Afleveringen
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What if AI’s next breakthrough isn’t a larger model, but a different way of thinking about intelligence?
In this episode, Markiesha Patrice, Head of Startup Platform & Community at Nebius, sits down with Sudip Roy, co-founder and CTO of Adaption. After helping build AI infrastructure during the scaling era at Google and Cohere, Sudip now argues that the industry’s future won’t be defined by ever-larger models alone.
He explains why leading foundation models are converging, why enterprises should think in terms of AI systems instead of individual models, and how continuous adaptation could become the next major shift in artificial intelligence.
0:00 - Intro teaser: The days of monolithic AI are over
0:47 - Challenging scaling laws: how Adaption Labs started
3:18 - The three pillars: data, continual learning, interfaces
6:52 - Adaptation is all you need: the future of AI models
8:40 - Proportional compute and the AI energy gap
11:00 - Solving the 5% reliability gap for enterprises
11:57 - Advice for builders: take contrarian positions
14:36 - Adaptive Data: synthetic data in 240+ languages
15:19 - Outro
What You'll Learn:
-Why leading foundation models are beginning to converge and what that means for the future of AI.
-Why thinking about tasks instead of models changes how enterprises should build AI systems.
-Why enterprise data remains AI’s biggest untapped resource.-How continuous learning closes the 5% enterprise reliability gap caused by domain-specific organizational data.
-Why challenging industry consensus can create breakthrough startup opportunities.
Learn more at: https://nebius.com/startups/podcast
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Henry Wang built a consumer app that 10 million people use for 150 minutes a day. For most of that time, the assumption in the industry was that you needed a frontier model to deliver a great AI experience.
Henry found a different answer.In this episode, Joshua Liss, Head of Media and Entertainment at Nebius, sits down with Henry (Lifan) Wang, Co-founder of Kaon Labs, to get into how you actually scale a consumer AI product. Not just find product-market fit, but build the infrastructure that lets you serve tens of millions of users, test 100 models a week, and generate a trillion tokens a day without it costing you everything.
Henry explains why personalization at consumer scale isn't a recommendation system anymore, how Kaon Labs replaced two-week A/B tests with Elo ranking that resolves in two hours, why entertainment is the right beachhead for consumer AI right now, and what in-experience advertising could look like.
He also shares his contrarian take on what actually separates the consumer AI companies that break out from the ones that spike and die.
0:00 - Intro teaser: 10M users, 115 minutes a day & 1 trillion tokens
0:20 - How Kaon Labs built AI infrastructure for 10 million users
3:02 - Why AI roleplay is changing entertainment forever
5:10 - Hyper-personalization vs. recommendation algorithms
8:18 - Why scaling consumer AI is harder than enterprise AI
11:33 - Building and evaluating 100 AI models every week
16:08 - Monetizing AI with subscriptions & immersive advertising
19:43 - Rapid fire: The AI-native leaders every startup needs
22:08 - Lessons from building a 10 million user consumer AI company
25:22 - Outro
What You'll Learn:
-Why testing 100 models a week against real users is the core of Kaon Labs' competitive advantage.
-How Elo ranking replaced A/B testing: evaluating models in hours, not weeks.
-Why AI replaces recommendation systems with true personalization.
-Why entertainment is the ideal proving ground for consumer AI.
-Product Market Fit matters, but scale is what separates breakouts from blips.
-What in-experience advertising looks like when it lives inside the story rather than interrupting it.
-The three things to look for in every key hire.
Learn more at: https://nebius.com/startups/podcast
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Brian Zhan doesn't want your business plan. In fact, if you hand him one at the seed stage, that might raise some red flags.
In this episode, Anu Maheshwari, Head of Venture Ecosystem at Nebius, sits down with Brian Zhan, partner at Striker Venture Partners. They unpack what it actually means to back people, not products, at the frontier of AI.
From reinforcement learning's generalization advantages, to recursive self-improvement loops in chip design, Brian makes the case that the VC consensus is missing the most important early bets by waiting for revenue.
Brian has been on the boards of Reflection, Skilled, and Periodic Labs. With a personal history in robotics research dating back to 2014, he maps out where the next trillion-dollar companies will emerge, why most VCs are too focused on revenue timelines to see them, and how Striker approaches seed investing with 10% of fund concentration per bet.
0:00 - Intro teaser: Why the best founders don't need a business plan
0:27 - Why Striker invests before there's a business plan
5:04 - Is AI in a bubble? Separating hype from opportunity
7:45 - How Brian identifies world-changing founders
9:24 - Reinforcement learning and the path to superintelligence
14:05 - Robotics, world models, and the future of physical AI
17:55 - Why most VCs think too small
20:18 - What Brian looks for in a founder pitch
23:37 - The OpenAI playbook & why compute partnerships matter
26:05 - Outro
What You'll Learn:
-Why a detailed business plan at seed is unnecessary.
-The precision behind frontier AI investing and why it's fundamentally different from SaaS.
-Why reinforcement learning underpins recursive self-improvement and why most investors don't actually understand it.
-How world models and simulation will accelerate robotics toward its ChatGPT moment.
-Solving energy supply by unlocking insight for everything else.
-How Striker evaluates founder-market fit in practice.
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Tavily hit one million users without a single outbound cold email.
Not because of a viral moment, but because the founder understood earlier than most that the unit economics of agentic search are fundamentally different.
When you’re returning context to an AI agent rather than links to a human, token waste, latency, and information density become the variables that determine whether your product survives in production. Tavily built its architecture around that constraint from day one, and developers noticed. After being mentioned in 200+ research papers and 1,000+ YouTube videos, Fortune 500 enterprises were already running Tavily internally before a sales conversation ever happened.
In this episode, Markiesha Patrice (Head of Startup Platform & Community at Nebius) sits down with Rotem Weiss, Founder and CEO of Tavily, to get into the technical and strategic decisions behind building the search layer for the agentic web.
Rotem breaks down why optimizing for snippet retrieval over link retrieval changes the entire architecture of a search product, how Tavily's prediction engine pre-processes likely queries to cut latency without sacrificing accuracy, and why he believes the most important GTM decision an AI infrastructure company can make in 2026 is getting integrated into the coding assistants autonomously selecting tools on behalf of engineers.
0:00 - Intro teaser: the buyer isn't a human anymore
0:25 - Guest intro & what Tavily does
0:47 - Rotem's origin story & the first check
1:40 - The real-time data gap & launching GPT Researcher
4:30 - What is agentic search? Snippets, not links
6:55 - The prediction engine that kills latency
7:55 - Why 2026 is the year of token optimization
10:05 - Inside the Nebius acquisition
11:25 - The team & the "second CEO"
12:45 - "The buyer is the AI assistant" — winning coding tools
14:30 - GPUs as rocket fuel
16:30 - One million users, zero cold emails
19:20 - "I'm the worst at everything in the company"
20:30 - Israel vs. the US founder mindset
What You'll Learn
-Why returning the right snippet rather than the right link changes the entire architecture of a search product.
-The prediction engine Tavily uses to pre-process likely queries at the website level, reducing processing overhead without sacrificing accuracy.
-Why coding assistants autonomously selecting tools in a stack are becoming the real GTM lever for AI infrastructure companies.
-The open-source to enterprise conversion motion Rotem actually used.
-How the migration from large closed-source models to fine-tuned open-source models changes the token economics for AI companies trying to get to production.
Learn more at: https://nebius.com/startups/podcast
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In October 2024, Alberto Taiuti was trying to solve a 3D asset problem and ran into a wall. The labeled data didn't exist. What he realized next reshaped the trajectory of his company.
In this episode, Josh Liss (Head of Media & Entertainment at Nebius) sits down with Alberto Taiuti, CEO and Co-founder of Reactor, the developer platform for world models. They unpack what real-time world models actually are, why they're fundamentally different from the AI video tools most people have encountered, and why he believes the era of prompting is already winding down.
Drawing on his background at Apple, where he worked on the Vision Pro, Alberto makes the case that interactive video changes what a developer platform has to be, why video models already understand 3D space (even though no one trained them to), and how shows, ads, and even software interfaces could be generated live, per user, in real time.
0:00 - Intro teaser: writing code, not prompts
0:25 - Guest intro & Reactor overview
0:47 - What is a world model?
2:19 - World models are regressive like LLMs
5:21 - Alberto's background & origin story
8:08 - The "aha" moment that changed everything
9:58 - How world models will impact media & entertainment
12:48 - "We only hire unreasonable people" — hiring philosophy
13:54 - Building in stealth: lessons from Apple
17:48 - GTA San Andreas shaped his entire career
What You'll Learn
What a world model is, in plain language, and how it differs from standard AI video generation.
Alberto's philosophy for building in stealth mode and how that impacts his team
Why Alberto believes interactive, real-time video brings code back to the center of AI development.
The insight about video models and 3D that became the foundation of Reactor.
Reactor's hiring philosophy and why "unreasonable" is the highest compliment at the company.
Alberto's three-year prediction for how applications themselves get built.
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🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast
In this episode, we sit down with Scott Kveton—serial entrepreneur, Co-founder and CEO of CaseMark, and Co-founder of the Association for AI in Legal (A4L)—to explore what it means to build across multiple generations of the internet.
With over 20 years of experience spanning Web1, Web2, Web3, and now AI, Scott has built and scaled companies at internet scale, with three successful exits and just as many hard-earned failures. From an early career at Amazon to co-founding Urban Airship and contributing to foundational technologies like OpenID and OAuth, his journey offers a front-row seat to the evolution of modern software.
Now, with CaseMark, Scott is focused on transforming the legal industry through AI—building a “litigation lifecycle” platform designed to help attorneys make sense of complex cases from intake to resolution.
We dive into Scott’s philosophy on building high-performance teams, why he believes companies should operate like clockwork—not culture—and how founders can stay focused on execution and stakeholder value. Along the way, we explore lessons from decades of building, scaling, and adapting through every major wave of the internet.
👤 About the Guest
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kveton/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/kveton
Company website: https://casemark.com/
🚀 About Nebius for Startups
Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth.
Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster.
👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🌐 About Nebius
Website: https://www.nebius.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius
X: https://x.com/nebiusai
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🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast
In this episode we sit down with Tariq Sheikh, Co-founder and CEO of Nova, a contract intelligence platform transforming how teams manage and analyze business documents.
A self-described “third culture kid,” Tariq’s journey spans numerous countries across both Africa and Europe, stints in consulting, gold trading, and defense, and finally a series of successes scaling tech startups. He previously founded Postpay, the leading buy now, pay later provider in the Middle East, scaling the company from a handful of employees to over 100 in just six months and raising over $65M along the way.
Tariq shares how a constant lack of stability shaped his founder mentality—driving him to keep building, breaking, and pushing forward without getting too comfortable. We dive into what it takes to build in emerging markets, the realities of hypergrowth, and the nonstop firefighting that defines the founder journey. Tariq also reflects on how having had little time to pause and celebrate the wins is shaping how he’s building today.
👤 About the Guest
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shkhtar/
Company website: https://nova-doc.com/
🚀 About Nebius for Startups
Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth.
Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster.
👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🌐 About Nebius
Website: https://www.nebius.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius
X: https://x.com/nebiusai
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🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast
At Slush 2025 in Helsinki, we sat down with Accel’s Sam Folds to unpack the breakneck pace of today’s AI startup landscape. From identifying emerging investment opportunities to how his technical background in gaming with Blizzard and as VP of Engineering at Checkout.com contributes to his perspective in VC. Sam shares how founders can better anticipate where the market is heading and why the next wave of startups is going deeper—targeting niche, verticalized problems with AI and what’s ahead and the challenges facing compute-intensive startups in today’s AI era.
👤 About the Guest
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samfold
X (Twitter): https://x.com/SamFold
Company website: https://www.accel.com/
🚀 About Nebius for Startups
Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth.
Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster.
👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🌐 About Nebius
Website: https://www.nebius.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius
X: https://x.com/nebiusai
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🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast
In this episode, we explore cutting-edge technological advancements with leaders from Abridge. Zach, an AI researcher and co-founder of Abridge, shares the company's mission to enhance human connections in healthcare by developing AI solutions that alleviate doctors' administrative burdens. He elaborates on the innovative use of AI in clinical settings to streamline documentation, improve patient-doctor interactions, and optimize healthcare practices. Zach shed light on the importance of efficient AI integration, the future potential of their technologies, and the continual advancements happening in the AI space.
👤 About the Guest
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacharylipton
X (Twitter): https://x.com/zacharylipton
Personal Website: https://www.zacharylipton.com/
🚀 About Nebius for Startups
Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth.
Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster.
👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🌐 About Nebius
Website: https://www.nebius.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius
X: https://x.com/nebiusai
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🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast
In this insightful episode, Rong Yan, the CTO of HeyGen, discusses the groundbreaking technology behind AI video generation and its potential to revolutionize video storytelling. Rong shares insights on HeyGen’s aim to make video creation accessible without the need for cameras, the challenges in developing realistic AI avatars, and the company’s commitment to privacy and safety. Furthermore, he addresses how AI could enhance multimedia communication and make video a more interactive and personalized experience.
The conversation also explores how HeyGen's innovations could shift content creation, making it easier for non-professionals to generate engaging video content.
👤 About the Guest
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rong-yan-2004692
X (Twitter): https://x.com/HeyGen
Comapny Website: https://www.heygen.com/
🚀 About Nebius for Startups
Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth.
Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster.
👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🌐 About Nebius
Website: https://www.nebius.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius
X: https://x.com/nebiusai
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🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast
Xuedong Huang is the Chief Technology Officer at Zoom. A leader in the AI revolution, he is currently spearheading the development of the Zoom AI Companion and its mission to transform how the world gets work done.
What happens when your meeting software starts acting like a high-level executive assistant? In this episode, Xuedong breaks down the evolution of AI Companion 3.0 and its shift toward "Conversation to Completion" (C2C), a philosophy focused on turning meeting notes into finished tasks.
👤 About the Guest
X (Twitter): https://x.com/xdh (or @xdh)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xdhuang
🚀 About Nebius for Startups
Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth.
Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster.
👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🌐 About Nebius
Website: https://www.nebius.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius
X: https://x.com/nebiusai
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🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast
Join us as we dive into the transformative world of Motion, a company delivering 'AI and business in a box' solutions to SMBs and mid-market enterprises. In this episode, we discuss how Motion is automating workflows, bridging the gap between small businesses and Fortune 500 capabilities, and the journey behind their rapid scale-up. Learn from their founder about the importance of stability, future plans for new product launches, and the enduring role of human decision-making in the age of AI.
👤 About the Guest
Find out more:
Harry Qi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Motion (usemotion.com or motion.app), an AI-powered productivity platform.
X (Twitter): https://x.com/harryqi666
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harryqi/
Motion on X: https://x.com/useMotion
🚀 About Nebius for Startups
Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth.
Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster.
👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🌐 About Nebius
Website: https://www.nebius.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius
X: https://x.com/nebiusai
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🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast
Grant Lee is the founder of Gamma. A former consultant who started his career in the advisory world, Grant previously worked at the startup Optimizely before deciding to tackle the universal frustration of manual slide formatting.
In this conversation, Grant dives into why the traditional way of building presentations felt "broken" and how he’s building an "anti-PowerPoint" to fix it. The discussion covers the launch of Gamma 3.0, including: The AI Design Agent, A new API and their collaborative business model.
Grant also shares his vision for the future of visual communication, moving beyond standard slides into microsites, social media assets, and data visualization. Finally, we touch on the "magical" camaraderie of the Silicon Valley builder community and why no founder has to build alone.
👤 About the Guest
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grantslee/
X (Twitter): https://x.com/thisisgrantlee
Company website: https://gamma.app/
🚀 About Nebius for Startups
Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth.
Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster.
👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🌐 About Nebius
Website: https://www.nebius.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius
X: https://x.com/nebiusai
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🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast
Alex is the founder of Higgsfield AI and a veteran of the social media space, having previously seen his company acquired by Snap.
In this episode, we explore how Higgsfield AI is filling the gap between a creative idea and a finished video. Alex breaks down why they are moving away from simple text boxes to create more user-friendly interfaces that allow anyone to express themselves on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. We also discuss the technical "aha" moment behind world models and why Alex believes AI-generated personalities are the next frontier of art.
👤 About the Guest
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amashrabov/
X (Twitter): https://x.com/alexmashrabov (or @alexmashrabov)
Company website: https://higgsfield.ai/
🚀 About Nebius for Startups
Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth.
Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster.
👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🌐 About Nebius
Website: https://www.nebius.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius
X: https://x.com/nebiusai
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🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast
Marc Boroditsky is a seasoned leader and ex-founder who has successfully built and scaled multiple companies. He currently holds a senior leadership position at Nebius, where he leverages his extensive background in enterprise sales and infrastructure to help the next generation of founders navigate the complexities of growth.
In this episode, Marc dives deep into the mindset required to scale a startup in today’s competitive landscape. Marc also shares why founders should prioritize finding partners who invest in their success rather than just vendors who provide a service.
The discussion explores:
The Enterprise Shift: Why the sales cycle jumps from a single buyer to a dozen stakeholders, and how to navigate those "veto" risks.Knowledge as Currency: How founders can open doors to CTOs by offering their unique domain expertise instead of just a sales pitch.The FOMO Factor: A refreshing take on imposter syndrome, revealing that even top-tier tech executives are worried about what they might be missing.Whether you are in stealth mode or ready to hit growth mode, this conversation is packed with "words of wisdom" for mastering the human side of tech.
👤 About the Guest
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcboroditsky
🚀 About Nebius for Startups
Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth.
Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster.
👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🌐 About Nebius
Website: https://www.nebius.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius
X: https://x.com/nebiusai
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🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast
In this episode, we sit down with Amit Zavery, the President, Chief Product Officer, and Chief Operating Officer at ServiceNow, who shares insights on the integration of AI into ServiceNow's platform. Amit discusses the importance of AI being a seamless part of the system, not a separate entity. He speaks on the strategic partnerships and the ecosystem-building approach ServiceNow adopts to ensure efficiency and scalability for enterprises and startups alike.
Amit also highlights the need for integrated, secure, and customer-centric AI solutions, and he lays out a forward-looking perspective on how AI adoption can mature by 2026.
The conversation touches upon infrastructure needs, inferencing, and compute efficiency, emphasizing how ServiceNow works to provide cost-effective solutions for its clients.
👤 About the Guest
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amitzavery
X: https://x.com/azavery
Company Website: https://www.servicenow.com/
🚀 About Nebius for Startups
Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth.
Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster.
👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🌐 About Nebius
Website: https://www.nebius.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius
X: https://x.com/nebiusai
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🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast
Alex Ren is the Founding Partner of Fellows Fund and the organizer of Fellows Forum. A former entrepreneur, Alex has spent the last decade building a high-quality community of AI leaders, researchers, and tech executives—bridging the gap between deep technology and venture capital.
In this conversation, Alex explains how Fellows Fund is rethinking the traditional VC model through a “fellowship” of 36 AI leaders who provide hands-on support and industry access to startups.
He shares his core investment philosophy—“traction is all you need”—and why founders must operate aggressively to stay ahead in today’s “Wild West” era of AI.
We also dive into the three technologies Alex believes will be most disruptive in 2026:
• AI-generated coding
• Video generation
• Physical AI in robotics
👤 About the Guest
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexchengmingren
X: https://x.com/AlexFellowsFund
Fellows Fund: https://www.fellowsfundvc.com/
Fellows Fund LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fellows-fund
🚀 About Nebius for Startups
Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth.
Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster.
👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups
🌐 About Nebius
Website: https://www.nebius.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius
X: https://x.com/nebiusai
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In this episode, host Anubhav Maheshwari speaks with Lukas Pankau, co-founder and CEO of Industrial Next, an award winner from the NEAS Robotics and Physical AI Summit and Awards competition.
Lukas shares how his and co-founder Alan’s experience at Tesla during the Model 3 ramp inspired them to bring modern autonomy and intelligence into factories, where industrial robots are typically pre-programmed and lack contextual understanding. He explains Industrial Next’s vision of an “AI autopilot for a factory,” including the need for deeper robot control than many manufacturers currently expose, the importance of integrating with legacy factory systems, and cases where the company provides hardware alongside optimized software.
Lukas also describes how improved line visibility and data can transform productivity, supply-chain responsiveness, and even enable more localized, modular manufacturing—reducing waste from scrapped production lines and supporting reshoring for cost and national security reasons. He closes with near-term goals of running a fully designed production line with their equipment, ongoing hiring needs across AI and engineering roles, and his success metric: being able to buy electronics built locally at a lower price than today.
More about Lukas:
Lukas Pankau is the Co-Founder and CEO (sometimes referred to as co-CEO or CTO in various sources) of Industrial Next (also styled as IndustrialNext or industrialnext.ai), a startup focused on autonomous manufacturing, robotics, and AI-driven production systems, particularly for industries like electric vehicles (EV) and general manufacturing.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukaspankau/
Company Website: https://industrialnext.ai/
For more information about Nebius, head to Nebius.com
Follow us on X @nebius.ai
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Curious about the latest in autonomous systems? In this episode of The Nubius for Startups podcast (special series from the Nebius Robotics and Physical AI Summit and awards competition), host Anubhav Maheshwari speaks with Mustafa Bal, co-founder and CEO of Nomadic ML.
In recent years, the realm of autonomous systems has experienced rapid evolution and innovation, paving the way for groundbreaking changes in how these systems interact with the world around them. At the forefront of this transformative wave is Nomadic ML, co-founded by Mustafa Bal. This pioneering company is setting new standards in the development and deployment of autonomous technologies, and its journey is nothing short of fascinating.
Bal shares his background in ML infrastructure at Snowflake and Microsoft’s AI frameworks team (including work on open-source libraries like DeepSpeed, ONNX Runtime, and PyTorch, and early work around GPT-3 and Azure ML), and explains how Nomadic ML evolved from a general ML tuning solution into a vision AI data layer focused on automating data labeling for autonomous systems.
The conversation centers on identifying long-tail edge cases in operational video and multi-sensor data (dash cam, LiDAR, and logs), using a constellation of open and closed multimodal models, and adding internal innovations to improve contextual motion understanding across video chunks.
They cover the tradeoffs between open vs. closed models (capabilities, inference costs, token pricing), fine-tuning and feedback loops driven by engineers accepting/rejecting/editing surfaced events, and the importance of reaching 95%+ accuracy while minimizing human involvement to optional verification.
Learn how they're transforming the landscape with human-level insights in data processing. Listen now!
Find out more about Mustafa:
Mustafa Bal is the co-founder and CEO of NomadicML (also stylized as Nomadic ML), a San Francisco-based AI company focused on visual AI for physical autonomy. The company specializes in semantic video understanding, turning raw video footage (e.g., from autonomous vehicles, robotics, and fleets) into structured datasets, edge case detection, and actionable insights using generative AI and video-language models to accelerate autonomy development.
Find out more:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mstfbl
GitHub: https://github.com/mstfbl
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=LUPy_-IAAAAJ
Company Website: https://www.nomadicml.com
For more information about Nebius, head to Nebius.com
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Sean Mitchell is the Vice President of Customer Operations at Gather AI, where he has spent the last six years scaling the company from its early advisory stages through to its Series B funding. With a deep focus on customer experience, Sean bridges the gap between complex robotics and the practical, high-stakes needs of modern warehouse managers.
In this episode, we sit down with Sean to discuss how Gather AI is transforming "the black box" of the warehouse using autonomous drones and Vision AI. We explore the company’s fascinating origin story rooted in Carnegie Mellon PhD research and military-grade autonomous helicopters. We also discuss how they’ve successfully pivoted that tech to help retailers and manufacturers never lose a pallet again. Sean explains why they choose off-the-shelf hardware over custom robots, the challenges of flying drones in -30°F freezers, and his vision for a future where a fully digitized warehouse is the industry standard.
Find out more:
Sean Mitchell is the Vice President of Customer Operations at Gather AI.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seantmitchell/
X (Twitter): https://x.com/gather_ai (or @gather_ai)
Company website: https://www.gather.ai/
For more information about Nebius head to Nebius.com
Follow us on X @nebius.ai
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