People

The investors, writers and builders shaping AI deployment, and worth following.

Investors

Hemant Taneja, CEO, General Catalyst (San Francisco, United States): Heads General Catalyst and co-wrote the launch of Percepta, the firm's wholly owned AI transformation company.
Marc Bhargava, Managing Director, General Catalyst (San Francisco, United States): Leads General Catalyst's creation strategy, incubating teams that buy services businesses and rebuild them around AI.
Elad Gil, Investor: Early AI investor who backs AI-led roll-ups of services firms and helped incubate Brain Co.
Marc Andrusko, Partner, Andreessen Horowitz: a16z partner whose essay questions whether startups copying Palantir's embedded-engineer model can keep software margins.
Julien Bek, Partner, Sequoia Capital (London, United Kingdom): Sequoia partner whose essay argues the next very large company will sell finished work, not tools.
Joanne Chen, General Partner, Foundation Capital: Co-wrote Foundation Capital's service-as-software thesis, which sized the work AI could take over at $4.6 trillion.
Joshua Kushner, Founder, Thrive Capital: Created Thrive Holdings as a separate vehicle from Thrive Capital to acquire accounting and IT services firms and rebuild them with AI.
Anuj Mehndiratta, Partner, Thrive Capital: Thrive Capital partner in charge of product and technology at Thrive Holdings, where OpenAI engineers work inside acquired firms.

Writers

Petar Petrov, Co-founder & CCO, Eilla AI (London, United Kingdom): Co-founded Eilla AI and runs its commercial side, and builds AI Deployment Firms; writes The AI-Native Economy newsletter on markets AI is reshaping.
Nikola Lazarov, Co-founder & CEO, Eilla AI (London, United Kingdom): Runs Eilla, an AI-native M&A advisory in London, and writes the Services as Software newsletter on AI in professional services.
Nabeel Qureshi, Writer: Former Palantir forward deployed engineer whose essay on the company is a standard reference on how embedded engineering works.
Marc Andrusko, Partner, Andreessen Horowitz: a16z partner whose essay questions whether startups copying Palantir's embedded-engineer model can keep software margins.
Julien Bek, Partner, Sequoia Capital (London, United Kingdom): Sequoia partner whose essay argues the next very large company will sell finished work, not tools.
Joanne Chen, General Partner, Foundation Capital: Co-wrote Foundation Capital's service-as-software thesis, which sized the work AI could take over at $4.6 trillion.
Gergely Orosz, Writer, The Pragmatic Engineer: Author of a widely read engineering newsletter whose deep dive explained what forward deployed engineers do and why demand spiked.
Gregor Ojstersek, Writer, Engineering Leadership: Newsletter author who interviewed OpenAI's FDE lead about how the team is organised and who it hires.

Builders

Petar Petrov, Co-founder & CCO, Eilla AI (London, United Kingdom): Co-founded Eilla AI and runs its commercial side, and builds AI Deployment Firms; writes The AI-Native Economy newsletter on markets AI is reshaping.
Nikola Lazarov, Co-founder & CEO, Eilla AI (London, United Kingdom): Runs Eilla, an AI-native M&A advisory in London, and writes the Services as Software newsletter on AI in professional services.
Chris Taylor, CEO, Ode (Ode with Anthropic) (San Francisco, United States): Co-founded Fractional AI, whose engineering team became the base of Ode, the Anthropic-backed services firm he now runs.
Eddie Siegel, CTO, Ode (Ode with Anthropic) (San Francisco, United States): Fractional AI co-founder who now leads the technical side of Ode, Anthropic's enterprise deployment venture with Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman.
Garvan Doyle, Head of Forward Deployed Engineering, Americas, Anthropic: Runs the Americas team of Anthropic engineers who embed with customers to get Claude-based systems into production.
Colin Jarvis, Global Head of Forward Deployed Engineering, OpenAI (Glasgow, United Kingdom): Runs OpenAI's global FDE organisation and says most enterprise AI projects that stall do so at deployment, not because of the model.
Arjun Prakash, Co-founder and CEO, Distyl AI: Helped build Palantir's commercial business before starting Distyl, which builds production AI systems for large enterprises.
Derek Ho, Co-founder and COO, Distyl AI: Former Palantir business development lead who co-founded Distyl and runs its operations.
Hirsh Jain, Co-founder and CEO, Percepta (New York, United States): Former Palantir senior vice president now running Percepta, General Catalyst's company that embeds AI engineers inside large organisations.
Bill Ward, Founder and CEO, Northslope: Palantir alumnus whose firm puts Palantir's AI platform to work for clients; Palantir made it the first member of its top partner tier.
Clemens Mewald, CEO, Brain Co. (San Francisco, United States): Former Databricks and Instabase product leader running Brain Co., which builds AI applications for companies and governments.
Jaclyn Rice Nelson, Co-founder and CEO, Tribe AI: Ex-Google and CapitalG; built Tribe AI around a network of senior engineers who deliver AI projects for companies.
Arman Hezarkhani, Co-founder and Managing Partner, Tenex: Serial AI founder and former Google Cloud engineer who co-runs Tenex, an AI transformation firm built around highly paid engineers.
Alex Lieberman, Co-founder and Managing Partner, Tenex: Morning Brew co-founder who moved into AI services by co-founding Tenex with Arman Hezarkhani.
Ed Broussard, Co-founder and Managing Director, Tomoro: Mudano co-founder who built Tomoro, the OpenAI-aligned engineering firm chosen as the founding acquisition of OpenAI's Deployment Company.
Marc Warner, CEO, Faculty (London, United Kingdom): Co-founded Faculty and still runs it inside Accenture, where he is also chief technology officer.
Scott Eivers, CEO, Datatonic (London, United Kingdom): Leads Datatonic, the Google Cloud data and AI specialist, across the UK, Europe and North America.
Louis Decuypere, Founder and Chairman, Datatonic: Founded Datatonic and grew it into a leading Google Cloud machine learning partner before handing the CEO role on.
Nicolas Deruytter, Co-founder and CEO, ML6 (Ghent, Belgium): Started ML6 in Ghent in 2013 and built it into one of Europe's larger AI engineering firms.
Jacob Parsons, Global CEO, Indicium AI: Former Mesh-AI chief executive who now leads the merged Indicium AI and its push into the United States.
Alan Descoins, CEO, Tryolabs (Montevideo, Uruguay): TIME100 AI honoree running Tryolabs and, since its sale to Qubika, also that group's chief AI officer.
Sebastian Heinz, Founder and CEO, statworx (Frankfurt, Germany): Built statworx from freelance data work into a Frankfurt AI consultancy and OpenAI services partner.
Vincent Luciani, Co-founder and Executive Chairman, Artefact (Paris, France): Co-founded Artefact and grew it into a global data and AI consultancy before moving from co-CEO to chairman.
Mahesh Kumar, Founder and CEO, Tiger Analytics: Former business school professor who founded Tiger Analytics in 2011 and scaled it into a large data and AI services firm.
Shub Bhowmick, Co-founder and CEO, Tredence: Co-founded Tredence to turn analytics into measurable business results, and remains its CEO.
Srikanth Velamakanni, Co-founder, Group CEO and Vice Chairman, Fractal (Mumbai, India): Co-founded Fractal and leads the group, one of India's oldest and largest AI and analytics firms.
Shyam Sankar, CTO and Executive Vice President, Palantir: Palantir's thirteenth employee, credited as its first forward deployed engineer and the person who shaped the role the industry now copies.
Anuj Mehndiratta, Partner, Thrive Capital: Thrive Capital partner in charge of product and technology at Thrive Holdings, where OpenAI engineers work inside acquired firms.
Stephen Straus, Co-founder and CEO, KUNGFU.AI (Austin, United States): Former Austin Ventures partner who co-founded KUNGFU.AI, a consulting and engineering firm working only on AI.
Stephanie Sy, Founder and CEO, Thinking Machines Data Science (Manila, Philippines): Founded Thinking Machines in Manila in 2015; it is OpenAI's first services partner in Asia Pacific and, since 2026, a Temus company she still runs.
Sayandeb Banerjee, Co-founder and CEO, MathCo: Ex-GE Capital analytics leader who co-founded MathCo in 2016 and sets its strategy.
Shay Levi, Co-founder and CEO, Unframe: Noname Security co-founder now running Unframe, which reported $100M of contract value within a year of launching.
Jack Soslow, Co-founder and CEO, Ciridae: Left a partner role at a16z to start Ciridae, which brings AI into mid-market firms in restoration, logistics and industrial services.
Ben Peters, Co-founder and CEO, Cogna (London, United Kingdom): Runs Cogna, a London company that uses AI to build custom software for utilities, logistics and manufacturing clients.
Tarek Nseir, Co-founder, Valliance: Co-founded Valliance, a UK AI consultancy that launched in late 2025 with private equity backing.
Brandon Powell, Founder and CEO, HatchWorks AI (Atlanta, United States): Ex-Accenture and Slalom; founded HatchWorks AI in Atlanta and steered it towards AI-first software delivery.
Pierpaolo D'Odorico, Co-founder and CEO, Datapizza (Milan, Italy): Turned a Milan tech community into Datapizza, an AI engineering firm that raised a €10M Series A in 2026.
Ross Hale, Co-founder and CEO, Artium: Co-founded Artium, a consultancy building agentic AI software, which AlixPartners acquired in 2026.
Alen Arslanagic, Founder and CEO, Visium (Lausanne, Switzerland): Grew Visium without outside money for eight years into a 100-person Lausanne AI firm for regulated industries, then took its first round.
Cory Janssen, Co-founder and CEO, AltaML (Edmonton, Canada): Investopedia co-founder who started AltaML in Edmonton to build applied machine learning products for clients.
Alex Kelleher, Founder and CEO, Quantum Rise: Founded Quantum Rise, an AI consulting firm whose team spans data science, data engineering and client training.

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