Andy Konwinski, cofounder of Databricks and Perplexity, is a computer scientist and investor focused on AI, data infrastructure, and research-driven startups. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science at UC Berkeley, where he contributed to Apache Hadoop and co-created Apache Mesos and Apache Spark. He later cofounded Laude Ventures and Laude Institute, including a $100 million commitment to support AI researchers.

Johnny Ho, cofounder and chief strategy officer of Perplexity, helps lead product at the AI search company. Before Perplexity, he worked as a high-frequency trader at Tower Research Capital and as an engineer at Quora. A Harvard math and computer science graduate, Ho was also a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics, ranking first in the world in 2012 with a perfect score.

Denis Yarats, cofounder and CTO of Perplexity, previously worked at Microsoft, Quora, and Facebook AI Research. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from NYU and has research experience in machine learning and reinforcement learning. At Perplexity, he helped build the company’s AI answer engine, which combines large language models with real-time, source-backed search.

Aravind Srinivas, cofounder and CEO of Perplexity, has become one of the most visible challengers to Google in the AI search race. Born in Chennai and trained at IIT Madras and UC Berkeley, he worked at OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind before launching Perplexity in 2022 with Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. The company built its reputation around citation-backed answers rather than traditional search links, reaching a reported $20 billion valuation in 2025 and making Srinivas one of the standout founders of the generative AI boom.

Matei Zaharia, cofounder and CTO of Databricks, is one of the most influential computer scientists behind modern big-data and AI infrastructure. While a PhD student at UC Berkeley, he created Apache Spark, the open-source data-processing engine that revolutionized large-scale analytics and became foundational to enterprise data platforms worldwide. Zaharia went on to help build Databricks into a multibillion-dollar company, translating academic research into commercial cloud-native tools used by thousands of organizations. Known for bridging deep research with practical engineering, he remains a defining architect of the data and AI stack powering today’s digital economy.

Ion Stoica, computer scientist and entrepreneur, is cofounder and executive chairman of Databricks, one of the world’s most valuable data and AI companies. A professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Stoica is also a co-creator of Apache Spark, the open-source framework that revolutionized big data processing. Under his leadership, Databricks has scaled into a multibillion-dollar enterprise serving global enterprises with cloud-based analytics and AI platforms. Known for bridging academia and industry, Stoica has become a leading figure in advancing the future of data infrastructure and machine learning.