation of enterprise workflows. Co-founded by Jake, the company has driven an 80% automation rate for major clients such as SeatGeek and Ramp, enabling thousands of IT staff to shift from support roles to building cross-functional solutions in marketing, legal, and HR. By treating AI as a core foundation rather than an add-on layer, Serval allows enterprises to eliminate support queues and rapidly reinvent their operational roadmaps every six months.
- RAISE Summit19 min
The Infrastructure Powering Live AI | Decart x Bloomberg | RAISE Summit 2026
CART, a 100-person AI lab, leverages its proprietary DOS stack to generate world-class real-time video models capable of powering autonomous robots and live virtual try-ons for e-commerce partners like Amazon. The company's "Lucy" interface enables photorealistic interactions in live streams and shopping feeds, reportedly tripling sales volumes while streamers achieve seven-fold engagement increases. With a roadmap projecting significant breakthroughs in physical AI and software engineering within 18 to 24 months, CART deploys forward-deployed teams to customize these high-performance solutions for specific enterprise KPIs.
- RAISE Summit20 min
Scaling Taste, Craft & Quality in the AI Era | Figma x Mistral | RAISE Summit 2026
At Figma Config 2024, Chief Design Officer Loredana Cosentino and CEO Dylan Field addressed an audience of over 10,000 to unveil AI-driven tools like Figma Agents while redefining the Chief Design Officer role as a bridge between business value and user experience. The event highlighted a critical industry shift where AI lowers barriers to entry for non-specialists yet fails to replicate human creative excellence, necessitating a collaborative convergence of designers and developers around shared prototyping standards. Leaders emphasized that while AI accelerates baseline output, achieving world-class innovation requires maintaining distinct human judgment to avoid cultural stagnation and push beyond historical data constraints.
- RAISE Summit19 min
How Higgsfield Went From 0 to $500M Run Rate in 14 Months | Alex Mashrabov | RAISE Summit 2026
Alex Mashrabov, Antoine Blondeau
Alex, a former competitive programming prodigy and ex-Head of AI at Snapchat, founded Hicksfield in October 2023 to address the retention gaps of mobile-first AI tools by pivoting to an enterprise-focused model. The company recently exceeded a $500 million annual run rate within 15 months through its proprietary "Cinema Studio" platform, which serves creative agencies with specialized product photography models and rapid release cycles. Operating with a hybrid US and Kazakhstan talent structure, Hicksfield is currently driving market adoption by shifting the AI narrative from job replacement to direct revenue growth for small and mid-market brands.
- RAISE Summit17 min
Your Agent Can't Fix What It Can't See | Milin Desai, Sentry | RAISE Summit 2026
Milin Desai, Karim Jalbout, Milo, Amil
Sentry leverages its global platform to serve over 200,000 software teams in addressing the exponential rise in coding complexity driven by AI agents and non-technical developers. The company champions a "self-healing" software paradigm where AI autonomously resolves 30% to 40% of production issues while managing costs through deterministic automation loops rather than raw token usage. This model-agnostic approach shifts the developer role from manual coding to system design, aiming to democratize rapid error resolution for organizations ranging from startups to billion-user enterprises.