Meet The Cerebral Valley Heavy Weights
Description
Introducing the Cerebral Valley Heavy Weights
We pride ourselves on bringing together a group of the most exciting AI founders in the industry at each Cerebral Valley AI Summit. Our attendees have gone on to build massively successful businesses and strike major deals with one another.
This time, we wanted to call our shot.
We’re proud to share with you our first ever list of Cerebral Valley Heavy Weights. We partnered with Index Ventures to help us select and narrow it down to the final 16 recipients.
We looked at the people who have been attending our summits and some of the best founders we’ve been connected with over the last year. We were looking for the same things that all the VCs are looking for — an exciting product, talented founders, AI-fueled momentum — and put together a list (albeit without the rigorous financial analysis investors are doing behind the scenes). And we consulted with Index, who is sponsoring the summit, to make sure we were bringing together a great group of startups.
The Cerebral Valley Heavy Weights are the founders who’ve developed and delivered cutting-edge AI, acquired customers at lightning speed, and who’ve wowed investors with their dedication and product growth.
We’ve divided these up across 5 sectors in AI where these startups are building.
Some of these founders, like David Singleton at /dev/agents and Alex Mashrabov at Higgsfield, have been attending our summits since before they even had a company. We’re excited that we get to honor them in this way while we’ve been watching them grow. The founders of Handshake, Gamma, Hex, and many more have been dedicated summit attendees.
Founders from the Heavy Weights are coming to a dinner the night before the summit that we’re hosting with Index — and most of them will be attending in person next week in San Francisco. Three of our Heavy Weights — Eléonore Crespo, Parag Agrawal, and Tudor Achim — are leading discussion groups at Cerebral Valley.
See the full list of Cerebral Valley Heavy Weights Below:
Developer Infrastructure
Parallel Web Systems
Founder: Parag Agrawal
What it does: Parallel is creating web search infrastructure for AI.
Why it’s on the list: As agents move out of experimental budgets and see real enterprise uptick, the way we interact with the web once more agents are using it will need to change. For a small startup, Agrawal brings a level of experience that could make it a serious competitor.
Hex
Founders: Glen Takahashi, Barry McCardel, and Caitlin Colgrove
What it does: Hex helps businesses with AI-powered data analytics, searchable via natural language prompts.
Why it’s on the list: Hex is building tools that help enterprise customers well outside of the technical bubble better understand their data. The company raised a $70 million Series C in May led by Avra. A16z, Amplify, Box Group, Redpoint, Sequoia, and Snowflake Ventures also wrote checks.
Harmonic
Founders: Tudor Achim and Vlad Tenev
What it does: Harmonic is developing mathematical super intelligence, or AI systems trained in math rather than language.
Why it’s on the list: Following Harmonic’s gold medal–level performance at the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad, the team is rolling out its flagship model, Aristotle, to mathematicians, researchers, engineers, professionals, and students.
LiveKit
Founders: Russ d’Sa and David Zhao
What it does: LiveKit is a developer platform for real-time voice, video, and physical AI agents.
Why it’s on the list: LiveKit partnered with OpenAI last year as the infrastructure partner to build apps using the same technology powering ChatGPT’s Voice Mode, which itself was built on top of LiveKit. Over 200,000 developers from companies like xAI, Salesforce, and Spotify have built their voice AI agents using the LiveKit’s cloud infrastructure, which handles billions of sessions annually.
Chroma
Founders: Jeff Huber and Anton Troynikov
What it does: Chroma is an open-source search and retrieval database for AI applications.
Why it’s on the list: Some of the AI space’s hottest builders and angels have backed Chroma, including Naval Ravikant, Max and Jack Altman, Jordan Tigani from Motherduck, Guillermo Rauch from Vercel, Akshay Kothari from Notion, Amjad Masad from Replit, and Spencer Kimball from CockroachDB.
Hardware
Etched
Founders: Gavin Uberti, Chris Zhu, and Robert Wachen
What it does: Etched manufactures specialized chips for AI inference.
Why it’s on the list: AI inference demand is increasing fast
United States
