Venture with Grace

Ashley Smith is the GP and Founder of Vermilion Cliffs Ventures, where she backs early-stage technical founders building in AI, developer tools, data, security, and infrastructure. Previously, she served as Global Vice President of Marketing at GitHub through its acquisition by Microsoft, Chief Marketing Officer at GitLab, and Venture Partner at OpenView. Her extensive go-to-market leadership at developer-first companies like Twilio and Facebook’s Parse team informs her focus on founder-led growth and durable AI infrastructure products.Topics:

• AI Infrastructure Trends
• Founder-Led Go-to-Market
• Building High-Performing Teams

#VC #AIVentures #DevTools #AIInfra #FounderStories #StartupInvesting

Philip Rathle is the Chief Technology Officer of Neo4j, where he has spent more than a decade helping transform the company from a niche on‑premise database into a leading global graph database and analytics platform used in modern AI and data-intensive applications. With over 25 years in enterprise data, he previously led Neo4j’s product organization, growing ARR from under seven figures to well into nine figures and expanding the portfolio into multiple cloud product lines, while building and leading large global product and engineering teams. Earlier in his career, Philip co-founded a customer data integration startup and held product and consulting roles at Embarcadero, Accenture, and Tanning Technology, giving him deep experience in databases, data modeling, and large-scale information systems. A Northwestern-trained engineer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he is also known for thought leadership around graph technology, GenAI, and GraphRAG, including authoring “The GraphRAG Manifesto” and championing industry standards such as ISO GQL.Topics:

• From On-Prem to Cloud: Scaling Neo4j’s Graph Database Business
• GraphRAG in Practice: How Graphs Supercharge GenAI and RAG Systems
• 25 Years in Data: What Actually Changed (and What Hasn’t)

#GraphRAG #Neo4j #GraphDB #GenAI #AIDatabases #VentureAI

Igor Taber is the founder and General Partner of Cortical Ventures, an early-stage AI-focused venture fund launched in 2021 to invent, incubate, and invest in companies driving the AI revolution. Previously, he served as SVP of Corporate Development at DataRobot, where he shaped growth strategy, raised over $500 million in capital, and managed M&A and partnerships; before that, as Managing Director at Intel Capital, he led the AI and data investment practice, funding over 20 organizations and earning recognition as a top AI investor. A Wharton MBA graduate based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Taber remains an active angel investor, advisor, and board member for AI startups like Weaviate, Immerok, and OthersideAI.Topics:

• Inventing AI Leaders: From Idea to Series A
• "$500M Raised: Scaling AI via M&A Mastery
• Corporate VC Edge: AI Strategy Wins

#AICapital #VentureAI #CorticalVentures #AIInvesting #StartupFunding #DataRobot #IntelCapital

Dave Steer is Chief Marketing Officer at Webflow, where he leads global marketing to scale the company’s enterprise growth and AI-powered digital experience strategy. A veteran marketing leader, he brings two decades of experience across B2C, B2B, and developer marketing, with prior senior roles at GitLab, Cloudflare, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, eBay, TRUSTe, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Known for unifying story, strategy, and go-to-market execution, he has led platform positioning, major AI product launches, and customer advocacy and community programs while managing large cross-functional teams. Steer is also a recognized mentor and marketing thought leader who frequently speaks on topics such as AI and the future of product marketing and building trust in marketing. Topics:

• How AI is reshaping product marketing and go-to-market strategy
• Building a unified brand story across B2B, B2C, and developer audiences
• Lessons from leading marketing at hyper-growth companies (Facebook, Twitter, Cloudflare, GitLab, Webflow)

#Webflow #CMO #ProductMarketing #AIMarketing #GoToMarket #MarketingLeadership #B2BGrowth #DeveloperMarketing #BrandStrategy #Hypergrowth

Flaviu Radulescu and Ioana Hreninciuc are the co-founders of Runware, an AI infrastructure company focused on making high-performance generative media dramatically more affordable and accessible for developers and product teams worldwide. Drawing on over two decades of Flaviu’s experience building bare-metal data clusters and custom hardware, Runware designs its own GPU and networking systems plus the Sonic Inference Engine, enabling up to 10x cost savings and order‑of‑magnitude speedups for visual and media AI workloads. As business and product leader, Ioana has helped steer Runware from an early image-generation prototype through major funding rounds and into a scalable AI media platform, partnering with leading investors and powering billions of creations while keeping AI inference costs low enough for companies of all sizes.Topics:

• Why “affordable AI” is a defensible wedge in the crowded AI infra market
• How Runware achieved 5–10x cost and speed gains by designing its own hardware + inference stack
• The future of generative media: real-time, multimodal, and as cheap as API calls today

#AIInfra #GenerativeMedia #StartupFounders #DeepTech #AI2026

Josh Sirota is the founder and CEO of Eragon, an AI operating system for work that connects to a company’s business apps and uses custom agents to provide unified, on-demand insights across everything from sales forecasts to product analytics. Based in San Francisco, he founded Eragon to help teams run their companies “from idea to IPO,” after earlier roles in enterprise software sales and go-to-market at Oracle and Salesforce. Under his leadership, Eragon has quickly grown to serve fast-scaling startups and large enterprises, positioning itself at the center of the emerging AI-powered future of work.Topics:

• The AI OS Replacing Dashboards, Reports, and App-Hopping at Work
• The Agentic AI Layer Transforming How Companies Operate
• Why the Future of Work Needs an AI Layer That Understands Everything

#AI #FutureOfWork #AgenticAI #StartupLife #EnterpriseAI #Productivity #AIOS #EragonAI #SaaS #VentureCapital

Jack Raines is a Forward Deployed Personality Hire at Slow Ventures, where he scouts the bold, the obsessive, and the slightly unhinged founders building the next wave of breakout companies. Before VC, Jack built a 65,000-subscriber Substack that landed him a Penguin book deal, wrote 50,000 words in 14 days, and worked across Robinhood’s Sherwood News, Litquidity, and UPS. A creator turned investor, he blends storytelling with venture to back founders and influential creators who want to build real businesses—not just audiences. His first book, a guide to navigating your 20s, comes out in 2026.Topics:

• Creator → Investor: Why Audiences Became the New Due Diligence
• How Slow Ventures Finds “Moderately Unhinged Founders”
• Investing in the Creator-Led Startup

#VC #Startups #Creators #FounderLife #SlowVentures #JackRaines

Denise Teng is a Partner at Gradient. Prior to joining Gradient, Denise spent six years as a product manager. Most recently, she was a PM on the Meta AI platform team where she built infrastructure tools for ML workflows. Denise previously spent time at Twitter as a senior PM where she launched products ranging from ad tech and social commerce to real-time data analytics. After grad school, she joined the Walmart e-commerce APM program where she scaled merchant-facing products for Walmart marketplace and supported the post-acquisition integration of Jet.com. Denise obtained an M.S. in software management from Carnegie Mellon University. Topics:

• Building AI infra and ML workflows from big tech to startups
• How a product manager’s mindset shapes AI and infra investing
• Tactical fundraising and GTM advice for AI/infra founders

#AIVC #GradientVentures #MLInfra #AIStartups #VCPodcast #ProductToVC

Rob Ferguson is the CTO and Head of AI at Microsoft for Startups, where he helps high‑growth founders access GPUs, frontier models, and strategic partnerships to scale AI products. A veteran engineering leader with more than two decades in AI and infrastructure, he previously served as Global Head of AI/ML for Startups and VC at AWS and has been a three‑time startup CTO/VPE with over $100M in exits, including Automatic Labs’ acquisition by SiriusXM. He has scaled engineering teams from early seed stages to hundreds of people at companies like Automatic Labs and Standard Cognition, and is known for making early, market‑shaping bets on platforms such as Databricks, Weights & Biases, and Ray. As a global AI keynote speaker, he focuses on turning cutting‑edge AI—LLM ops, RAG, and distributed training—into pragmatic playbooks for founders, enterprises, and investors navigating hyperscale cloud and modern AI infrastructure.Topics:

• How Hyperscalers Actually Evaluate AI Startups
• Lessons From Being a Three-Time Startup CTO
• The 2026 AI Infrastructure Landscape

#AIInfrastructure #StartupFounders #VentureCapital #CloudComputing #AIEngineering

Chappy Asel serves as Co-Founder and Executive Director of The AI Collective, the largest grassroots AI community in the US with over 25,000 members across major tech hubs, fostering in-person events and online forums for founders, researchers, operators, and investors to shape AI's future. A self-taught coder from age 12, he built and sold the world's #1 homework app with 338k installs before roles at Apple—contributing to Vision Pro prototypes, Apple Intelligence, App Intents, and AI/ML eye-tracking—and brief stints at Meta and Xevo. He also founded a top-rated weightlifting app (70k+ installs), Cofactory, and a stealth project on social capital allocation, while pursuing competitive natural bodybuilding, reading 50-100 books yearly, and scouting for ventures like Madrona.AJ Green is the Founding Director of Growth at The AI Collective, where he leads the expansion of the world’s largest AI nonprofit community. He views AI as the most disruptive force humanity has ever discovered and is dedicated to building systems that provide asymmetric leverage, transforming compounding intelligence into exponential opportunities. AJ aims to create defining cultural moments in AI history through his work, driving impactful growth and engagement within the AI ecosystem.Topics:

• Building the Largest Grassroots AI Community
• Patterns among the top early-stage AI teams
• What the AI Talent Stack Looks Like in 2026

#AI2026 #FutureOfAI #AIAgents #AICommunity #AgenticWorkflows