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ScaleUp:AI!

The AI Innovators Defining the Next Century

Sebastian Mallaby – Pulitzer Prize finalist, Washington Post columnist, and author of The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence – has spent decades tracking how transformative technology reshapes wealth and power. In this conversation, he makes the case that the choices being made right now by AI builders will define the next century of innovation.

Deven Parekh | Managing Director, Insight Partners
Sebastian Mallaby | Author, "The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence", Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)

State of the Frontier: How Rapidly Advancing AI is Impacting Builders and Investors

This session brings together an investor perspective on what's changed in the AI landscape over the past year, and a researcher/founder's view of where the most consequential innovation is actually happening. Together, they'll explore what it means to back, and build, companies at this particular moment in history.

Lonne Jaffe | Managing Director, Insight Partners
Alex Ratner | Cofounder & CEO, Snorkel AI

AI Deployment Inside Global Financial Markets

Ryan New leads the infrastructure and technical operations that run ICE's global markets across 26 regulatory jurisdictions. He discusses what it means to deploy AI inside some of the world's most critical financial systems: the opportunities, the constraints, and what the markets of tomorrow might look like when machine intelligence runs at their core.

Sonali Basak | Chief Investment Strategist, iCapital
Ryan New | CIO & Senior Vice President, Operations, ICE

AI and the Future of National Security

General (ret.) Tim Haugh, former director of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, brings a firsthand perspective from the front lines of national security. When adversaries and allies alike have access to the same powerful tools, what does protecting a nation actually look like?

Nick Sinai | Managing Director, Insight Partners
Gen.(Ret.) Timothy D. Haugh | (Fmr) Commander, U.S. Cyber Command, NSA Director

Coffee & Networking Break

Context is the Moat: Why the Data Layer Decides Who Wins

Every enterprise has access to the same frontier models. The differentiation is in what you give those models to work with. This panel makes the case that the context and data layer — not the model, not the prompt — is where enterprise AI compounds, and where most deployments fall flat. The conversation spans the architectural challenge, the product reality, and the financial stakes of getting it right.

George Mathew | Managing Director, Insight Partners
Tasso Argyros | VP Engineering, Databricks
Ido Gaver | Founder & CEO, Sweep
Srikant Gokulnatha | SVP, AI Data Platform, Oracle

The Last Mile: How AI Actually Gets Deployed

Enterprise AI investment has never been higher — and neither has the gap between 'we're doing AI' and AI that runs in production, earns trust, and compounds over time. This panel brings together the people working the last mile: the operators building the motion, platforms enabling it, and the companies measuring whether it worked. The conversation is practical and specific for what it takes to get AI from a pilot to a permanent part of how a business runs.

Jon Fernandez | Cofounder & CEO, Dividend AI
Raphael Ouzan | Founder & CEO, A.Team
Srikrishnan Ganesan | Founder & CEO, Rocketlane
Assaf Resnick | Founder & CEO, BigPanda

Lunch

Scaling Enterprise AI: Inside the Databricks Story

Ron Gabrisko helped scale Databricks from under $1M to a $6.9B revenue run rate — and in doing so, built a front-row seat to how the world's largest enterprises actually adopt AI. Ron shares the playbook behind Databricks' hypergrowth — open source business models, consumption pricing, hiring technical sellers, and knowing when to reinvent — then turns the lens outward on what he's seeing inside his customers: why most enterprises are stuck in AI sprawl, what's driving runaway costs, and how the best organizations are finally closing the gap between AI investment and real ROI.

Mike DeSantis | Managing Director, Insight Partners
Ron Gabrisko | Chief Revenue Officer, Databricks

Fireside with Sarah Yager, Human Rights & Responsible Deployment Lead at OpenAI

Sarah Yager is the first human rights and responsible deployment lead at OpenAI, bringing decades of human rights and government work — from the Pentagon to the UN to the White House — to one of the most consequential questions in tech: what does accountability look like when AI runs at scale, and what does responsibility require of the companies building it?

Hilary Gosher | Managing Director, Insight Partners
Sarah Yager | Human Rights and Responsible Deployment Lead, OpenAI

Building the AI-Native Company: Teams, Structure, and What Changes

The most consequential AI decisions being made right now aren't about which model to use. They're about how to organize around it — who owns what, what roles disappear, what new ones get created, and how a company scales capability without scaling headcount. This panel brings together leaders who are making those decisions from inside companies at different stages of transformation, with a candid look at what's actually changed and what's still being figured out.

Chitra Nawbatt | Author & Podcast Host of The CodeBreaker Mindset™
François Ajenstat | Founder & CEO, Golden Analytics
Alex Atzberger | CEO, Optimizely
Mario Ciabarra | Founder & CEO, Quantum Metric

Coffee & Networking Break

AI and Security: New Threats, New Opportunities

AI is rewriting both the attack surface and the defense playbook. Whether you're a cybersecurity company or a non-security business trying to navigate an increasingly complex threat landscape, this session cuts through the noise: what's real, what's hype, and what you should actually be doing to keep your business and customers safe. For security-focused companies, it's a perspective on where the biggest opportunities to expand and differentiate now lie.

Gregor Stewart | Chief AI Officer, SentinelOne
Eric Fourrier | Cofounder & CEO, GitGuardian
Vyas Sekar | Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
Ron Dovich | Chief AI Officer, Brinqa
Mark Bower | Chief Strategy Officer, Anjuna Security

The Future Dev Stack

A candid conversation on how AI is reshaping the way software gets built, tested, and shipped — from AI-native tooling and autonomous agents to what it means to build for (and sell to) engineering teams today.

Praveen Akkiraju | Managing Director, Insight Partners
Krishna Gade | Founder & CEO, Fiddler
David Colwell | VP, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Tricentis
Abhinav Asthana | Founder & CEO, Postman

The Compounding Intelligence Race

Every enterprise today borrows its intelligence from a frontier lab. The differentiation is in what you build on top, and whether it compounds. This panel brings together the people defining what proprietary AI actually looks like: how enterprises move from prompt engineering to models that grow more valuable every year, and what the infrastructure to get there really requires.

Ganesh Bell | Managing Director, Insight Partners
Daniel Shimoni | Cofounder & CEO, Modus
Jackson Stokes | Cofounder & CEO, TrainLoop
Michael D'Angelo | Member of the Technical Staff, OpenAI

Cocktail Reception