This Year's Winners
Meet the startups building what’s next in AI infrastructure. On stage at 5:30 PM on Day 1.
He previously led ML infrastructure for autonomy at Nuro and Zoox, and was a Principal Engineer at Microsoft, where he worked on large-scale data and machine learning platforms across Azure, Microsoft Research, and other product groups.
His work sits at the intersection of applied research and large-scale ML systems.
Linghua Jin is Cofounder and CEO of CocoIndex, an open-source, Python-native framework for context engineering in production AI systems. CocoIndex incrementally builds search index and knowledge graphs over codebases, meeting notes, slack, inboxes, and videos for agents to reason over fresh, structured data, at scale.
With a background in large-scale indexing and data infrastructure, she previously led engineering and product efforts at Google, building core systems that power Search and Health AI.
Rishabh Mehrotra is the Co-founder & CEO of Pavo AI, building enterprise superintelligence -- learning-loop infrastructure that turns tribal knowledge, experimentation, and agent execution into a compounding engine for data-led improvement across production systems.
Prior to Pavo, Rishabh was Head of AI at Sourcegraph (developing AI coding assistants), and Staff Scientist at Spotify, where he led multiple ML projects from basic research to production across 400M+ users. His research focuses on ecosystem learning, lifelong learning for multi-agent systems, causal inference in coupled enterprise systems, and multi-objective optimization of recommender and creator ecosystems. Rishabh holds a PhD in Machine Learning from UCL and has 60+ research papers and patents at venues including KDD, NeurIPS, WWW, RecSys, and WSDM.
He was CPO at Tableau from the early startup days through its IPO and Salesforce acquisition, then CPO at Amplitude. He's helped shape two of the most important product companies in analytics history, and he's watched every wave of this industry from the inside.
Now he's founder and CEO of Golden Analytics. Golden is built for data teams who are tired of the tradeoffs: the depth of self-service analytics without the rigidity, the accessibility of modern design tools, and AI that actually augments how analysts work instead of getting in the way. It launched in April 2026 with backing from NEA and Madrona.
Francois believes the best products are love letters to the people who use them. He's been in this industry long enough to know what's broken. Golden is his answer.
Agents run 50x faster than humans, but the tools they rely on were built for humans. An agent reasoning over a codebase, a conversation graph, a document corpus, or a stream of events needs that data fresh, organized, and cheap to query — not just on the first call, but throughout the long run.
This Year's Winners
Meet the startups building what’s next in AI infrastructure. On stage at 5:30 PM on Day 1.
Brad Heller is the CTO and co-founder of Tower.dev, a next generation data platform for Data + AI apps that use Iceberg storage. Tower.dev is a platform as a service that solves infrastructure problems for data engineering teams. Prior to founding Tower.dev, Brad worked on the control plane at Snowflake. Brad is located in Berlin, Germany, but was born and raised on the west coast of the US.
Step Into the AI Spotlight
Zero Prime Ventures, the team behind AI Council, is proud to announce our 3rd annual AI Launchpad where six exceptional AI startups will be chosen to showcase at AI Council 2026 to builders and investors.
This isn't just another pitch competition. Instead, we're hand-selecting and recognizing AI's most promising startups based on team, technical implementation and market potential.
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
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Applications are Closed
Who Should Apply?
- Engineer-founders building B2B AI companies
- Pre-seed and seed stage (raised between $0-$5M)
- Focus on AI infrastructure & applications
- Strong technical foundation and demo-ready product
Presentation Format
- 10-minute demo slot
- Show technical innovation / product demo
- Optional call-to-action for beta users, design partners or funding
- Supportive, no-pressure environment with no judges or competition
Why Being at AI Council Matters
Since 2015, our annual conference has been the launchpad for breakout companies in AI & data. Being recognized as an AI Launchpad startup gives you the opportunity to present in front of:
- Other engineer-founders who are also building data & AI companies
- Investors focused on scouting promising AI startups
- Potential customers, talent and business development partners
Winners Will Receive
Event Access
Up to 2 passes to AI Council ($1499 value per ticket)
Stage Time
Dedicated demo slot in front of AI & data leaders
Media Package
Professional stage photos and videos of your presentation
Conference Presence
Rub shoulders with other founders, engineers and investors
Brand Exposure
We extend your reach post-conference to our 100K-strong network
Expanded Network
Connect with potential customers, partners and mentors