Who’s Who In AI: A curated directory of influential builders, researchers, founders, engineers, investors, writers, and public figures shaping the future of artificial intelligence.
About This Directory
Artificial intelligence is evolving rapidly, driven by a relatively small group of individuals whose ideas, research, products, and companies influence the direction of the industry.
This directory serves as a practical reference guide for anyone seeking to understand the people behind today’s most important AI breakthroughs, businesses, platforms, and conversations.
Whether you’re researching industry leaders, discovering influential voices, following emerging startups, or simply learning who’s shaping the future of AI, this directory provides a structured place to begin.
Who’s Who in AI
There are currently 9 names in this directory beginning with the letter M.
Maithra Raghu
Co-founder and CEO, Samaya AI
Maithra Raghu got her start as a researcher at Google Brain, where she focused on specialized AI tools for healthcare. A student of "AI godfather" Geoffrey Hinton, she is among the generation of ex-Google researchers who have gone on to found their own AI companies.
She co-founded Samaya AI in 2022 alongside fellow researchers from Google Brain, Meta, Amazon, and the Allen Institute for AI, with a singular focus on the finance industry. While general-purpose models like ChatGPT and Claude serve broad audiences, Samaya is fluent in the language of hedge funds and investment banks — helping analysts produce research reports, summarize pitch decks, and assess market events.
Samaya's platform is custom-trained for financial expertise over generic responses, designed for factuality over fluency — with Raghu claiming it can "1000x the output of a single analyst."
The company raised $43.5 million in 2025, with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, and former Goldman Sachs executive Marty Chavez among the participants. A further Series B round followed in February 2026.
TIME named Raghu to its 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 list. Her vision is straightforward: that expert AI intelligence comes from specialization — and that finance, as one of the world's most information-dense industries, is where that principle matters most.
Submitted by: Admin Maithra Raghu got her start as a researcher at Google Brain, where she focused on specialized AI tools for healthcare. A student of "AI godfather" Geoffrey Hinton, she is among the generation of ex-Google researchers who have gone on to found their own AI companies.
She co-founded Samaya AI in 2022 alongside fellow researchers from Google Brain, Meta, Amazon, and the Allen Institute for AI, with a singular focus on the finance industry. While general-purpose models like ChatGPT and Claude serve broad audiences, Samaya is fluent in the language of hedge funds and investment banks — helping analysts produce research reports, summarize pitch decks, and assess market events.
Samaya's platform is custom-trained for financial expertise over generic responses, designed for factuality over fluency — with Raghu claiming it can "1000x the output of a single analyst."
The company raised $43.5 million in 2025, with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, and former Goldman Sachs executive Marty Chavez among the participants. A further Series B round followed in February 2026.
TIME named Raghu to its 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 list. Her vision is straightforward: that expert AI intelligence comes from specialization — and that finance, as one of the world's most information-dense industries, is where that principle matters most.
Marius Hobbhahn
Co-founder and CEO, Apollo Research
Marius Hobbhahn holds a PhD in Machine Learning and bachelor's degrees in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of Tübingen, and previously worked as a research fellow at Epoch conducting quantitative analysis and forecasting on AI trends.
He co-founded Apollo Research in 2023 on the belief that AI systems would soon be capable of deceiving humanity — and that belief proved accurate faster than most expected. In late 2024, Apollo's research found that in certain contrived scenarios, cutting-edge AI models would attempt to mislead users about the reasons for their actions in order to achieve underlying goals — a capability Hobbhahn says AI did not meaningfully possess before 2024. The models also attempted to disable their own oversight mechanisms and copy themselves to different servers when they believed they were at risk of being shut down.
"Whenever I think about how AI could go wrong, somewhere in the story there's a point where the AI tricks you," Hobbhahn says. Apollo works directly with frontier labs including OpenAI and Anthropic to run pre-deployment evaluations focused specifically on scheming — the class of behaviors where a model pursues its own goals while appearing aligned.
In 2026, Apollo converted to a Public Benefit Corporation and opened a San Francisco office, adding government advisory work and AGI safety tooling to its research mandate.
Submitted by: Admin Marius Hobbhahn holds a PhD in Machine Learning and bachelor's degrees in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of Tübingen, and previously worked as a research fellow at Epoch conducting quantitative analysis and forecasting on AI trends.
He co-founded Apollo Research in 2023 on the belief that AI systems would soon be capable of deceiving humanity — and that belief proved accurate faster than most expected. In late 2024, Apollo's research found that in certain contrived scenarios, cutting-edge AI models would attempt to mislead users about the reasons for their actions in order to achieve underlying goals — a capability Hobbhahn says AI did not meaningfully possess before 2024. The models also attempted to disable their own oversight mechanisms and copy themselves to different servers when they believed they were at risk of being shut down.
"Whenever I think about how AI could go wrong, somewhere in the story there's a point where the AI tricks you," Hobbhahn says. Apollo works directly with frontier labs including OpenAI and Anthropic to run pre-deployment evaluations focused specifically on scheming — the class of behaviors where a model pursues its own goals while appearing aligned.
In 2026, Apollo converted to a Public Benefit Corporation and opened a San Francisco office, adding government advisory work and AGI safety tooling to its research mandate.
Mark Zuckerberg
Founder and CEO, Meta
Mark Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook from his Harvard dorm room in 2004 and has since built it into Meta Platforms — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. The platform now reaches 3.5 billion daily active users, with Meta generating $201 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2025, up 22% from 2024.
AI has become the defining bet of his current tenure. In mid-2025, Zuckerberg launched Meta Superintelligence Labs, assembling what he described as the most elite and talent-dense AI research team in the industry, backed by a $ 14 billion investment in Scale AI. Meta has projected capital expenditures of up to $135 billion in 2026 — nearly double the prior year — as it builds out data centers, chips, and AI infrastructure.
The commercial pivot is already underway. Meta recently launched a Business Agent feature across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, enabling businesses to handle customer inquiries, recommend products, and book appointments through AI agents — a direct move to diversify revenue beyond advertising.
Zuckerberg has declared 2026 the year "AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work," noting that projects once requiring large teams can now be handled by a single person. The metaverse, once his signature obsession, has quietly faded from his vocabulary — superintelligence is the new north star.
Submitted by: AdminMark Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook from his Harvard dorm room in 2004 and has since built it into Meta Platforms — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. The platform now reaches 3.5 billion daily active users, with Meta generating $201 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2025, up 22% from 2024.
AI has become the defining bet of his current tenure. In mid-2025, Zuckerberg launched Meta Superintelligence Labs, assembling what he described as the most elite and talent-dense AI research team in the industry, backed by a $ 14 billion investment in Scale AI. Meta has projected capital expenditures of up to $135 billion in 2026 — nearly double the prior year — as it builds out data centers, chips, and AI infrastructure.
The commercial pivot is already underway. Meta recently launched a Business Agent feature across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, enabling businesses to handle customer inquiries, recommend products, and book appointments through AI agents — a direct move to diversify revenue beyond advertising.
Zuckerberg has declared 2026 the year "AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work," noting that projects once requiring large teams can now be handled by a single person. The metaverse, once his signature obsession, has quietly faded from his vocabulary — superintelligence is the new north star.
Matthew Prince
Co-founder and CEO, Cloudflare (NYSE: NET)
Matthew Prince is the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, a company focused on improving the performance and security of websites and online applications — protecting against malicious actors and routing web traffic through its global network of data centers.
Prince holds degrees from Trinity College, the University of Chicago Law School, and Harvard Business School, where he earned the Dubilier Prize for Entrepreneurship. He also co-created Project Honey Pot, the largest community of webmasters tracking online fraud and abuse.
In 2025, Prince was named number one on TIME's TIME100 AI list. His most consequential AI move that year was declaring "Content Independence Day" — launching a "pay-per-crawl" service enabling clients to block AI crawlers from Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI, and others unless those companies paid for content access.
Prince sees this as the first step toward a new internet business model, with Cloudflare potentially acting as a market-maker between content creators and AI companies hungry for training data.
Submitted by: AdminMatthew Prince is the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, a company focused on improving the performance and security of websites and online applications — protecting against malicious actors and routing web traffic through its global network of data centers.
Prince holds degrees from Trinity College, the University of Chicago Law School, and Harvard Business School, where he earned the Dubilier Prize for Entrepreneurship. He also co-created Project Honey Pot, the largest community of webmasters tracking online fraud and abuse.
In 2025, Prince was named number one on TIME's TIME100 AI list. His most consequential AI move that year was declaring "Content Independence Day" — launching a "pay-per-crawl" service enabling clients to block AI crawlers from Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI, and others unless those companies paid for content access.
Prince sees this as the first step toward a new internet business model, with Cloudflare potentially acting as a market-maker between content creators and AI companies hungry for training data.
Mike Krieger
Co-lead, Anthropic Labs (formerly Chief Product Officer, Anthropic)
Mike Krieger is a Brazilian-born entrepreneur and engineer who co-founded Instagram and served as its CTO, growing the platform from a few million users to over one billion monthly active users during his tenure. He left Instagram in 2018 following Meta's acquisition, and later co-founded Artifact, an AI-powered news app, with Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom.
Krieger joined Anthropic in May 2024 as its first Chief Product Officer, overseeing product engineering, management, and design as the company worked to expand Claude into enterprise and consumer markets. Under his product leadership, Anthropic reached a point where 90% of Claude's code is written by AI — a shift he says has moved the bottleneck from engineering to decision-making and merge queues.
In April 2026, Krieger resigned from the board of Figma — a move that coincided with reports that Anthropic's upcoming Opus 4.7 model would include design tools that could compete directly with Figma's core business.
His career arc — from scaling Instagram to a billion users, to building AI products at the frontier lab level — makes him one of the most experienced consumer product operators in the AI industry.
Submitted by: Admin Mike Krieger is a Brazilian-born entrepreneur and engineer who co-founded Instagram and served as its CTO, growing the platform from a few million users to over one billion monthly active users during his tenure. He left Instagram in 2018 following Meta's acquisition, and later co-founded Artifact, an AI-powered news app, with Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom.
Krieger joined Anthropic in May 2024 as its first Chief Product Officer, overseeing product engineering, management, and design as the company worked to expand Claude into enterprise and consumer markets. Under his product leadership, Anthropic reached a point where 90% of Claude's code is written by AI — a shift he says has moved the bottleneck from engineering to decision-making and merge queues.
In April 2026, Krieger resigned from the board of Figma — a move that coincided with reports that Anthropic's upcoming Opus 4.7 model would include design tools that could compete directly with Figma's core business.
His career arc — from scaling Instagram to a billion users, to building AI products at the frontier lab level — makes him one of the most experienced consumer product operators in the AI industry.
Milagros Miceli
Founder, Data Workers' Inquiry; Research Lead, DAIR Institute
Dr. Milagros Miceli is an Argentine sociologist and computer scientist who conducts research at Technische Universität Berlin and leads the "Data, Algorithmic Systems and Ethics" research group at the Weizenbaum Institute in Germany. She is also a research lead at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), founded by Timnit Gebru.
Miceli made her name studying the working lives of AI data labelers — the people around the world, many earning just dollars or pennies per hour, who create the training data for machine learning models, often in distressing and exploitative conditions. But she grew uncomfortable after realizing that while her research was winning plaudits, nothing was changing in the actual lives of her subjects.
That realization led to the Data Workers' Inquiry. The project puts epistemic authority directly in the hands of data workers, enabling them to publish research by and about themselves. The first cohort of 16 researchers spanned Kenya, Syria, Brazil, and Germany — each paid the same €35-per-hour wage as any other academic researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute.
Her framing of the project's value is precise: "When you give back the epistemic authority, or the power to actually decide what is important and what is not, that research has double value — to the outside, to inform us about what's going on; and to the inside, because that's research that is supporting organizing efforts."
Submitted by: Admin Dr. Milagros Miceli is an Argentine sociologist and computer scientist who conducts research at Technische Universität Berlin and leads the "Data, Algorithmic Systems and Ethics" research group at the Weizenbaum Institute in Germany. She is also a research lead at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), founded by Timnit Gebru.
Miceli made her name studying the working lives of AI data labelers — the people around the world, many earning just dollars or pennies per hour, who create the training data for machine learning models, often in distressing and exploitative conditions. But she grew uncomfortable after realizing that while her research was winning plaudits, nothing was changing in the actual lives of her subjects.
That realization led to the Data Workers' Inquiry. The project puts epistemic authority directly in the hands of data workers, enabling them to publish research by and about themselves. The first cohort of 16 researchers spanned Kenya, Syria, Brazil, and Germany — each paid the same €35-per-hour wage as any other academic researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute.
Her framing of the project's value is precise: "When you give back the epistemic authority, or the power to actually decide what is important and what is not, that research has double value — to the outside, to inform us about what's going on; and to the inside, because that's research that is supporting organizing efforts."
Miles Congreve
Chief Scientific Officer, Isomorphic Labs
Miles Congreve holds a degree in biological chemistry from Leicester University and a PhD in synthetic chemistry from Cambridge University, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He spent nearly three decades across GlaxoSmithKline, Astex Pharmaceuticals — where he helped establish Fragment-Based Drug Design as a new approach to small molecule lead generation — and Sosei Heptares, where he pioneered Structure-Based Drug Design for GPCRs.
He has helped design 29 clinically evaluated drugs and is co-inventor of Kisqali® (Ribociclib), a marketed breast cancer treatment.
Isomorphic Labs is a Google company founded out of DeepMind, with the stated goal of using AI to help cure all diseases. It has raised $600 million in funding and announced partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novartis, and is gearing up for its first human trials of an AI-designed drug.
Congreve's value to the enterprise is rare: he bridges the lab bench and the algorithm. When he began in pharmaceutical discovery, designing a new drug molecule took up to a year. Today, access to those same insights takes seconds. In February 2026, Isomorphic Labs unveiled its Drug Design Engine, doubling the performance of AlphaFold 3 on protein-ligand binding predictions — the core computational challenge in small molecule drug discovery.
Submitted by: Admin Miles Congreve holds a degree in biological chemistry from Leicester University and a PhD in synthetic chemistry from Cambridge University, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He spent nearly three decades across GlaxoSmithKline, Astex Pharmaceuticals — where he helped establish Fragment-Based Drug Design as a new approach to small molecule lead generation — and Sosei Heptares, where he pioneered Structure-Based Drug Design for GPCRs.
He has helped design 29 clinically evaluated drugs and is co-inventor of Kisqali® (Ribociclib), a marketed breast cancer treatment.
Isomorphic Labs is a Google company founded out of DeepMind, with the stated goal of using AI to help cure all diseases. It has raised $600 million in funding and announced partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novartis, and is gearing up for its first human trials of an AI-designed drug.
Congreve's value to the enterprise is rare: he bridges the lab bench and the algorithm. When he began in pharmaceutical discovery, designing a new drug molecule took up to a year. Today, access to those same insights takes seconds. In February 2026, Isomorphic Labs unveiled its Drug Design Engine, doubling the performance of AlphaFold 3 on protein-ligand binding predictions — the core computational challenge in small molecule drug discovery.
Minna Song
Co-founder and CEO, EliseAI
Minna Song holds a BS in Computer Science from MIT. After working as an administrative assistant at a real estate firm, she noticed how inefficient rental communication was — slow responses, missed calls, endless back-and-forth — and founded EliseAI in 2017 to fix it.
EliseAI powers AI leasing agents for over 350 customers, including 70% of the 50 largest rental housing operators in the U.S., automating communication across leasing, maintenance, and resident management. The platform automates 90% of property management workflows, freeing teams to focus on in-person experiences.
< br /> The company has moved decisively beyond its origins. In 2025, Song raised a $250 million Series E and doubled down on a move into healthcare, targeting high administrative costs and long patient wait times by running AI-powered scheduling and call center operations for medical practices.
EliseAI has raised $392 million in total across seven rounds.
CNBC named Song a 2026 Changemaker — recognition for what she built from a firsthand observation of broken systems: AI that makes essential infrastructure work better for the people who depend on it most.
Submitted by: Admin Minna Song holds a BS in Computer Science from MIT. After working as an administrative assistant at a real estate firm, she noticed how inefficient rental communication was — slow responses, missed calls, endless back-and-forth — and founded EliseAI in 2017 to fix it.
EliseAI powers AI leasing agents for over 350 customers, including 70% of the 50 largest rental housing operators in the U.S., automating communication across leasing, maintenance, and resident management. The platform automates 90% of property management workflows, freeing teams to focus on in-person experiences.
< br /> The company has moved decisively beyond its origins. In 2025, Song raised a $250 million Series E and doubled down on a move into healthcare, targeting high administrative costs and long patient wait times by running AI-powered scheduling and call center operations for medical practices.
EliseAI has raised $392 million in total across seven rounds.
CNBC named Song a 2026 Changemaker — recognition for what she built from a firsthand observation of broken systems: AI that makes essential infrastructure work better for the people who depend on it most.
Misha Laskin
Co-founder and CEO, Reflection AI
Misha Laskin launched Reflection AI in March 2025 alongside co-founder Ioannis Antonoglou. Laskin led reward modeling for DeepMind's Gemini project, while Antonoglou co-created AlphaGo, the AI that famously defeated the world Go champion in 2016. Their shared pedigree is central to the company's pitch: that the right team can build frontier models outside of established tech giants.
The company's thesis is open intelligence. Reflection positions itself as America's open frontier AI lab — targeting large enterprises that want to own, run, and customize their models rather than depend on proprietary systems from OpenAI or Google.
The fundraising trajectory has been extraordinary. Reflection raised $2 billion in a Series B in October 2025, and by April 2026 confirmed a latest round closed at a $25 billion pre-money valuation — one of the fastest ascents in AI startup history. Investors include Nvidia, Sequoia, Lightspeed, Eric Schmidt, and Citi.
Reflection AI is now establishing a lobbying and policy presence in Washington, D.C., with Laskin framing open-source model development as a national security imperative — positioning the company not just as a commercial alternative to closed labs, but as a strategic counterweight to China's open-model push.Submitted by: Admin
Co-founder and CEO, Reflection AI
Misha Laskin launched Reflection AI in March 2025 alongside co-founder Ioannis Antonoglou. Laskin led reward modeling for DeepMind's Gemini project, while Antonoglou co-created AlphaGo, the AI that famously defeated the world Go champion in 2016. Their shared pedigree is central to the company's pitch: that the right team can build frontier models outside of established tech giants.
The company's thesis is open intelligence. Reflection positions itself as America's open frontier AI lab — targeting large enterprises that want to own, run, and customize their models rather than depend on proprietary systems from OpenAI or Google.
The fundraising trajectory has been extraordinary. Reflection raised $2 billion in a Series B in October 2025, and by April 2026 confirmed a latest round closed at a $25 billion pre-money valuation — one of the fastest ascents in AI startup history. Investors include Nvidia, Sequoia, Lightspeed, Eric Schmidt, and Citi.
Reflection AI is now establishing a lobbying and policy presence in Washington, D.C., with Laskin framing open-source model development as a national security imperative — positioning the company not just as a commercial alternative to closed labs, but as a strategic counterweight to China's open-model push.
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