Latest Interviews

Benoit Dageville, Snowflake ｜ RAISE Summit 2025

Benoit Dageville, John Furrier

Snowflake has advanced its platform by establishing unstructured data as a first-class citizen through new AI SQL capabilities and the official launch of Semantic Views, which embed business logic to ensure AI query accuracy exceeds 95%. This evolution supports a three-phase integration of generative AI, ranging from data ingestion and natural language interaction to a future agentic layer that democratizes access for non-technical users while maintaining strict governance via a dual proprietary and open-source cataloging strategy. By distinguishing itself through a dedicated semantic layer and objective performance benchmarks, the company positions this shift as a foundational revolution that simplifies complex data relationships for enterprises without compromising security or cost efficiency.

Roman Chernin, Nebius ｜ Raise Summit 2025

Roman Chernin, John Furrier, Robin Sheeran

Nebius, a publicly traded full-stack AI cloud provider founded one year ago, has expanded its infrastructure to seven global locations and targets operating tens of thousands of GPUs by year-end. The company differentiates itself through proprietary liquid-cooled engineering and a pay-per-consumption model that accommodates diverse workloads ranging from real-time inference to massive training clusters. Nebius is pursuing a tenfold revenue growth to one billion Russian Rubles while pivoting its customer base toward established enterprises in life sciences and FinTech to support the transition to "AI factories."

Rajiv Ramaswami, Nutanix ｜ RAISE Summit 2025

Rajiv Ramaswami, John Furrier

At the RAISE Summit 2025 in Paris, Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswamy unveiled a strategic partnership with NVIDIA to deliver a fully integrated enterprise AI infrastructure stack designed to support generative AI inference for the 28,000 companies Nutanix currently serves. This solution combines Nutanix's simplified base with NVIDIA's microservices and reference architectures to enable secure, turnkey deployment of AI workloads across data centers, edge locations, and public clouds. By abstracting hardware and containerization complexity, the collaboration targets the "vast majority" of enterprises that will consume rather than train models, facilitating immediate use cases like document summarization and automated translation while supporting future multi-agent workflows.

Naveen Rao, Databricks ｜ RAISE Summit 2025

Naveen Rao, John Furrier

At the RAID Summit in Paris, Databricks executives outlined a strategic pivot from raw data analytics to treating information as proprietary ingredients for generating competitive AI assets. Jonathan Frankel championed a methodological shift that inverts traditional machine learning by using observational data to validate pre-defined world models, while introducing automated evaluation frameworks to replace the "magic thinking" of earlier generative AI trends. Concurrently, the platform's integration of "Genie" enables natural language querying to dynamically generate SQL and visualizations, signaling a broader industry transition where business logic becomes deeply embedded within automated data infrastructure.

Paul Bloch, DDN ｜ RAISE Summit 2025

Paul Bloch, John Furrier

DDN, a self-funded startup transitioning from high-performance computing to AI infrastructure, has solidified its position as a critical partner for NVIDIA and XAI by deploying storage solutions capable of scaling from single GPUs to over one million. The company recently launched its Infinia data ocean platform to support massive foundation model training and low-latency inference, capitalizing on the emerging sovereign AI trend where nations integrate government and infrastructure into unified national data platforms. Despite intense market competition, DDN leverages its deep Caltech R&D roots and founder-led culture to retain customers who require the extreme scale and performance necessary for next-generation AI workloads.

Has science finally cracked the secret to invisibility?

Alok Jha, Professor Sir John Pendry, John Pendry

Physics professor John Pendry introduced metamaterials as geometrically engineered structures capable of manipulating light paths to achieve the effects described in his "invisibility cloak" concept. This theoretical framework, initially named by Pendry's wife to aid a 2005 DARPA presentation, faced early skepticism before David Smith's team at Duke University successfully constructed a functional prototype for radar waves. The field has since evolved from resolving debates over negative refraction to experimental recreations of conditions existing near black holes.

This Startup Is Trying To Delete 29% Of All CO2 Emissions

Paul Gross, Gustaf Alströmer

Remora has launched a solid-pellet based carbon capture system that reduces CO2 emissions by up to 90% in hard-to-electrify diesel trucks and freight trains, converting the captured gas into beverage-grade CO2 for commercial reuse. Backed by $117 million in venture capital, the Detroit-based company is vertically integrating its manufacturing to deploy modular retrofits to major partners like Ryder and Union Pacific while testing the technology on a repurposed locomotive. Co-founders Paul Gross and Christina Reynolds aim to scale this point-source solution to capture one billion tons of carbon annually by overcoming the logistical challenges of retrofitting diverse vehicle fleets.

The Future of Software Engineering: Cognition’s Russell Kaplan

Russell Kaplan, Marco Argenti

Cognition, founded by former Olympiad medalists and now valued at $4 billion, is advancing software engineering by deploying Devin, an autonomous AI agent capable of executing end-to-end development tasks. The company differentiates itself through a dual-product strategy combining Devin for independent execution with the recently acquired Windsurf IDE for human-in-the-loop collaboration, targeting enterprise integration into proprietary codebases. While AI capabilities in coding are projected to double every seven months, Cognition aims to elevate Devin to senior engineer status within a year, though future growth is anticipated to be constrained by energy availability rather than data scarcity.

Anthropic: The Great Equaliser: How Agentic AI Is Powering Europe’s Next Generation of Startups

Guillaume, Charlie

Guillaume, Head of Anthropic for EMEA, discusses the strategic deployment of the Cloud4 coding model which self-wrote 90% of its own code to power a growing ecosystem of European startups like Dust and Lovable. The conversation highlights how major enterprises including BMW and Novo Nordisk are utilizing these models as virtual collaborators to accelerate R&D and customer service, while emphasizing Anthropic's strict data sovereignty and safety policies to address European regulatory concerns. Amidst this expansion, the company aims to hire over 100 new staff members across its London, Dublin, and Zurich offices to support the region's robust AI funding environment and mitigate local talent gaps.

NextSilicon & More Than Moore. The Silicon Revolution: Why the Future of Hardware is Software

Next Silicon introduces a reconfigurable compute platform that utilizes a smart runtime algorithm to dynamically adjust chip hardware within 20 nanoseconds for CPU, GPU, and AI workloads without requiring code rewrites. This "software-aware hardware" targets the most computationally intensive code segments to deliver projected performance speedups of 4x to 10x while consuming only a quarter of the energy used by static ASICs. By supporting established languages and frameworks like CUDA and PyTorch, the system aims to decouple hardware efficiency from the need to pre-anticipate future algorithmic shifts.

A Chat with AI21 Labs: Building Custom AI Systems That Actually Work From Hype to Business Impact

Yuval, Asaf

AI21, a foundational LLM builder, highlights the persistent gap between individual AI experimentation and institutional production adoption, driven by "ChatGPT Syndrome" and fear of missing out. The company identifies a critical "underground movement" where employees innovate silently due to a lack of official guidelines, resulting in disjointed pilots and missed collective wisdom. To escape this paralysis, successful deployment requires multidisciplinary teams to map granular workflows and align stakeholders on clear KPIs, transforming informal usage into a structured, high-value organizational framework.

Roshn Group & Enhance Ventures: AI Meets Real Estate: Hype or Real Value

Robert, Yazeed Al-Ghamdi, Aristide, Maria Paula

Saudi Arabia's Roshan giga-project, mandated to deliver 400,000 housing units under Vision 2030, is leveraging Google Cloud AI and a proprietary digital sales platform to generate over 6 billion SAR in revenue while reducing land selection time by 40%. This hybrid transaction model, which integrates global KYC protocols and visualizes amenities for remote buyers, was further accelerated by the region's largest PropTech hackathon that sourced external solutions for operational bottlenecks. Driven by a young demographic and supported by upcoming infrastructure projects, the organization plans to launch a corporate venture capital arm and export its technology stack to international markets within the decade.

Serge Palaric, NVIDIA & Antoine Vaissié, Google Cloud: Better together

Serge Palaric, Antoine Vaissié, Serge Lachapelle

Google Cloud and NVIDIA have deepened their strategic partnership to deploy enterprise-scale AI, becoming the first provider to offer Blackwell architecture GPUs including the B200, GB200, and G4 instances for immediate production use. This collaboration integrates NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and NIM inference microservices with Google's infrastructure to support evolving post-training and agentic AI workloads across healthcare, finance, and industrial sectors. By combining these technologies with confidential computing options and joint engineering efforts, the alliance enables organizations to accelerate secure AI deployment while reducing operational risks and addressing specific industry workflows.

A Fireside Chat with Himanshu Tyagi, CEO & Co-Founder of Sentient Foundation ft. FINOS

Himanshu Tyagi, Imancho Tiagi

Co-founded by academic Iman Shutyagi, the Sentient Foundation advocates for a blockchain-enabled "creator economy" that allows open-source AI contributors to tokenize and monetize high-value assets like data and hyperparameters. The organization promotes open auditing and red teaming as primary safety mechanisms while predicting that global AI advancement will depend on a decentralized baseline rather than closed models or rigid regulatory thresholds. By targeting digital-native developers and utilizing decentralized compute, the initiative aims to sustain a competitive, open-source ecosystem where software contributions yield long-term financial value alongside technological progress.

A Keynote with Richard Rizk, & IRobert Rizk, BLACKBOX.AI

Richard Rizk, IRobert Rizk

Co-founded by Robert and Richard Co, Blackbox has scaled its autonomous coding agent platform to over 20 million users, securing the top rank among code-related AI startups on Andreessen Horowitz's 2024 adoption list. The system distinguishes itself through features like Figma-to-code conversion, voice-enabled remote execution, and a "Robocoder" module that resolves GitHub issues asynchronously within isolated secure environments. While integrating with over 35 IDEs and offering unified model access, the company emphasizes a human-in-the-loop philosophy to augment developer productivity rather than replace engineers.