Latest Interviews
Showing 91–105 of 129 interview transcripts.
Clear all filters- RAISE Summit19 min
Paul Copplestone (SupaBase) & Abel Samot (Commit): Open Source Backend for the AI Age
Paul Copplestone, Abel Samot, DAN GALPIN, FRANCESC CAMPOY, ALEXIS MOUSSINE
Supabase has achieved a $2 billion valuation following a $200 million funding round, driven by a user base that tripled to over 3 million developers and a strategy positioning the open-source platform as a default modern web backend. Founder Paul Copplestone highlights rapid adoption fueled by AI-assisted "vibe coding" tools while the company pursues enterprise growth through "configuration over customization" and upcoming infrastructure breakthroughs like the Multigress sharding solution. Operating as a fully remote organization of 140 specialists, the firm continues scaling by launching Pico instances for zero-to-one applications and recruiting senior talent to support petabyte-scale database capabilities.
- RAISE Summit22 min
Scaleway & SemiAnalysis: Unlocking AI's Potential Insights from Deploying Europe's Most Advanced
Scaleway launched Europe's largest Hopper GPU cluster in 2023 to secure data sovereignty and prevent U.S. hyperscaler dominance, now hosting major AI players like Mistral for training and inference. The provider is advancing "Project ION," a consortium-backed initiative aiming to build capacity equivalent to 280,000 H100 chips with private capital while seeking government demand assurance rather than direct subsidies. Operating across five European regions, Scaleway positions itself as a full-stack public cloud solution that prioritizes legal immunity from U.S. laws over domestic hardware manufacturing, targeting a consolidated market of EU-based public and private AI consumers.
- RAISE Summit19 min
A fireside Chat with May Habib, CEO & Co Founder of Writer ft. Rana Yared, GP, Balderton Capital
Writer is an enterprise AI company accelerating the transition to "Era 3.0" agentic systems by deploying vertically specific, revenue-impacting solutions that integrate with legacy infrastructure while maintaining full-stack control over security and reliability. The organization addresses adoption barriers like traceability and scalability through a frugal, synthetic-data-driven architecture that enables rapid model iteration and distinct competitive moats against infrastructure providers. By structuring implementation around 30-to-365-day value increments, Writer facilitates deep corporate transformation from efficiency tools to autonomous agents capable of executing complex, high-stakes business workflows.
- RAISE Summit21 min
Poolside AI, IREN, Forbes: From 10x to 100x Building AI Systems for Real World Scale
Emma Allen, Dennis Skriniop, Isa Kent
Dennis Skriniop of Iron and Isa Kent of Poolside discuss the critical infrastructure and energy requirements for scaling foundation models toward human-level intelligence. Kent outlines Poolside's $500 million investment in automating a "model factory" that executes 1,800 monthly experiments, emphasizing that 80% of success relies on distributed systems engineering rather than algorithmic discovery. Skriniop and Kent further analyze the necessity of hybrid power grids, disaggregated storage architectures, and the emerging role of specialized "Neo-Clouds" to address the exponential complexity of operating clusters exceeding 10,000 GPUs.
- RAISE Summit18 min
Together AI & SemiAnalysis: In Conversation Together AI's Vision For the Future of AI Infrastructure
Vipul Vaid-Prakash, Dylan Patel
Founded in late 2022, Together AI challenges hyperscaler dominance by reengineering the cloud stack to achieve 75% maximum FLOP utilization on H100 GPUs, significantly outpacing the 50% industry standard. Led by chief scientist Tri Dao and the ClusterMax initiative, the firm drives down inference costs for massive models like DeepSeek from $8 to 30 cents per million tokens through architectural innovations and Reinforcement Learning frameworks. These technical advancements enable new MoE-based workloads and position the company to define emerging optimization surfaces before new hardware generations are fully adopted.
- RAISE Summit15 min
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.
- 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 Summit18 min
A fireside Chat with Paddy Srinivasan, CEO of DigitalOcean ft. Semafor
DigitalOcean CEO Patti and Reid Hoffman discuss the platform's role in serving 3 million developers by providing specialized AI infrastructure for both native startups and traditional firms integrating large language models. The conversation highlights critical global bottlenecks, including power constraints necessitating nuclear energy and a talent war driving new hiring protocols for AI automation engineers. Hoffmann forecasts a massive economic expansion where AI increases the technology sector's share of global GDP to 25% within a decade, alongside a predicted dispersion of value beyond current market leaders.
- 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 Summit13 min
Ioannis Antonoglou (Reflection AI): Building The Next Superintelligence After AlphaGo
Reflexion AI co-founder Yiannis and his team argue that AGI requires no new scientific breakthroughs, but rather the assembly of existing knowledge to solve the foundational "root node" problem of autonomous coding agents. Differentiating from well-funded competitors like DeepMind and OpenAI, the startup prioritizes a ruthless focus on software development while shifting training paradigms toward reinforcement learning in simulated environments. The founders also analyze the global landscape, attributing Europe's lag to market fragmentation and regulation, while asserting that mission alignment offers a superior talent acquisition strategy to massive signing bonuses.
- RAISE Summit20 min
A Fireside Chat with Luc Julia, Renault & Matthieu de Chanville, Shift for Good
Luc Julia, Matthieu de Chanville
Luc Beaulieu, Renault's Chief Scientific Officer, highlights the critical lag between century-old automakers and agile startups regarding AI adoption, noting that legacy software cycles remain incompatible with the rapid hardware refresh rates required for software-defined vehicles. While dismissing the feasibility of Level 5 autonomy and humanoids, Beaulieu champions specialized "physical AI," geo-fenced Level 4 robot taxis, and virtual sensor technologies to enhance manufacturing efficiency and reduce environmental impacts. These insights are further reinforced by the "Software Republic" consortium, which includes Renault and Thales, as it advances a vision where artificial intelligence serves as a specialized tool to augment human capability rather than replace it.
- RAISE Summit18 min
An AI conversation with Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack OverFlow
Prashanth Chandrasekar, Henry Shi, Prashant
Stack Overflow has pivoted from a traditional Q&A hub into a revenue-generating knowledge intelligence layer by licensing its data to major AI providers like Google and Microsoft while launching enterprise solutions for corporate workflows. This strategic shift addresses a 64% year-over-year traffic decline caused by user migration to AI search, transforming trust deficits among senior developers into a premium verification service rather than a code-generation competitor. Despite risks to junior developer roles, the company remains profitable and is expanding its talent pipeline through certification challenges and asynchronous human-to-human chat features.
- 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 Summit18 min
Aurélien Rodriguez, Director at Cohere: Building AI for Security-Minded Enterprises
In this session, a former Meta AI researcher now directing foundation model training at Cohere explains how the company prioritizes secure, grounded generation over pursuing Artificial General Intelligence. The discussion highlights a strategic shift toward on-premise deployment and retrieval-augmented pipelines that ensure data remains within client environments while minimizing hallucinations through strict source verification. By leveraging co-development partnerships with entities like Fujitsu and RBC, the organization focuses on specialized, high-value tools that deliver concrete business impact in regulated sectors without mimicking human biology.
- 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.