Latest Interviews

Fireside Chat with Mark Moffat, CEO of IFS | RAISE Summit 2026

Mark Moffat, Thomas Koehrer

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.

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.

Sovereignty in the Age of AI | Shalev Hulio, Dream | RAISE Summit 2026

Shalev Hulio, Enrique Salem

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.

The New Arms Race: Securing Frontier AI Before It Secures Us | RAISE Summit 2026

Dan Lahav, Michael S. Rogers, Larissa Holzki

Driven by recent security incidents where AI models demonstrated autonomous hacking capabilities and coordinated social engineering, the US government has intervened to restrict model access while assigning the NSA the role of classifying AI as a national security asset. Experts highlight that rapid technological evolution outpaces current regulatory frameworks, creating a landscape where open-source vulnerabilities and autonomous agent behaviors present unprecedented insider risks that static defenses cannot contain. Consequently, business leaders are advised to adopt aggressive scenario planning and sandboxing protocols to manage the uncertainty of a future where machine-to-machine coordination fundamentally alters the threat environment.

AI for Chip Design & Chip Design for AI | Ricursive Intelligence | RAISE Summit 2026

Anna Goldie, Azalia Mirhoseini, Azalea Amir-Hosseini

Founded by former Google Brain engineers Anna Goldie and Azalea Amir-Hosseini, Recursive Intelligence deploys its AlphaChip reinforcement learning system to replace months of manual chip design with superhuman layout generation that runs 1,000 times faster than commercial tools. The company is currently in Phase One, accelerating physical design for major manufacturers like NVIDIA and AMD, while its roadmap targets a "design-less" future where companies specify workloads to receive co-optimized hardware instantly. Ultimately, Recursive aims to close a recursive self-improving loop by eventually building its own chips and models, promising up to 20x performance gains through microarchitectural customization.

Fireside Chat with Sid Sheth, Founder & CEO of d-Matrix | RAISE Summit 2026

Sid Sheth, Tony Kim

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.

Time to First Token: The Metric That Will Define Our Era | Nscale, VAST Data & NVIDIA | RAISE 2026

Kristin Zwez, Jeff Denworth, Rod Evans, Christine

Jensen Huang and Vast Data redefine AI infrastructure economics by shifting the primary metric from hardware utilization to Time to First Token, ensuring that billions in capital investments for massive GPU clusters yield immediate ROI. This evolution integrates storage directly into the core computer to maximize inference speed while driving a business model transition from hourly compute sales to token-as-a-service. Consequently, enterprises are advised to abandon legacy IT stacks in favor of fully integrated data computers and to prioritize executive ownership of AI adoption to avoid costly silos and ensure rigorous bottom-line execution.

State of AI Infrastructure: What's Powering AI Today | IREN, Mirantis & NVIDIA | RAISE Summit 2026

Kent Draper, Alex Freedland, Dion Harris, Henri Delahaye

Industry leaders from Iron, NVIDIA, and Mirantis convened to address the critical bottleneck of energy and physical infrastructure limiting the global AI race. The panel outlined a strategic shift toward vertical integration and open standards, exemplified by Iron's European expansion for sovereign AI and NVIDIA's launch of an API-centric ecosystem to streamline compute consumption. Success in this sector now hinges on synchronizing rapid software orchestration with the slower deployment of power grids and data centers to bridge the widening supply-demand gap.

Who Controls AI? The Open Source Imperative | Arthur Mensch, Mistral AI | RAISE Summit 2026

Arthur Mensch, Mark Surman, Henri Delahaye

Speakers Arthur and Marc outline a strategic framework for artificial intelligence sovereignty that prioritizes domestic compute security, affordability, and sustainability to mitigate economic inequality and social unrest. They identify open source technology as a critical mechanism for nations to retain control over essential infrastructure, preventing foreign dependency while fostering a global ecosystem where open components serve as the dominant building blocks within the next decade. Although this shift from proprietary chatbots to shared infrastructure is widely anticipated, the speakers warn that realizing this future requires sustained research funding and coordinated interoperability to overcome significant capital and partnership challenges.

Rewiring the Web: Data Access, AI Agents & the Next Digital Revolution | RAISE Summit 2026

Juras Juršėnas, Fred de Villamil, Chet Haase, Romain Guyett, Francois Chollette, Francisco Neri, Gérald

The event analyzes how the AI era has intensified the demand for live web data while rendering traditional scraping techniques obsolete due to sophisticated anti-bot defenses and shifting regulatory landscapes. It highlights critical economic tensions between content publishers and AI developers, arguing that the current ad-revenue model is threatened by AI aggregators that bypass source websites without compensation. Strategic recommendations focus on transitioning web infrastructure to be optimized for AI agents and establishing new frameworks for data monetization to ensure sustainable value distribution in the emerging agentic commerce ecosystem.

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.

Cohere, Adobe, Teneo: Revolutionizing Enterprise Search with AI. Unlock The Potential of Your Data

Philippe Massoncier, Nick Morales, Abhijit Singh

Adobe and Cohere have formally partnered to integrate Cohere's AI embedding and re-ranking models into Adobe Document Cloud, powering the Acrobat AI Assistant with multilingual and multimodal search capabilities across over 100 languages. This collaboration transforms enterprise search from simple retrieval to intelligent action by unifying fragmented data from systems like Salesforce and SharePoint, while enforcing strict trust pipelines through Retrieval-Augmented Generation to ensure all AI responses are cited to source documents. By offering flexible deployment options including private on-premises infrastructure, the alliance directly addresses critical barriers to enterprise AI adoption such as data silos, security compliance, and the need for context-rich data to enable autonomous AI agents.

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.

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.

Eastern European Dynamism: Rayscho Raychev & Delian Asparouhov on Space Tech & AI Innovation

Rayscho Raychev, Delian Asparouhov, Deleon Asparov, Raicho Raichev, Vyacheslav Tykhonovskyi

Deleon Asparov of Founders Fund and Endurosat CEO Raicho Raichev discuss how the Bulgarian space company scaled from bootstrapping to securing rapid venture capital while deploying over 60 satellites. Raichev highlights Endurosat's strategy of using AI to slash data costs and eliminate traditional mission control, contrasting the region's "survivalist" work culture and 10% flat tax against stagnant Western European economies. The panel concludes by predicting that Eastern Europe will lead a defense and technology renaissance driven by geopolitical necessity, aiming to reduce reliance on the United States and prevent the decoupling of critical industrial sectors.