Maria Barisano
Managing Director and Partner
Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
Maria Barisano is a Managing Director and Partner, based in the San Francisco office. She has been with BCG since 2013. As a core group member of BCG's Technology Media and Telecommunication (TMT) Practice Area, she works mainly for companies in the technology / high-tech industry.
Maria is leading the Women in Tech effort on the West Coast within BCG. Maria consistently engages with numerous high-profile women C-suite personnel in the tech industry. Maria is immensely knowledgeable in a broad set of topics, with a strong focus on growth/Go To Market acceleration.
Nikhil Sukhtankar
Head of Product Conversational AI & Messaging Platforms
PayPal
As Head of AI & Messaging Platforms org at PayPal, Nikhil leads Product Management & Conversational AI Design teams. Nikhil is responsible for defining the vision & strategy to bring advancements in AI, especially Generative AI & NLU/NLP to power intuitive & intelligent experiences for PayPal's Consumers & Small-Medium Business Merchants. He brings over two decades of experience in building and growing enterprise scale consumer products across technology start-ups, growth companies and S&P 500 large companies. In recent years, my focus has been on building enterprise-scale vertical Applied AI platforms that offer capabilities & services such as AI powered Chatbot, Voice / IVR applications, Semantic & Lexical Search, Agent Assist Solutions (Smart Replies, Summarization) etc within Consumer Wallet, Payments, SMB Merchants, Shopping / Rewards & Customer Success domains. Nikhil also is a Product Advisor to a handful of startups leaders and CEOs. Nikhil has a technical background with Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and has also earned an AI & ML certification from MIT.
Ved Upadhyay
Senior Data Scientist
Walmart Global Tech
Ved Upadhyay is a seasoned professional in the realm of data science and artificial intelligence (AI). With a focus on addressing complex challenges in data science on an enterprise scale, he boasts over 7 years of hands-on experience in crafting AI-powered solutions for businesses. Ved’s expertise spans diverse industries, including retail, e-commerce, pharmaceuticals, agrotech, and socio-tech, where he has successfully productized multiple machine learning pipelines. Currently serving as a Senior Data Scientist at Walmart, Ved spearheads multiple data science initiatives centered around customer propensity and responsible AI solutions at enterprise scale. Prior to venturing into the industry, Ved earned his master’s degree in Data Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and contributed as a Deep Learning researcher at IIIT Hyderabad. His research contributions are reflected in multiple publications in the field of applied AI.
Moderator
Gayathri Radhakrishnan
Partner
Hitachi Ventures
Gayathri is currently Partner at Hitachi Ventures. Prior to that, she was with Micron Ventures, actively investing in startups that apply AI to solve critical problems in the areas of Manufacturing, Healthcare and Automotive. She brings over 20 years of multi-disciplinary experience across product management, product marketing, corporate strategy, M&A and venture investments in large Fortune 500 companies such as Dell and Corning and in startups. She has also worked as an early stage investor at Earlybird Venture Capital, a premier European venture capital fund based in Germany. She has a Masters in EE from The Ohio State University and MBA from INSEAD in France. She is also a Kauffman Fellow - Class 16.
John Wei
Venture Investment Director
Applied Ventures
John Wei is a venture investment director at Applied Ventures. He focuses on a range of deep tech areas and industry verticals, including advanced materials, semiconductor manufacturing and industrial & enterprise software. He also manages Applied Ventures’ investment activities in the Greater China region.
Prior to joining Applied, John was a key member of the SABIC Ventures investment team, where he led multiple investments in advanced materials, energy, sustainability, manufacturing and agriculture space in North America, Europe and Greater China.
Earlier in his career, John held various commercial and technical roles at The Linde Group and General Electric with experiences mostly in the petrochemical, power generation, alternative energy and oil & gas industries.
John has a Bachelor degree from Tsinghua University and a PhD from Rutgers University, both in Chemical Engineering. While at Rutgers, he also earned a Master's degree in Computer Science. In addition, John holds an MBA degree from UCLA with a focus in Finance and Entrepreneurship.
Laura Swan
General Partner
Silicon Catalyst Ventures
Laura is in charge of portfolio company management at SCV. Laura is a Managing Partner with Silicon Catalyst and the Vice President of Operations for Silicon Catalyst Angels as well as an investor with Sand Hill Angels and a founding partner of The Batchery, a tech incubator in Berkeley California.Laura earned her Master Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wyoming (Go Pokes!).
Divya Raghavan
Principal
NGP Capital
Divya Raghavan is a venture investor and technology enthusiast with a diverse background in product management, software engineering, and venture capital. She currently serves as a Principal of the US investment team at NGP Capital, where her primary focus revolves around software, data, and edge infrastructure. Her expertise lies in identifying and nurturing cutting-edge startups poised to revolutionize these sectors. Divya brings solid technical acumen to venture investing.
Prior to her role at NGP Capital, Divya was a leader in software engineering at Citrix and led product management teams at SugarCRM. In her journey towards venture investing, Divya gained invaluable experience at VC firms, including Costanoa Ventures and Samsung NEXT Ventures, where she further deepened her understanding of the startup ecosystem.
Within NGP Capital, Divya has led investments in notable companies such as Coda, Immuta, ArmorCode and Nova Labs. Her keen eye for innovation and a strong track record of successful investments have made her a trusted voice in the venture capital landscape. Beyond her professional endeavors, Divya is also an avid angel investor, continuously contributing to early product ideation and GTM, always ready to wear her product hat.
Divya received an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Florida, Gainesville.
Krishna Rangasayee
Founder and CEO
SiMa.ai
Krishna Rangasayee is Founder and CEO of SiMa.ai. Previously, Krishna was COO of Groq and at Xilinx for 18 years, where he held multiple senior leadership roles including Senior Vice President and GM of the overall business, and Executive Vice President of global sales. While at Xilinx, Krishna grew the business to $2.5B in revenue at 70% gross margin while creating the foundation for 10+ quarters of sustained sequential growth and market share expansion. Prior to Xilinx, he held various engineering and business roles at Altera Corporation and Cypress Semiconductor. He holds 25+ international patents and has served on the board of directors of public and private companies.
SiMa
Website: https://sima.ai/
SiMa.ai is the software-centric, embedded edge machine learning system-on-chip (MLSoC) company. SiMa.ai delivers one platform for all edge AI that flexibly adjusts to any framework, network, model, sensor, or modality. Edge ML applications that run completely on the SiMa.ai MLSoC see a tenfold increase in performance and energy efficiency, bringing higher fidelity intelligence to ML use cases spanning computer vision to generative AI, in minutes. With SiMa.ai, customers unlock new paths to revenue and significant cost savings to innovate at the edge across industrial manufacturing, retail, aerospace, defense, agriculture, and healthcare.
Matthias Tan
Co-Founder
Normal Computing
Normal Computing
Website: http://www.normalcomputing.com
Normal, are rewriting AI foundations to advance the frontier of reasoning and reliability in the real world. At the center of their mission is bridging artificial intelligence to the most sensitive industrial and advanced manufacturing applications around the globe. The company are tackling these problems with a mix of interdisciplinary approaches across the full stack, from probabilistic software infrastructure and algorithms to hardware and physics, enabling AI that can reason and understand its own limits. Normal was founded in 2022 by engineers and scientists that pioneered industry-leading Physics + ML tools for next-gen AI at Google Brain and Google X.
Angela Yeung
VP of Product Management
Cerebras Systems
Prasad Saripalli
Distinguished Engineer
Capital One
Prasad Saripalli serves as a Distinguished Engineer at Capital One, a technology driven bank on the Fortune 100 list, redefining Fintech and Banking using data, technology, AI and ML in unprecedented ways. Most recently, Prasad served as the Vice President of AIML and Distinguished Engineer at MindBody Inc - a portfolio company of Vista which manages the world's fourth-largest enterprise software company after Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. Earlier, he served as VP Data Science at Edifecs, an industry premier healthcare information technology partnership platform and software provider, building Smart Decisions ML & AI Platform with Ml Apps Front. Prior to this, Prasad served as CTO and VP Engineering at Secrata.com, provider of Military grade Security and Privacy solutions developed and deployed over the past 15 years at Topia Technology for the Federal Government and the Enterprise, and as CTO & EVP at ClipCard, a SaaS based Hierarchical Analytics and Visualization platform.
At IBM, Prasad served as the Chief Architect for IBM's SmartCloud Enterprise (http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/us/en/). At Runaware, he served as the Vice President of Product Development. As a Principal Group Manager at Microsoft, Prasad co-led the development of virtualization stack on Windows 7 responsible for shipping Virtual PC7 and Windows XP Mode on Windows 7.
Prasad teaches Machine Learning, AI, NLP, Distributed Systems, Cloud Engineering and Robotics at Northeastern University and the University of Washington Continuum College.