ByteDance is a global incubator of platforms at the cutting edge of commerce, content, entertainment and enterprise services - over 2.5bn people interact with ByteDance products including TikTok.

Creation is the core of ByteDance's purpose. Our products are built to help imaginations thrive. This is doubly true of the teams that make our innovations possible. 

Together, we inspire creativity and enrich life - a mission we aim towards achieving every day. At ByteDance, we create together and grow together. That's how we drive impact - for ourselves, our company, and the users we serve. We are committed to building a safe, healthy and positive online environment for all our users.

We have over 110,000 employees based in more than 30 countries globally. Join us.

Global Leader AI

Bain Capital, LP is an American private investment firm based in Boston, Massachusetts, with around $185 billion of assets under management.

Chief Information Security Officer

Visa Inc. is a global leader in digital payments, operating one of the largest electronic payment networks in the world. Founded in 1958, the company has grown to facilitate 276 billion transactions annually across more than 200 countries and territories, with a total payment volume of $15 trillion. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Visa collaborates with approximately 14,500 financial institutions and serves over 130 million merchant locations worldwide.

Visa offers a wide range of payment solutions, including debit, credit, and prepaid cards, as well as commercial payment systems tailored for businesses and government entities. The company emphasizes technological innovation through its VisaNet processing network, mobile payment integrations, and advanced cybersecurity measures. With over 3.5 billion Visa cards in circulation, Visa continues to expand its global presence and enhance transaction security, supporting consumers, merchants, and financial institutions alike.

Head of Visa Ventures

Okta Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Okta, partners with and invests in early-stage startups building identity-enabled platforms and security-focused solutions.

Head of Okta Ventures

YZi Labs is an investment firm that supports ventures in Web3, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and healthcare/biotech. Managed by the family office of CZ, the founder of Binance, YZi Labs focuses on innovative technologies and has rebranded from its previous identity as Binance Labs.

The firm invests in companies at all stages, from early startups to more established businesses, provided they demonstrate strong fundamentals in its target sectors. YZi Labs has a diverse portfolio that includes notable investments such as zkPass, LayerZero, Axelar, Dune, and StarryNift, which span various blockchain and AI projects. This wide-ranging approach allows YZi Labs to contribute to the growth of transformative technologies across different industries.

Investment Director

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core. OpenAI is dedicated to putting that alignment of interests first — ahead of profit.

To achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. Our investment in diversity, equity, and inclusion is ongoing, executed through a wide range of initiatives, and championed and supported by leadership.

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

Data Engineering and Science

Index Ventures is a prominent venture capital firm founded in 1996 in Geneva, Switzerland. Co-founded by Neil Rimer, the firm has expanded its presence to London, San Francisco, and New York City, reflecting its global reach.

The firm offers investment services across various stages of company development, from seed funding to IPO. Its recent initiative, Index Origin, combines the focus of a dedicated seed fund with the resources of a multi-stage global firm, enabling it to support startups from their earliest stages. Index Ventures has collaborated with notable digital companies such as Figma, Wiz, Roblox, and Notion, and maintains a diverse portfolio of over 140 companies across different sectors and geographies.

Partner

Neo4j, the Graph Database & Analytics leader, helps organizations find hidden relationships and patterns across billions of data connections deeply, easily, and quickly. Customers leverage the structure of their connected data to reveal new ways of solving their most pressing business problems with Neo4j's full graph stack and a vibrant community of developers, data scientists, and architects across hundreds of Fortune 500 companies.

Yelp is a California-based online platform that publishes user reviews and recommendations on service providers in areas such as restaurants, beauty salons and contractors.

Engineering Manager - Applied Machine Learning

T. Rowe Price is a premiere global asset management organization, actively investing in opportunities to help people thrive in an evolving world. 

Headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, we provide a broad range of investment solutions across equity, fixed income, and multi-asset capabilities for clients around the world—from individuals to advisors to institutions to retirement plan sponsors.

Our active, independent investing approach has guided how we do business for more than 85 years. Our professionals have diverse perspectives, but are united behind a commitment to rigorous research. They collaborate to identify market risks and opportunities that can give clients sharper insights and an investment edge.  We maintain a long-term view, aiming to deliver consistently strong performance in up and down markets.

 Tech Lead Private Growth Investor

Bessemer Venture Partners helps entrepreneurs lay strong foundations to build and forge long-standing companies. With more than 145 IPOs and 300 portfolio companies in the enterprise, consumer and healthcare spaces, Bessemer supports founders and CEOs from their early days through every stage of growth. Bessemer’s global portfolio has included Pinterest, Shopify, Twilio, Yelp, LinkedIn, PagerDuty, DocuSign, Wix, Fiverr, and Toast and has more than $18 billion of assets under management. Bessemer has teams of investors and partners located in Tel Aviv, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York, London, Boston, and Bangalore. Born from innovations in steel more than a century ago, Bessemer’s storied history has afforded its partners the opportunity to celebrate and scrutinize its best investment decisions (see Memos) and also learn from its mistakes (see Anti-Portfolio).

Pear VC is a seed-stage venture capital firm founded in 2013 in Menlo Park by Pejman Nozad and Mar Hershenson. The firm focuses on pre-seed and seed investments across sectors such as AI, Consumer, SaaS, Healthcare, FinTech, Climate, Enterprise, and Biotech, and has backed 200+ startups including DoorDash, Gusto, and Dropbox—with a collective valuation exceeding $200B. Beyond funding, Pear VC runs the Pear Garage accelerator, offering mentorship, community, and operational support, along with recruiting services, founder coaching, and access to top industry networks. Its team of former founders and operators provides hands-on guidance to help early-stage companies scale effectively.

Republic is a financial technology company that specializes in investment-related services in the private markets, which include a retail investment platform, a blockchain advisory service, and a private capital division. Republic has deployed over $2.6 billion in investments, supported over 2,000 ventures, with a community of over 2.5M users across 150 countries. 

Republic Ventures (formerly known as Republic Capital) is Republic’s VC arm, and provides private access to pre-seed to series A investment opportunities to our network of accredited investors, family offices and institutional investors.

Point72 Asset Management is a global firm led by Steven Cohen that invests in multiple asset classes and strategies worldwide. Resting on more than a quarter-century of investing experience, we seek to be the industry's premier asset manager through delivering superior risk-adjusted returns, adhering to the highest ethical standards, and offering the greatest opportunities to the industry's brightest talent. We're inventing the future of finance by revolutionizing how we develop our people and how we use data to shape our thinking.

Informed Ventures is an arm of GSR Ventures ($3B+ AUM) focused on early-stage transformative companies for GSR Ventures in the United States. 

Informed Ventures invests in founders and startups who are dedicated to building products and services that drive change and redefine markets. Its team of physicians, entrepreneurs, and engineers apply their deep industry knowledge to help founders scale companies and deliver long-term growth and success. 

The firm invests in high-impact companies in digital health, SaaS, and consumer products and services, including vertical applications of AI. 

Antler is the investor backing the world's most driven founders, from day zero to greatness. Founded on the belief that people innovating is the key to building a better future, we partner with people across six continents to launch and scale high-potential startups that address meaningful opportunities and challenges. Knowing that exceptional founders can come from anywhere with any background, we have offices in 25 cities, including Austin, New York, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Bangalore, Jakarta, Portugal, Singapore, Seoul, Spain, Tokyo, and Sydney. Our global community backs people from the beginning with co-founder matching, deep business model validation, initial capital, expansion support, and follow-on funding. Fueled by a personal passion that goes beyond traditional investing, we have helped create and invested in more than 850 startups across a wide range of industries and technologies, with the goal of backing more than 6,000 by 2030.

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Past Speakers

Chetan Velivela

Mark Sutton

David Rolf

Austin Arensberg

Jing Xiong

Angad Singh

Jahanvi Sardana

Philip Rathle

Thavidu Ranatunga

Emma Norchet

Elliott Robinson

Harris Stolzenberg

Chris DN

Ishan Sinha

David Yin

Rio Hodges