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Speakers Who Attends Discussion Groups Archive

Cerebral Valley AI Summit — San Francisco

The AI world gathers at Cerebral Valley.

The Cerebral Valley AI Summit is the definitive invite-only gathering on artificial intelligence.

Hosted by

Eric Newcomer

Max Child

James Wilsterman

Join us at the next Cerebral Valley AI Summit to make new connections, ideas, and deals with the top venture-backed founders, backers, and builders in AI.

“Cerebral Valley is where I go to connect with some of the best minds in the industry.”

Anna Veronika Dorogush

Founder & CEO, Recraft

Hear about the next summit

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Our Speakers

Ali Ghodsi

Founder & CEO

Databricks

Nikesh Arora

Chairman & CEO

Palo Alto Networks

Igor Babuschkin

Founder & CEO

River AI

Lin Qiao

Founder & CEO

Fireworks

Aravind Srinivas

Founder & CEO

Perplexity

Qasar Younis

Co-Founder & CEO

Applied Intuition

Brendan Foody

Founder & CEO

MERCOR

Matan Grinberg

Founder & CEO

Factory

Robert Wachen

Co-founder & President

Etched

Hemant Taneja

CEO

General Catalyst

Guillermo Rauch

Founder & CEO

Vercel

Ryan Daniels

Founder & CEO

Crosby

Asher Spector

Founder & President

Flapping Airplanes

Byron Deeter

Partner

Bessemer Venture Partners

Talia Goldberg

Partner

Bessemer Venture Partners

Our Discussion Leaders

Joon Sung Park

Founder & CEO

Simile

Emmett Shear

Founder & CEO

Softmax

Michael Grinich

Founder & CEO

WorkOS

Keith Peiris

Founder & CEO

Lightfield

Zoë Weil

Founder & CEO

Sequen AI

Dmytro Dzhulgakov

Co-Founder and CTO

Fireworks

Carina Hong

Founder & CEO

Axiom Math

Jai Das

Founder, President & Partner

Sapphire Ventures

Navrina Singh

Founder & CEO

Credo AI

Wesley Chan

Founder & Managing Partner

FPV

Harjot Gill

Founder & CEO

CodeRabbit

Eugenia Kuyda

Founder & CEO

Wabi

Hooman Reza Nezhad

Founder & CEO

Solcoa

Andy Vitus

Partner

Scale Venture Partners

Hassaan Raza

Founder & CEO

Tavus

Kambiz Aghili

Chief Product Officer

IREN

James Detweiler

General Partner

Felicis

Lindsey Irvine

Chief Marketing Officer

Nebius

Jay Jackson

SVP, Global AI and Strategic Customer Operations

Oracle

Laura Modiano

Founder Experience

OpenAI

Dan Moroz

Chief Economist

Exa

Rob Naidoff

VP, Americas

SambaNova

Founders keep coming back to Cerebral Valley.

Attendees can expect a small, curated room of elite founders, investors, media, and other AI leaders.

50% Founders

At venture-backed startups building AI products

33% Investors

GPs and AI-focused investors from top firms

Media

From top tech outlets

Tech Execs

At companies building and deploying AI

AI researchers and tech leaders

50% Founders

At venture-backed startups building AI products

33% Investors

GPs and AI-focused investors from top firms

Media

From top tech outlets

Tech Execs

At companies building and deploying AI

AI researchers and tech leaders

See who attends →

Built for founders.

Everything about the summit — from the speakers, to the structure, to who we choose to invite — is made with the founders who attend in mind.

Deals happen here.

Databricks bought MosaicML for $1.3B after their CEOs met at our event. Menlo led Suno's $250m Series C after they met its CEO at our event. And many more.

Make high-value relationships.

We keep a high bar. The summit is carefully curated so you walk away with new connections to people building and backing the top AI companies.

A lot can happen in three years.

Attendees watching a panel on stage at the first Cerebral Valley AI Summit

Panel discussion on the Cerebral Valley AI Summit stage

Attendees talking between sessions at the summit

CVAI1

March 30, 2023 - San Francisco

The Cerebral Valley AI Summit was born.

Our friends at Weekend had a beautiful office in Hayes Valley, a neighborhood the AI crowd was starting to call "Cerebral Valley." We thought we might try to host an event.

We had Daniella Amodei, Ali Ghodsi, Clem Delangue, Amjad Masad, and more on stage.

Anthropic was just a research lab valued at about $5 billion and generative AI was still a niche San Francisco obsession rather than the engine of the global economy.

You could have met these early founders before they raised their next round.

Before raising Seed

Now worth over $5.4B

Before raising Series A

Now worth over $2.2B

Before raising Series B

Now worth over $1B

Before raising Series D

Now worth over $7B

The CVAI2 audience filling the SFJAZZ Center as speakers talk on stage

CVAI2

November 15, 2023 - San Francisco

Eight months later the summit had outgrown a loft office. Round two filled the SFJAZZ Center as the whole industry raced to keep up with generative AI. Ali Ghodsi and Naveen Rao joined for a victory lap after our first summit led to a $1.3B acquisition of Naveen's company.

Sam Altman dropped by our speaker's dinner. Two days later, OpenAI's board fired Sam and briefly turned the AI world upside down.

You could have met these early founders before they raised their next round.

Before raising Series A

Now worth over $1.5B

Before raising Series A

Now worth over $2B

Before raising Seed

Now worth over $21B

Before raising Series A

Now worth over $18B

Eric Glyman, Eoghan McCabe, and Eric Newcomer in conversation on the CVNY stage

CVNY

June 27, 2024 - New York

For our East Coast debut: we brought Cerebral Valley to Manhattan, trading the Bay Area crowd for bank CEOs, hedge fund investors, and East Coast founders eager to get in on the AI wave.

The mood had shifted from the previous two summits: instead of debating whether foundation models would keep leapfrogging each other, the consensus in the room was that it was time to stop waiting and start building. Suno's Mikey Shulman, fresh off a lawsuit from the music labels, drew a crowd, and Goldman Sachs announced a new multi-model platform on stage, a sign of just how fast "enterprise AI" had moved from theory to production.

You could have met these early founders before they raised their next round.

Before raising Series A

Now worth over $5.4B

Before raising Series A

Now worth over $1.25B

Before raising Series B

Now worth over $1.5B

Before raising Series D

Now worth over $5.9B

Dario Amodei and Eric Newcomer on the CVAI4 stage for The State of Machine Intelligence

CVAI4

November 20, 2024 - San Francisco

Back in San Francisco, attendees packed the room to watch Scale AI's Alexandr Wang, Databricks' Ali Ghodsi, and Anthropic's Dario Amodei.

The question of the day: have foundation models hit a wall? Wang and Ghodsi argued pre-training gains were slowing, while Amodei closed the day insisting progress showed no signs of stopping. There was no consensus on whether models would keep improving at the rate we'd seen the last two years.

You could have met these early founders before they raised their next round.

Before raising Seed

Now worth over $4.5B

Before raising Series A

Now worth over $18B

Before raising Series B

Now worth over $2B

Before raising Series B

Now worth over $21B

Eric Newcomer, Max Child, and James Wilsterman opening the first Cerebral Valley AI Summit London

CVL1

June 25, 2025 - London

We crossed the Atlantic for the first time, bringing together the AI worlds of Europe and America for a single day in London.

Figma's Dylan Field came out to talk to a room of founders and investors just days before their IPO. Last year's worries about hitting a wall were already gone, replaced by talk of speech and video replacing text as the way people interact with AI.

You could have met these early founders before they raised their next round.

Before raising Seed

Now worth over $2B

Before raising Series B

Now worth over $1.5B

Before raising Series B

Now worth over $1B

Before raising Series B

Now worth over $2.1B

The CVAI6 audience watching a panel on the Terra Gallery stage

CVAI6

November 12, 2025 - San Francisco

Three years after AI took over the tech industry, the conversation had shifted to it taking over the economy. Elad Gil, Guillermo Rauch, and the rest of our speakers had to contend with the idea that it'd become a bubble.

Nobody in the room seemed worried. Instead, the dominant theme among the founders who took the stage was the vast potential they're seeing in agentic AI.

You could have met these early founders before they raised their next round.

Before raising Series A

Now worth over $1.6B

Before raising Series B

Now worth over $2B

Before raising Series A

Now worth over $750M

Before raising Series B

Now raised over $62M

A discussion group beneath the Cerebral Valley AI Summit London banner at 180 Studios

CVL2

June 24, 2026 - London

Back in London for round two, the mood had shifted from pure AI excitement to something more geopolitical. Cohere's Aidan Gomez argued we'd essentially already hit AGI, while Sequoia's Luciana Lixandru pointed to European governments waking up to the need for their own AI and defense capabilities, no longer counting on American protection.

An anonymous survey of attendees found most agreed we're in an AI bubble, though few expected it to burst this year. Anthropic was the runaway favorite unicorn people wished they owned, while OpenAI topped the list of companies people would short.

A fireside conversation with Eric Newcomer on the CVAI8 stage

CVAI8

November 12, 2026 - San Francisco

The headlines from the day could hardly have been more dramatic after Jensen Huang resigned as NVIDIA CEO the morning of the summit and Anthropic's IPO was just around the corner.

On stage, and in the hallways and byways of CVAI, industry leaders were figuring out in real time what Huang's resignation might mean for their companies, and the juggernaut that is the AI economy.

No one was quite celebrating, though. “It’s a blow to everything, every player, except their direct competitors,” Ali Ghodsi of Databricks said on stage of the crisis at Nvidia.

Positivity about the potential of top AI startups remained, especially as Newcomer and Bessemer revealed the first-ever AI 100 live on stage.