The Nebius for Startups Podcast

🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups 🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast In this episode, we explore cutting-edge technological advancements with leaders from Abridge. Zach, an AI researcher and co-founder of Abridge, shares the company's mission to enhance human connections in healthcare by developing AI solutions that alleviate doctors' administrative burdens. He elaborates on the innovative use of AI in clinical settings to streamline documentation, improve patient-doctor interactions, and optimize healthcare practices. Zach shed light on the importance of efficient AI integration, the future potential of their technologies, and the continual advancements happening in the AI space. 👤 About the Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacharylipton  X (Twitter): https://x.com/zacharylipton  Personal Website: https://www.zacharylipton.com/  🚀  About Nebius for Startups Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth. Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster. 👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups 🌐 About Nebius Website: https://www.nebius.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius X: https://x.com/nebiusai

🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups 🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast In this insightful episode, Rong Yan, the CTO of HeyGen, discusses the groundbreaking technology behind AI video generation and its potential to revolutionize video storytelling. Rong shares insights on HeyGen’s aim to make video creation accessible without the need for cameras, the challenges in developing realistic AI avatars, and the company’s commitment to privacy and safety. Furthermore, he addresses how AI could enhance multimedia communication and make video a more interactive and personalized experience.  The conversation also explores how HeyGen's innovations could shift content creation, making it easier for non-professionals to generate engaging video content. 👤 About the Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rong-yan-2004692 X (Twitter): https://x.com/HeyGen  Comapny Website: https://www.heygen.com/ 🚀  About Nebius for Startups Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth. Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster. 👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups 🌐 About Nebius Website: https://www.nebius.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius X: https://x.com/nebiusai

🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups 🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast Xuedong Huang is the Chief Technology Officer at Zoom. A leader in the AI revolution, he is currently spearheading the development of the Zoom AI Companion and its mission to transform how the world gets work done. What happens when your meeting software starts acting like a high-level executive assistant? In this episode, Xuedong breaks down the evolution of AI Companion 3.0 and its shift toward "Conversation to Completion" (C2C), a philosophy focused on turning meeting notes into finished tasks. 👤 About the Guest X (Twitter): https://x.com/xdh (or @xdh) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xdhuang 🚀  About Nebius for Startups Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth. Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster. 👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups 🌐 About Nebius Website: https://www.nebius.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius X: https://x.com/nebiusai

🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups 🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast Join us as we dive into the transformative world of Motion, a company delivering 'AI and business in a box' solutions to SMBs and mid-market enterprises. In this episode, we discuss how Motion is automating workflows, bridging the gap between small businesses and Fortune 500 capabilities, and the journey behind their rapid scale-up. Learn from their founder about the importance of stability, future plans for new product launches, and the enduring role of human decision-making in the age of AI. 👤 About the Guest Find out more: Harry Qi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Motion (usemotion.com or motion.app), an AI-powered productivity platform. X (Twitter): https://x.com/harryqi666  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harryqi/ Motion on X: https://x.com/useMotion  🚀  About Nebius for Startups Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth. Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster. 👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups 🌐 About Nebius Website: https://www.nebius.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius X: https://x.com/nebiusai

🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups 🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast Grant Lee is the founder of Gamma. A former consultant who started his career in the advisory world, Grant previously worked at the startup Optimizely before deciding to tackle the universal frustration of manual slide formatting. In this conversation, Grant dives into why the traditional way of building presentations felt "broken" and how he’s building an "anti-PowerPoint" to fix it. The discussion covers the launch of Gamma 3.0, including: The AI Design Agent, A new API and their collaborative business model. Grant also shares his vision for the future of visual communication, moving beyond standard slides into microsites, social media assets, and data visualization. Finally, we touch on the "magical" camaraderie of the Silicon Valley builder community and why no founder has to build alone. 👤 About the Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grantslee/ X (Twitter): https://x.com/thisisgrantlee Company website: https://gamma.app/ 🚀  About Nebius for Startups Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth. Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster. 👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups 🌐 About Nebius Website: https://www.nebius.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius X: https://x.com/nebiusai

🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups 🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast Alex is the founder of Higgsfield AI and a veteran of the social media space, having previously seen his company acquired by Snap. In this episode, we explore how Higgsfield AI is filling the gap between a creative idea and a finished video. Alex breaks down why they are moving away from simple text boxes to create more user-friendly interfaces that allow anyone to express themselves on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. We also discuss the technical "aha" moment behind world models and why Alex believes AI-generated personalities are the next frontier of art. 👤 About the Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amashrabov/  X (Twitter): https://x.com/alexmashrabov (or @alexmashrabov) Company website: https://higgsfield.ai/ 🚀  About Nebius for Startups Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth. Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster. 👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups 🌐 About Nebius Website: https://www.nebius.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius X: https://x.com/nebiusai

🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups 🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast Marc Boroditsky is a seasoned leader and ex-founder who has successfully built and scaled multiple companies. He currently holds a senior leadership position at Nebius, where he leverages his extensive background in enterprise sales and infrastructure to help the next generation of founders navigate the complexities of growth. In this episode, Marc dives deep into the mindset required to scale a startup in today’s competitive landscape. Marc also shares why founders should prioritize finding partners who invest in their success rather than just vendors who provide a service. The discussion explores: The Enterprise Shift: Why the sales cycle jumps from a single buyer to a dozen stakeholders, and how to navigate those "veto" risks.Knowledge as Currency: How founders can open doors to CTOs by offering their unique domain expertise instead of just a sales pitch.The FOMO Factor: A refreshing take on imposter syndrome, revealing that even top-tier tech executives are worried about what they might be missing. Whether you are in stealth mode or ready to hit growth mode, this conversation is packed with "words of wisdom" for mastering the human side of tech. 👤 About the Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcboroditsky 🚀  About Nebius for Startups Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth. Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster. 👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups 🌐 About Nebius Website: https://www.nebius.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius X: https://x.com/nebiusai

🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups 🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast In this episode, we sit down with Amit Zavery, the President, Chief Product Officer, and Chief Operating Officer at ServiceNow, who shares insights on the integration of AI into ServiceNow's platform. Amit discusses the importance of AI being a seamless part of the system, not a separate entity. He speaks on the strategic partnerships and the ecosystem-building approach ServiceNow adopts to ensure efficiency and scalability for enterprises and startups alike. Amit also highlights the need for integrated, secure, and customer-centric AI solutions, and he lays out a forward-looking perspective on how AI adoption can mature by 2026. The conversation touches upon infrastructure needs, inferencing, and compute efficiency, emphasizing how ServiceNow works to provide cost-effective solutions for its clients. 👤 About the Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amitzavery X: https://x.com/azavery Company Website: https://www.servicenow.com/ 🚀  About Nebius for Startups Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth. Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster. 👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups 🌐 About Nebius Website: https://www.nebius.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius X: https://x.com/nebiusai

🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups 🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast Alex Ren is the Founding Partner of Fellows Fund and the organizer of Fellows Forum. A former entrepreneur, Alex has spent the last decade building a high-quality community of AI leaders, researchers, and tech executives—bridging the gap between deep technology and venture capital. In this conversation, Alex explains how Fellows Fund is rethinking the traditional VC model through a “fellowship” of 36 AI leaders who provide hands-on support and industry access to startups. He shares his core investment philosophy—“traction is all you need”—and why founders must operate aggressively to stay ahead in today’s “Wild West” era of AI. We also dive into the three technologies Alex believes will be most disruptive in 2026: • AI-generated coding • Video generation • Physical AI in robotics 👤 About the Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexchengmingren X: https://x.com/AlexFellowsFund Fellows Fund: https://www.fellowsfundvc.com/ Fellows Fund LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fellows-fund 🚀  About Nebius for Startups Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth. Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster. 👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups 🌐 About Nebius Website: https://www.nebius.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius X: https://x.com/nebiusai

In this episode, host Anubhav Maheshwari speaks with Lukas Pankau, co-founder and CEO of Industrial Next, an award winner from the NEAS Robotics and Physical AI Summit and Awards competition.  Lukas shares how his and co-founder Alan’s experience at Tesla during the Model 3 ramp inspired them to bring modern autonomy and intelligence into factories, where industrial robots are typically pre-programmed and lack contextual understanding. He explains Industrial Next’s vision of an “AI autopilot for a factory,” including the need for deeper robot control than many manufacturers currently expose, the importance of integrating with legacy factory systems, and cases where the company provides hardware alongside optimized software.  Lukas also describes how improved line visibility and data can transform productivity, supply-chain responsiveness, and even enable more localized, modular manufacturing—reducing waste from scrapped production lines and supporting reshoring for cost and national security reasons. He closes with near-term goals of running a fully designed production line with their equipment, ongoing hiring needs across AI and engineering roles, and his success metric: being able to buy electronics built locally at a lower price than today. More about Lukas: Lukas Pankau is the Co-Founder and CEO (sometimes referred to as co-CEO or CTO in various sources) of Industrial Next (also styled as IndustrialNext or industrialnext.ai), a startup focused on autonomous manufacturing, robotics, and AI-driven production systems, particularly for industries like electric vehicles (EV) and general manufacturing. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukaspankau/ Company Website: https://industrialnext.ai/ For more information about Nebius, head to Nebius.com Follow us on X @nebius.ai

Curious about the latest in autonomous systems? In this episode of The Nubius for Startups podcast (special series from the Nebius Robotics and Physical AI Summit and awards competition), host Anubhav Maheshwari speaks with Mustafa Bal, co-founder and CEO of Nomadic ML. In recent years, the realm of autonomous systems has experienced rapid evolution and innovation, paving the way for groundbreaking changes in how these systems interact with the world around them. At the forefront of this transformative wave is Nomadic ML, co-founded by Mustafa Bal. This pioneering company is setting new standards in the development and deployment of autonomous technologies, and its journey is nothing short of fascinating. Bal shares his background in ML infrastructure at Snowflake and Microsoft’s AI frameworks team (including work on open-source libraries like DeepSpeed, ONNX Runtime, and PyTorch, and early work around GPT-3 and Azure ML), and explains how Nomadic ML evolved from a general ML tuning solution into a vision AI data layer focused on automating data labeling for autonomous systems. The conversation centers on identifying long-tail edge cases in operational video and multi-sensor data (dash cam, LiDAR, and logs), using a constellation of open and closed multimodal models, and adding internal innovations to improve contextual motion understanding across video chunks. They cover the tradeoffs between open vs. closed models (capabilities, inference costs, token pricing), fine-tuning and feedback loops driven by engineers accepting/rejecting/editing surfaced events, and the importance of reaching 95%+ accuracy while minimizing human involvement to optional verification.  Learn how they're transforming the landscape with human-level insights in data processing. Listen now!  Find out more about Mustafa: Mustafa Bal is the co-founder and CEO of NomadicML (also stylized as Nomadic ML), a San Francisco-based AI company focused on visual AI for physical autonomy. The company specializes in semantic video understanding, turning raw video footage (e.g., from autonomous vehicles, robotics, and fleets) into structured datasets, edge case detection, and actionable insights using generative AI and video-language models to accelerate autonomy development. Find out more: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mstfbl  GitHub: https://github.com/mstfbl  Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=LUPy_-IAAAAJ  Company Website: https://www.nomadicml.com  For more information about Nebius, head to Nebius.com Follow us on X @nebius.ai 

Sean Mitchell is the Vice President of Customer Operations at Gather AI, where he has spent the last six years scaling the company from its early advisory stages through to its Series B funding. With a deep focus on customer experience, Sean bridges the gap between complex robotics and the practical, high-stakes needs of modern warehouse managers. In this episode, we sit down with Sean to discuss how Gather AI is transforming "the black box" of the warehouse using autonomous drones and Vision AI. We explore the company’s fascinating origin story rooted in Carnegie Mellon PhD research and military-grade autonomous helicopters. We also discuss how they’ve successfully pivoted that tech to help retailers and manufacturers never lose a pallet again. Sean explains why they choose off-the-shelf hardware over custom robots, the challenges of flying drones in -30°F freezers, and his vision for a future where a fully digitized warehouse is the industry standard. Find out more: Sean Mitchell is the Vice President of Customer Operations at Gather AI. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seantmitchell/ X (Twitter): https://x.com/gather_ai (or @gather_ai) Company website: https://www.gather.ai/ For more information about Nebius head to Nebius.com Follow us on X @nebius.ai

Matt Schwartz is a biomedical engineer and the CEO and Founder of Virgo. Before launching Virgo in 2017, he served as a product manager at Intuitive Surgical, where he worked on the Da Vinci Robotic surgery system. Inside the Episode In this episode, Matt sits down to discuss how Virgo has captured the world’s largest dataset of gastrointestinal endoscopy videos, now totaling over 3 million procedures. Matt shares the founding story of the company, the challenges of convincing hospitals to embrace cloud storage, and the technical hurdles of building "EndoDINO," a self-supervised AI foundation model for endoscopic imaging. The conversation explores the massive potential for AI to detect signals for chronic kidney, liver, and cardiovascular diseases that are currently undetectable to the human eye. Matt also breaks down how Virgo is partnering with pharmaceutical companies to accelerate clinical trials and his ultimate goal: making video recording the default standard of care for every procedure. Find out more: Matt Schwartz is the CEO and Founder of Virgo. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mzschwartz88/ X (Twitter): https://x.com/virgosvs (or @virgosvs) Company website: https://virgosvs.com/ For more information about Nebius head to Nebius.com Follow us on X @nebius.ai

In this episode of The Nebius for Startups podcast special series from the Nebius Robotics and Physical AI Summit and Awards, Anubhav Maheshwari speaks with Kangwook Lee (KW), Chief Business Officer of RLWRLD, an award winner in the foundation models, robot brains, and runtime category. Dive into how they are revolutionizing the robotics industry with their innovative approach to dexterous hand manipulation and humanoid integration. From collaborations with leading East Asian companies to preparing a global expansion, Real World's story is a testament to the potential of combining cutting-edge technology with strategic partnerships. Discover the key challenges and milestones they've tackled along the way. Listen now and stay ahead in the robotics revolution!  #Robotics #AI #Innovation #StartupJourney Find out more about KW: Kangwook Lee serves as the Chief Business Officer at RLWRLD Inc, a company focused on building real-world intelligence and revolutionizing robotics through Robotics Foundation Models (RFM) and physical AI technologies.  The company, launched with significant seed funding (around 21 billion KRW in 2025), has partnerships with major manufacturers in South Korea and Japan and has achieved recognition, including 1st place in Foundation Models, Robot Brains & Runtime at the 2025 Nebius Robotics & Physical AI Awards. LinkedIn: https://kr.linkedin.com/in/kangwook  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kangwook  Company website: https://www.rlwrld.ai/  X (Twitter): https://x.com/RLWRLD_ai (or @RLWRLD_ai) For more information about Nebius, head to Nebius.com Follow us on X @nebius.ai