[Monty2026: Geopolitics, National Security, & Government]

Marko Papic (Macro-Geopolitical Chief Strategist, BCA Research) and Michael J. Mazarr (Senior Political Scientist, RAND Corporation)

Papic frames the US-China relationship through capital allocation — up to four Xi-Trump summits are expected this year, an extraordinary level of engagement, and even a modest diplomatic thaw could unlock major capital flows back into Chinese assets. Mazarr brings the security counterweight, arguing that nobody currently has a coherent theory for a stable US-China equilibrium over the next two to five years.

China outperformed US equities by double in the prior year, yet private market investors face a structural problem public investors don't: seven-year lockups that make it hard to trade in and out as diplomatic winds shift. Mazarr adds that the US national security community is quietly far more hawkish on China than official strategy documents suggest, with landmines around investment, semiconductors, and export controls sitting underneath any surface-level truce.

[Monty2026: The Next Big Thing: Private Company Highlights]

Evan Smith (Co-Founder & CEO, Altana) in conversation with Robert Silvers (Partner & Co-Chair, National Security Practice, Ropes & Gray)

Smith and Silvers — former DHS Under Secretary and co-author of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act — discuss how geopolitical fragmentation, from US-China trade restrictions to EU carbon border adjustments, is forcing companies to map multi-tier supply chain networks for the first time, since CFOs can't forecast tariff impacts without knowing their full value chain.

The most striking disclosure: a Chinese logistics middleware called "Loginc," embedded in global port and logistics systems, reportedly gives Beijing visibility into roughly 90% of global trade — part of a broader strategy that includes giving away free border management software to nations under the Belt and Road Initiative. Altana's federated AI architecture, already used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, offers an alternative: mapping global trade connections without centralizing sensitive data, with EU customs authorities reportedly calling it "light years ahead" of alternatives.

[Monty2026: The Next Big Thing: Private Company Highlights]

Umesh Sachdev (Co-Founder & CEO, Uniphore) in conversation with Gajen Kandiah (CEO, Rackspace) and Sumant Mandal (Co-Founder & Managing Partner, March Capital)

Kandiah — six months into his tenure as Rackspace CEO after serving as Chief AI Officer at Hitachi — and Sachdev discuss how geopolitical risk has turned AI infrastructure sovereignty from a data-control preference into a business continuity imperative, as non-US enterprises ask how they'd keep operating if trade policy cut off access to Silicon Valley AI platforms.

Uniphore serves 2,500 enterprise customers, including 200+ Fortune 500 companies, with a "sovereign AI stack" that runs across any cloud, on-prem environment, LLM, or GPU type. The core thesis: proprietary data and fine-tuned models — not the underlying LLMs, which every enterprise can access — are the real source of differentiation, and owning the full stack is what makes that differentiation defensible.

[Monty2026: The Next Big Thing: Private Company Highlights]

Grant Lee (Co-Founder & CEO, Gamma) in conversation with Jamie Montgomery (Co-Founder & Managing Partner, March Capital)

Lee traces Gamma's founding story — started in mid-2020 in London — through three product phases, culminating in a March 2023 relaunch that fixed the product's first-30-seconds experience and triggered explosive, entirely organic growth driven by creators sharing the tool with their audiences.

The relaunch took Gamma from months of effort to reach 60,000 users to tens of thousands of new signups a day within a week. The company has kept its original 12 employees since launch, operates with fewer than 70 people total under a "player-coach" model with no traditional management layer, and Lee credits the growth to personally onboarding creators one by one rather than paid acquisition.

[Monty2026: The Next Big Thing: Private Company Highlights]

Ram Palaniappan (Founder & CEO, EarnIn) in conversation with Madison McIlwain and Claudia Laurie (Hosts, The Room Podcast)

Palaniappan argues payroll is the last major financial system still running on a multi-day batch settlement lag, and traces EarnIn's origin from a manual practice he ran at RushCard into a consumer fintech platform that now serves roughly 1% of all U.S. paycheck recipients, with a roadmap toward continuous, streaming pay.

A University of Oregon study of 1.5 million EarnIn users found incomes rose 11.5% (about $335/month) with on-demand pay access — gains at twice the rate of inflation — while EarnIn's LivePay product has already surpassed one million transactions since its late-2025 launch. Palaniappan also describes a deliberately asymmetric capital strategy: buying hospital medical debt in bulk at a discount and forgiving it, writing off nearly $10 million on behalf of customers.

[Monty2026: The Next Big Thing: Private Company Highlights]

Ketan Karkhanis (CEO, ThoughtSpot) in conversation with Greg Emerson (Managing Director & Senior Partner, Boston Consulting Group)

Karkhanis describes the strategic pivot he made within 17 months of becoming CEO — shutting down business units that no longer fit, rebuilding engineering culture around AI-first principles, and reorienting sales and go-to-market entirely — framed against BCG's estimate of a $3 trillion agentic AI opportunity, roughly double today's B2B software market.

ThoughtSpot has crossed $140 million ARR with 33 customers above $1 million ARR and is projecting $180 million ARR at 48% year-over-year growth by fiscal year-end, with 60–70% growth targeted the following year. Karkhanis is candid that the company hasn't fully solved the shift away from seat-based pricing but is betting on unlimited-usage contracts as the model that captures the most value.

[Monty2026: The Next Big Thing: Private Company Highlights]

Carina Hong (CEO, Axiom Math) in conversation with Matt McIlwain (Managing Director, Madrona Venture Group)

Hong describes Axiom's mission to build the world's first AI mathematician — a system that doesn't just solve advanced math problems but formally proves mathematical conjectures and verifies logical correctness without requiring human expertise to audit the result.

The headline proof point: Axiom Prover scored a perfect 120/120 on the Putnam Exam (only 5 humans have done that in 98 years, and the best LLM scored 103/120), then went on to resolve four open mathematical conjectures that no human mathematician had solved. Hong connects the breakthrough to a bigger commercial opportunity in chip verification, code verification, and building trust into agentic AI as it deploys at scale.

[Monty2026: The Next Big Thing: Private Company Highlights]

Wardah Inam (CEO, Overjet) in conversation with Quentin Hardy (Principal, LGTM Communication)

Inam explains how Overjet applies AI across the full dental treatment workflow — diagnosis, patient communication, insurance claims — for a half-trillion-dollar global market where treatment acceptance rates run as low as 50%, founded after she noticed wide diagnostic variation between dentists.

The operational case is stark: dentists spend 5+ hours a week documenting patient communications, hygienists spend 15+ minutes per patient on periodontal charting, and front-desk staff spend 20 hours a week verifying insurance — all of which Overjet automates or compresses, including a 3x cut in charting time. The company now serves thousands of practices and 60,000+ users, processes claims for 115 million+ insured members, and is eyeing expansion into adjacent outpatient verticals like veterinary and dermatology.

[Monty2026: The Next Big Thing: Private Company Highlights]

Pankaj Patel (Co-Founder & CEO, Nile) in conversation with Quentin Hardy (Principal, LGTM Communication Services)

Patel, a 22-year Cisco veteran, lays out Nile's cloud-native, zero-trust network-as-a-service platform designed to replace legacy enterprise LAN infrastructure with a fully autonomous, security-first architecture — citing a 2025 Google study tying 50% of zero-day vulnerabilities to legacy vendors, specifically Cisco and Fortinet.

Proof points include standing up an entire network for 200,000 daily visitors at a 2-million-square-foot Saudi Arabia conference with just 4 people in 3 days, a 4.9/5.0 Gartner Voice of Customer score, and land-and-expand accounts growing from $50K to $1.4M+ ACV. Nile has raised $300 million to date and is targeting 300–500% growth in ARR and TCV in 2025.

[Monty2026: The Next Big Thing: Private Company Highlights]

Vipul Ved Prakash (Co-Founder & CEO, Together.ai) in conversation with Sumant Mandal (Co-Founder & Managing Partner, March Capital)

Prakash, a former Apple engineer who worked on Face ID and Siri, argues that generative AI represents a new computational substrate, not just an advancement in language processing. He positions Together.ai as the cloud layer for the emerging AI workload era, running the top open-source models across modalities on Grace Blackwell rack-scale systems.

The conversation frames inference efficiency at scale as the defining competitive moat of the AI era, comparable to what AWS did for general-purpose cloud compute, with Together.ai serving both frontier labs and enterprises adapting models to proprietary data.