Meet The Cerebral Valley Heavy Weights
The founders that will define the future of AI, curated by Newcomer & Index Ventures
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 faster than current GPUs can keep up. Etched makes chips that are specifically designed for inference that can help close this gap.
Agent Platforms
/dev/agents
Founders: David Singleton, Hugo Barra, and Nicholas Jitkoff
What it does: /dev/agents is building a new operating system for AI agents.
Why it’s on the list: After months of rapid growth and excitement from early adopters, the team is ramping up towards the launch of its beta. It secured a hot $56 million seed round co-led by Index and CapitalG in November of last year.
Pigment
Founders: Eléonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli
What it does: Pigment is an AI-powered business planning and performance management platform.
Why it’s on the list: Even though Pigment was founded in 2019 — long before the current generative AI boom — doubling down on AI products has made growth take off like a rocketship. In the last year the company has doubled ARR, grown its customer base by 50%, and tripled the number of Fortune 500 customers.
Quilter
Founder: Sergiy Nesterenko
What it does: Quilter is automating circuit board design for AI chips using physics-driven reinforcement learning.
Why it’s on the list: Quilter has now demonstrated its successful design and manufacturing of boards that typically take professionals close to three months to design that have been applied and brought up on the first attempt. Quilter is working closely with leaders from aerospace, automotive, and consumer companies to bring its chips into the market quickly.
Agency
Founders: Elias Torres
What it does: Agency is building Kai, an AI agent for customer success.
Why it’s on the list: Agency is already helping fast growing customers replace layers of manual customer success work, including MotherDuck and HappyRobot.
Phaidra
Founders: Jim Gao, Veda Panneershelvam, and Katie Hoffman
What it does: Phaidra makes AI agents that handle the daily operations of AI factories, like power, cooling, and workforce management systems.
Why it’s on the list: Phaidra’s agents are the rare breed that are completing tasks for the physical world. It’s backed by Collaborative Fund, NVIDIA, and Index Ventures, among others.
Data
Surge AI
Founder: Edwin Chen
What it does: Surge AI runs data labeling and reinforcement learning programs for AI models.
Why it’s on the list: Surge has earned deep trust from the top AI labs that it partners with, including Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The company landed $1 billion in revenue before raising any outside capital.
Handshake
Founders: Garrett Lord, Ben Christensen, and Scott Ringwelski
What it does: Handshake connects large AI labs with experts to help train and fine-tune new models through its careers and networking platform.
Why it’s on the list: Handshake pulled off a major restructure this year to double down on its Handshake AI product offering, and it’s growing fast: its new data-labeling business crossed $100 million in ARR in just 8 months.
Creative
Higgsfield
Founders: Alex Mashrabov and Yerzat Dulat
What it does: Higgsfield is an AI video generator tool for creators.
Why it’s on the list: Higgsfield is the largest startup in generative video, growing faster than Cursor and Lovable, and crossed $50 million in run rate in just five months after product launch. It’s raised $66 million so far from investors like GFT Ventures and Menlo Ventures.
Vizcom
Founders: Jordan Taylor and Kaelan Richards
What it does: Vizcom gives designers AI tools for rendering sketches into 3D plans and objects.
Why it’s on the list: Just last week, Vizcom announced its $27 million Series B led by Collaborative Fund on the back of its fast growth, with over 700,000 designers using its tools.
Gamma
Founders: Grant Lee, James Fox, and Jon Noronha
What it does: Gamma is an AI tool for generating web design projects, presentations, social media posts, and other business documents.
Why it’s on the list: Gamma is the rare early-stage AI application startup that’s actually profitable and has subsequently eschewed most VC funding. That hasn’t stopped the team from reaching over 50 million users already and hitting $50 million in ARR by mid-2025.