Latest Interviews
Showing 1–15 of 141 transcripts.
Clear all filters- RAISE Summit19 min
Fireside Chat with Mark Moffat, CEO of IFS | RAISE Summit 2026
IFS, under the leadership of CEO Mark Moffat, distinguishes itself in capital-intensive sectors like utilities and aerospace by deploying "forward-deployed engineering" to solve complex physical value chain challenges rather than merely offering software features. This approach has yielded a 96% gross retention rate and a notable 38% reduction in downtime for clients such as Grant Distillery, while simultaneously underpinning 100% of US commercial aviation flights through a hybrid model of probabilistic optimization and deterministic safety. To ensure resilience against geopolitical shifts, the company further secures its position with a sovereign AI architecture that leverages edge-deployed, agnostic models across its global supply chain.
- RAISE Summit19 min
Building Africa's AI Factory: Cassava, Rafay and Sovereign AI | RAISE Summit 2026
Cassava Technologies, a digital solution provider serving over 40 countries, has secured direct investment from NVIDIA and Google to deploy a GPU-rich compute infrastructure across Africa, Latin America, and India. The company distinguishes itself through a custom orchestration layer that democratizes access to AI for students and startups, enabling the development of localized language models and critical sector applications in agriculture and healthcare. With a strategic focus on expanding dark fiber connectivity and green energy integration, Cassava aims to drive economic growth and job creation in emerging markets over the next five years.
- RAISE Summit18 min
Zero Flaps, Zero Excuses: Network Reliability at AI Scale | Credo x TensorWave | RAISE 2026
Credo SVP Phil Kuhman and Tensorwave Co-founder Jeff Tatarchuk discussed the critical role of high-reliability networking in scaling AMD-exclusive GPU clusters, citing a deployment of 8,192 MI325 GPUs supported by Tensorwave's two-gigawatt North American infrastructure. The dialogue highlighted Credo's Zero-Flap transceiver technology, which utilizes rigorous thermal hardening and in-band telemetry to reduce deployment cycles from six weeks to one and eliminate the costly downtime caused by link failures in hyperscale environments like Oracle's. By driving the industry toward a standardized "Purple Cables" architecture that combines copper for short-range reliability with advanced optics for long-haul connectivity, the companies aim to transform networking from a bottleneck into a table-stakes foundation for rapid AI infrastructure revenue.
- RAISE Summit19 min
Inside the AI Inference Cluster: Measuring What Matters | Mansour Karam, Aria Networks | RAISE 2026
The AI infrastructure sector is pivoting from homogeneous general-purpose systems to specialized architectures that optimize distinct model training and serving economics, with high-throughput inference offering potential cost savings of up to 100x. This shift demands deep networking solutions capable of managing dynamic, unpredictable traffic patterns and microsecond-scale latency requirements for complex agent workflows. Leading this transition, ARIA proposes a multi-layered AI agent architecture that integrates full-stack telemetry to dynamically coordinate hardware, software, and network operations across immediate physical reactions and long-term strategic planning.
- RAISE Summit18 min
Where We're Going We Don't Need Keyboards, Just Voice | Neil Zeghidour, Gradium | RAISE 2026
Gradium, a spin-off of the frontier research lab Qtize, is commercializing full-duplex voice AI models like "Moshi" to replace traditional keyboard interfaces with natural, real-time human-machine interaction. By utilizing single audio-to-audio architectures that eliminate turn-taking latency, the Paris-based company enables seamless agentic tasks ranging from customer support to industrial robotics in noisy environments. With recent funding to expand into San Francisco and open-source model access, Gradium aims to establish voice as the primary operating system for always-on, asynchronous agent networks.
- RAISE Summit19 min
What's New for Startups with Google DeepMind? | Omar Sanseviero | RAISE Summit 2026
Omar Sanseviero of Google DeepMind outlined the strategic expansion of the Gemini ecosystem, highlighting the release of Gemini 3.5 Flash, the imminent Gemini 2.5 Pro, and advanced GenMedia models like NanoBanana 2 Lite for rapid image generation. The presentation detailed critical infrastructure updates including the Gemma 4 open model family, which achieved over 250 million downloads on consumer hardware, alongside new real-time APIs for low-latency voice translation and live visual analysis. These advancements collectively aim to accelerate the transition from prompt to production by empowering developers to build complex agentic workflows and specialized applications in sectors ranging from robotics to environmental monitoring.
- RAISE Summit18 min
Operating AI Infrastructure at Multi-Model, Multi-Cloud Scale | RAISE Summit 2026
Lukas Gentele, Bola Malek, Nikita Vdovushkin
Nebius and Base10 are redefining the AI infrastructure landscape by pivoting from raw compute provision to managed "Token Factory" services that prioritize inference efficiency and multi-cloud orchestration across dozens of providers. While Base10 aggregates demand across 90+ regions to ensure redundancy and data sovereignty, Nebius leverages vertical hardware integration to optimize cost-to-performance ratios, together supporting a market shift toward hybrid open-source and proprietary model strategies. This collaboration and competitive tension address the growing enterprise demand for transparent, token-based pricing and localized hosting solutions that balance geopolitical constraints with the need for scalable, specialized AI deployment.
- RAISE Summit20 min
Running Secure Agents on Multi-Tenant Sovereign AI Infrastructure | Protopia AI x HPE | RAISE 2026
Eiman Ebrahimi, María Ridruejo, Maria Redrojo, Imon Ibrahini
Protopia AI and HPE AI Services have introduced the Stained Glass Transform, a privacy-preserving technology that converts sensitive data into randomized, non-reversible representations before they enter multi-tenant AI factories. This innovation, integrated through the SafeClaw subagent architecture, enables agentic workflows to run on shared infrastructure without compromising security or suffering the GPU underutilization associated with traditional hardware isolation. Consequently, sovereign providers and neoclouds can unlock significant revenue by processing high-volume sensitive workloads with near-baseline latency, addressing the critical gap between data ownership and economic efficiency in modern AI deployment.
- RAISE Summit20 min
Benchmarks vs. Reality: Lessons from 750 Trillion Tokens | Chris Clark, OpenRouter | RAISE 2026
OpenRouter leverages empirical usage data from over 80 cloud providers to highlight a critical gap between published AI pricing and real-world inference costs, driven by variable caching efficiencies and tool call reliability. The analysis reveals that while open-weight Chinese models currently lag US frontier capabilities by four to six months, successful adoption depends less on raw intelligence rankings than on specific optimization for agentic workflows and stable inference. Consequently, industry leaders are advised to prioritize production-based validation over theoretical benchmarks to navigate shifting cost structures where inference expenses are rising to rival headcount as a primary operating burden.
- RAISE Summit17 min
Headline AI Europe 100: 2026 Megatrends & Next Winners | Headline | RAISE Summit 2026
Astrid Moullé-Berteaux, Jonathan Userovici, John
Headline Ventures has introduced a new sector-agnostic classification framework that categorizes AI startups into six distinct "breeds" based on economic models rather than traditional industry verticals. Simultaneously, the firm announced the second edition of the "AI Europe 100" list, highlighting 100 European startups valued below $1 billion while analyzing regional strengths in deep research and gaps in applied AI sectors. This initiative aims to align founders with investment criteria by emphasizing specific operational metrics and scalability potential across the diverse ecosystem.
- RAISE Summit20 min
The Missing Layer: Why Agentic AI Fails Without a Work Operating System | Asana | RAISE 2026
Amritansh Raghav, Mike Butcher
AR, Asana's CTO, challenges the enterprise belief that AI productivity is primarily hindered by shadow IT, arguing instead that success depends on deploying mature platforms capable of "agentifying" complex business processes. Leveraging Asana's existing foundation for human coordination, AR positions the company as a critical intermediary layer that safeguards intellectual property and maintains vendor optionality against volatile AI-native competitors. He advises leaders to prioritize workflow decomposition with deterministic checkpoints and diverse model integration to ensure accountability and cost efficiency rather than relying solely on model quality.
- RAISE Summit19 min
Scale or Stall: The ICONIQ 2026 State of AI | Seth Pierrepont & Vivian Guo | RAISE Summit 2026
Iconic's May 2024 longitudinal survey of 305 AI executives reveals that legacy software firms now derive 33% of revenue from AI products, with gross margins projected to rise to 60% by 2027 as model orchestration optimizes costs. The data highlights a strategic pivot toward outcome-based pricing and agentic AI, where Anthropic's market share surged to 81% and companies plan to scale Forward Deployed Engineer roles to drive revenue rather than merely fill technical gaps. Looking ahead, organizations are redefining operational structures to prioritize deep verticals and agentic workflows, expecting AI spend to jump from 11% to 19% of total revenue while engineering productivity and FTE earnings nearly double through complete work redesign.
- RAISE Summit19 min
Sovereignty in the Age of AI | Shalev Hulio, Dream | RAISE Summit 2026
Global leaders are increasingly prioritizing sovereign AI to secure national infrastructure by controlling the full AI architecture from data to deployment, driven by fears of external shutdowns and the weaponization of open models by state-sponsored threat groups. The cybersecurity landscape is shifting toward an autonomous "AI versus AI" dynamic where traditional reactive defenses are deemed insufficient against rapid, unregulated advancements, particularly from adversaries lacking restrictive guardrails. With the convergence of computing power, cyber capabilities, and quantum technology defining future superpowers, nations face an existential imperative to rapidly assess their capacity to execute a sovereign AI strategy or risk obsolescence in the coming era.
- RAISE Summit19 min
Redefining Customer Experience Through Intelligent AI | Suveer Kothari, Sierra | RAISE 2026
Suveer Kothari, Rohit Iragavarapu, Xavier
Sierra, a customer-facing AI platform led by former Google executive Xavier, has secured investment from Ray Ventures by deploying agents that utilize an outcomes-based pricing model to resolve inbound and outbound conversations. Serving 40% of the Fortune 500 through a forward-deployed engineering approach, the company successfully reduces deployment timelines to 90 days, as demonstrated by rapid adoption cases at Singtel and Rocket Mortgage. By orchestrating multiple foundation models to shield clients from infrastructure volatility, Sierra positions itself as the critical bridge between raw model capabilities and specific business outcomes in an era where conversation is becoming the primary user interface.
- RAISE Summit14 min
Delivering on the Promise of AI Through Trusted Partnerships | Simon Ahdoot, Hypertec | RAISE 2026
Founded in 1984, Hypertech leads a strategic alliance with Bell Canada, Cohere, and BuzzHPC to build a sovereign AI ecosystem in Canada that addresses massive infrastructure demands and sector-specific inefficiencies. This partnership explicitly combines four decades of data center expertise with legacy telecommunications, modern GPU management, and enterprise AI modeling to overcome unprecedented capital, talent, and regulatory hurdles. The initiative highlights that successful AI deployment requires such cross-generational collaboration to navigate environmental concerns and power constraints that no single entity can resolve independently.