The Software Report is pleased to announce The Top 25 AI Executives of 2025. This year’s awardees are driving a new phase of AI adoption—one where intelligent systems are no longer experimental, but essential. These leaders are focused on making AI practical, scalable, and embedded in everyday workflows. They represent the full spectrum of the field—founders of cutting-edge startups, former research leads, infrastructure experts, and enterprise veterans—each pushing the boundaries of what AI can do in the real world.
According to McKinsey, 78% of organizations have now integrated AI into at least one business function, up from just 55% the year prior. That rapid uptake is reflected in the work of these leaders, who are advancing everything from enterprise agents and multimodal platforms to AI-powered security, automation, and personalized content generation. What unites this group is a focus on building AI systems that work under real-world constraints. Together, they reflect the shift from theoretical breakthroughs to applied systems that organizations depend on every day.
Among this year’s awardees, Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO and Co-Founder of Axelera AI, is leading advancements in edge AI computing through his work building high-performance solutions tailored for real-time applications. Tomas Gogar, CEO and Co-Founder of Rossum, continues to drive enterprise automation forward with his company’s AI-powered Intelligent Document Processing platform used by global organizations. Aimei Wei, Founder and CTO of Stellar Cyber, brings over two decades of technical leadership to her role in developing AI-based cybersecurity tools that enhance threat detection across complex digital environments.
These leaders are shaping how AI moves from theory to practice—building the systems, teams, and safeguards that make real-world adoption possible. This year’s awardees were selected based on their track records of innovation, leadership, and measurable contributions to advancing AI. Please join us in celebrating the impact of The Top 25 AI Executives of 2025.
1. Mahe Bayireddi
Company: Phenom
Title: CEO and Co-Founder
Mahe Bayireddi is the CEO and co-founder of Phenom, an applied AI company specializing in HR, with a purpose to help a billion people find the right work. One of Inc. 5000’s fastest-growing private companies, Phenom’s revolutionary Intelligent Talent Experience platform ensures candidates find and choose the right job faster, employees develop their skills and evolve, recruiters become wildly productive, talent marketers engage with extreme efficiency, talent leaders optimize hiring processes, managers build stronger-performing teams, HR aligns employee development with company goals, and HRIT easily integrates existing HR tech to create a holistic infrastructure.
A passionate entrepreneur, Mahe has co-founded several successful technology companies with his extensive knowledge in predictive intelligence and machine learning. He started his career in software consulting and web development after earning his BE and MS degrees in Computer Science.
2. Fei-Fei Li
Company: World Labs
Title: Co-Founder and CEO
Fei-Fei Li is the Co-Founder and CEO at World Labs, a spatial intelligence company building Large World Models (LWMs) to perceive, generate, and interact with the 3D world. Li is a renowned technology visionary in AI, as a scientist, professor, scholar, and industry leader. She is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the computer science department at Stanford University and Founding Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute.
Previously, she served as the director of Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018. During her sabbatical from Stanford, she was vice president at Google and served as chief scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud. Her work on ImageNet, the first big training and benchmarking dataset in AI, was instrumental in catalyzing the onset of modern AI. Li graduated from the California Institute of Technology with a PhD in computer science and from Princeton University with a bachelor’s degree in physics.
3. Vikram Chatterji
Company: Galileo
Title: Co-Founder and CEO
Vikram Chatterji is the Co-Founder and CEO of Galileo, a leading platform for enterprise generative AI evaluation and observability. Its comprehensive suite of products supports developers across the modern AI development workflow—from fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to building, testing, monitoring, and securing AI applications. Chatterji has 14 years of experience spanning product management, AI and data science tooling, and enterprise software development, with a focus on building scalable technologies for global markets.
Before joining Galileo, Chatterji was a product lead at Google, where he worked on AI-based enterprise applications and played a key role in launching Google Pay India, which scaled to over 100 million users. Prior to Google, he was head of product for consumer and data science at Premise Data, where he led mobile and data products used across global public health and development initiatives. Chatterji is also a member of the Forbes Technology Council and serves as an advisor to CMU Tech & Entrepreneurship, a Carnegie Mellon initiative that supports students and alumni in building and scaling startups with connections to faculty, mentorship, and industry networks.
Chatterji graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a master’s degree in computer science and from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, with a bachelor’s degree in industrial design and HCI.
4. Daniela Amodei
Company: Anthropic
Title: President and Co-Founder
Daniela Amodei is the President and Co-Founder of Anthropic. Anthropic is an AI research company focused on the safety of AI systems. Its research includes natural language processing, human feedback, scaling laws, reinforcement learning, code generation, and interpretability. The company’s flagship product, Claude, is an AI assistant designed for enterprise use cases—including summarization, search, data analysis, and code generation—integrated across tools like Slack, Notion, and Airtable. The company develops AI systems that prioritize safety, transparency, and alignment with human values.
Amodei first began her career in 2010 at the IRIS Center at the University of Maryland, where she supported international development projects focused on poverty assessment and microfinance. She later worked on strategic development training in Uganda and helped lead a successful congressional campaign before moving into tech. At Stripe, she started as a recruiter and advanced to risk manager, where she oversaw core operations, user policy, and underwriting, leading cross-functional efforts. She then joined OpenAI, where she led technical teams and served as VP of safety and policy, managing functions across technical safety, people operations, and business strategy. Amodei graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a bachelor’s degree in English literature.
5. Daniel Dines
Company: UiPath
Title: Founder and CEO
Daniel Dines is the CEO and Founder of UiPath, an enterprise automation software company that helps organizations streamline repetitive digital tasks using robotic process automation (RPA) and AI. Dines started UiPath in Bucharest in 2005—originally as DeskOver—before relocating the company’s headquarters to New York. His founding vision was to reduce the burden of repetitive administrative work by making software robots as common in the workplace as PCs. Under his leadership, UiPath went public in 2021.
Previously, Dines was a software development engineer at Microsoft. Earlier in his career, he worked with Crinsoft as a developer lead. After a brief period as Chief Innovation Officer, he returned to the CEO position in 2024 to lead UiPath through its next phase, focused on agentic AI. He also serves as a General Partner at Crew Capital and has spoken widely about business culture, automation, and the future of work. Dines earned a master’s degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Bucharest.
6. Peter Wang
Company: Anaconda
Title: Chief AI & Innovation Officer, Co-Founder
Peter Wang is the Chief AI and Innovation Officer and Co-Founder of Anaconda. Wang leads Anaconda’s AI Incubator, which focuses on advancing core Python technologies and developing new frontiers in open-source AI and machine learning, especially in the areas of edge computing, data privacy, and decentralized computing. Anaconda serves over 47 million users, including 1.9 million developers and one million enterprises worldwide.
Prior to founding Anaconda, Wang spent 15 years in software design and development across a broad range of areas, including 3D graphics, geophysics, large data simulation and visualization, financial risk modeling, and medical imaging. As a creator of the PyData community and conferences, he devotes time and energy to growing the Python data science community and advocating for increasing data literacy around the world. Wang holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Cornell University.
7. Fabrizio Del Maffeo
Company: Axelera AI
Title: Co-Founder and CEO
Fabrizio Del Maffeo is the CEO and Co-Founder of Axelera AI, the Netherlands-based startup delivering the world’s most powerful and advanced solutions for AI at the Edge. In his role at Axelera AI, Fabrizio leads a world-class executive team, board of directors, and advisors from top AI Fortune 500 companies.
Before establishing Axelera AI, Fabrizio Del Maffeo served as Head of AI at the Bitfury Group, a globally recognized emerging technologies company. Prior to joining Bitfury, Fabrizio was vice president and managing director of AAEON Technology Europe, the AI and internet of things (IoT) computing company within the ASUS Group.
8. May Habib
Company: Writer
Title: Co-Founder and CEO
May Habib is the CEO and Co-Founder of Writer, a generative AI platform built specifically for enterprise teams. Writer helps companies securely deploy large language models across functions like marketing, support, HR, and product—without compromising brand, compliance, or data privacy. Rather than relying on third-party models, Writer built its own foundation models and infrastructure to give customers more control over performance, privacy, and customization.
Habib has worked in natural language processing and machine learning for 10 years, and before founding Writer, she founded and built Qordoba, a machine translation and localization software company. She is an expert in AI language generation, AI-related organizational change, and the evolving ways we use language online. Habib holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University, is a Young Global Leader with the World Economic Forum, and is a Fellow of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.
9. Jack Hidary
Company: SandboxAQ
Title: CEO
Jack Hidary is the CEO of SandboxAQ, an enterprise SaaS company developing AI and quantum technology solutions for sectors such as banking, biopharma, and government. In addition to his executive role, he contributes to the field through publications on quantum computing and cybersecurity, including the textbook Quantum Computing: An Applied Approach and a co-authored paper on post-quantum cryptography. He has also collaborated on AI research with institutions such as MIT.
A serial entrepreneur, Hidary co-founded several technology ventures, including EarthWeb/Dice, which he led through its IPO, and Vista Research, later acquired by S&P/McGraw-Hill. Earlier in his career, he served as chairman at Samba Energy and was a director at Alphabet’s Sandbox group. He is a trustee of the X Prize Foundation and a former board member of Trickle Up. He holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and neuroscience from Columbia University.
10. Tomas Gogar
Company: Rossum
Title: CEO and Co-Founder
Tomas Gogar is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Rossum, a global leader in AI and cloud-native Intelligent Document Processing (IDP). With extensive expertise in artificial intelligence and enterprise automation solutions, Tomas is recognized for driving innovation and operational excellence at Rossum since its inception in 2017.
Tomas is passionate about leveraging advanced AI technologies to address critical business inefficiencies, enhance productivity, and empower organizations globally. His strategic vision continues to position Rossum as an essential partner for global enterprises navigating digital transformation and automation. A native of the Czech Republic, he holds a bachelor's degree in software engineering and a master's degree in artificial intelligence from the Czech Technical University.
11. Deon Nicholas
Company: Forethought
Title: Co-Founder, President, and Executive Chairman
Deon Nicholas is the co-founder of Forethought, a human-centered generative AI suite for customer support, trained on proprietary data. The company powers support for leading customer-centric organizations like Upwork, Grammarly, and iFit, and has raised over $90 million in venture capital from investors including NEA and Sound Ventures. Nicholas founded the company with the goal of applying cutting-edge AI to real-world operational bottlenecks, placing usability, trust, and human impact at the core of its product design.
Previously, Nicholas built products and infrastructure at Facebook, Palantir, Dropbox, and Pure Storage. He has machine learning publications and infrastructure patents, and was a World Finalist at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. Originally from Canada, Nicholas graduated from the University of Waterloo with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, combinatorics, and optimization.
12. Jill Popelka
Company: Darktrace
Title: CEO
Jill Popelka is the CEO of Darktrace. She has over 20 years of experience in the technology industry, driving growth and innovation for global software companies. Popelka took on the role of Darktrace CEO in September 2024, having joined the company first as a non-executive director on Darktrace’s plc Board in January 2024. Founded in 2013, Darktrace provides a cybersecurity platform that protects organizations from unknown threats using its proprietary AI that learns from the unique patterns of life for each customer in real-time.
Previously, Popelka spent most of her career at SAP, where she was president of SAP SuccessFactors, the company’s cloud-based human capital management software. Under Popelka’s leadership, SAP SuccessFactors grew to support more than 7,000 customers, with 120 million users worldwide. During her time at SAP, Popelka also spent time based in Singapore running SAP Consulting and Success Factors’ Asia Pac operation. She began her career at Accenture after earning a bachelor’s degree in international studies from Texas A&M University.
13. Aimei Wei
Company: Stellar Cyber
Title: Founder and Chief Technical Officer
Aimei Wei is the Founder and Chief Technical Officer of Stellar Cyber. She has more than 20 years of experience building successful products and leading teams in data networking and telecommunications. Wei has extensive working experience for both early-stage startups as well as well-established companies like Nortel, Ciena, and Cisco.
Prior to founding Stellar Cyber, Wei served as VP of Engineering and later CTO, helping lead the development of the company’s core platform for unified security analytics. Earlier in her career, she spent eight years at Cisco as a senior software engineer. She also held engineering leadership roles at Kineto Wireless, Ciena, and Nuera Communications. She began her career at Nortel Networks, where she contributed to real-time call processing and wireless switch development. She holds a master’s degree in computer science from Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.
14. Kunal Verma
Company: AppZen
Title: Co-Founder and CTO
Kunal Verma is the Co-Founder and CTO of AppZen, and developed its core artificial intelligence technology. He is responsible for the company’s product vision and oversees the company’s R&D, product, and data science teams. AppZen’s platform uses custom-trained Transformer models to analyze unstructured financial data—including invoices, receipts, and corporate card transactions—enabling organizations to automate audits, reduce processing costs, and identify risks in real time. The technology is designed to understand language, context, and patterns in enterprise spend, and is used by finance teams to manage compliance and improve decision-making.
Previously, Verma led research teams at Accenture Technology Labs that were responsible for developing AI-based tools for Fortune 500 companies. He is the author of over 50 peer-reviewed publications and holds multiple patents. He earned his PhD in computer science from the University of Georgia and a bachelor’s degree in electronics and telecom from the University of Mumbai.
15. Alexandr Wang
Company: Scale AI
Title: Co-Founder and CEO
Alexandr Wang is the CEO and Co-Founder of Scale AI, a company he launched in 2016 to help organizations turn raw data into usable training and validation sets for machine learning. Scale’s platform supports tasks such as LiDAR, video, and image annotation, allowing teams in autonomous vehicles, robotics, logistics, and AI research to focus on building models rather than preparing data. Its clients have included companies such as OpenAI, Lyft, Zoox, and Flexport.
A New Mexico native, Wang began working as a full-time engineer in Silicon Valley at age 17, first at Addepar and then at Quora, where he later became a tech lead. He briefly studied machine learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before leaving to co-found Scale AI through Y Combinator.
16. Rajat Mishra
Company: Prezent
Title: Founder and CEO
Rajat Mishra is the Founder and CEO of Prezent, a business communication platform powered by AI that helps enterprise teams build presentations faster and more effectively. Under his leadership, Prezent has become the go-to presentation tool for close to 150 Fortune 2000 companies, helping enterprise teams become better communicators, saving 90% of their time on presentation creation, and significantly reducing their agency spending.
Prior to founding Prezent, Rajat was a senior vice president at Cisco Systems, overseeing the $14 billion Customer Experience (CX) business and leading a team of over 1,000 professionals across strategy, product management, and marketing functions. His earlier career includes leadership roles at Mu Sigma, McKinsey & Company, and Microsoft Corporation.
Rajat holds an MBA in strategic management from The Wharton School, where he achieved Director's List honors, and a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, where he earned Dean’s List honors.
As the executive producer of the “Think Deeply, Speak Simply” podcast, he explores the art and science of effective communication. He is also an active philanthropist, serving on the leadership council of No Kid Hungry and the advisory board of Adruta Children’s Home.
17. Cody Coleman
Company: Coactive AI
Title: Co-Founder and CEO
Cody Coleman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Coactive AI, a company building a Multimodal Application Platform (MAP) that enables organizations to extract insights from unstructured visual data. By allowing teams to search and analyze images and videos without relying on manual metadata or tagging, Coactive supports use cases across industries—from retail and media to security and logistics.
Coleman is also a co-creator of DAWNBench and MLPerf, a founding member of MLCommons, and his work spans developing standards and benchmarks for high-performance deep learning to data-centric AI. Coleman holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford University and a master’s degree and bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
18. Renato Siljeg
Company: Nauto
Title: Chief Information Officer
Renato Siljeg is the Chief Information Officer at Nauto, where he leads the strategic alignment of information technology with business objectives and oversees the company’s cybersecurity, data privacy, and compliance programs. He has been a key driver of Nauto’s digital transformation—modernizing internal systems, streamlining operations, and embedding automation to scale efficiently.
Renato pioneered and continues to lead the operationalization and commercialization of Nauto’s AI solution as a SaaS offering, helping to deliver it as a secure, scalable, and customer-centric platform. With deep expertise in enterprise architecture, system integration, and vendor strategy, Renato is known for translating complex business needs into innovative, secure, and privacy-first digital solutions that support growth and operational excellence.
Prior to joining Nauto, Renato was known for driving IT innovation and transformation in the semiconductor industry, having held IT leadership roles at Renesas Electronics (via Intersil and Xicor), Broadcom (via Ikanos Communications), and Exar Corporation. He also played a significant role in advancing technology systems at MiTAC (Magellan GPS) in the high-tech sector. Throughout his career, Renato has gained extensive international experience, leading cross-functional teams and global technology initiatives across North America, Europe, and Asia.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina and a master’s degree in computer science from Technische Universität Wien (TU Wien) in Austria.
19. Lin Qiao
Company: Fireworks AI
Title: Co-Founder and CEO
Lin Qiao is the Co-Founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, a company providing a generative AI platform as a service. Fireworks supports developers and enterprises in building and scaling AI-native applications by offering infrastructure that enables fast iteration, high throughput, and cost-efficient deployment. The platform is designed to streamline the integration of large language models into production, with support for both open-source and proprietary models.
Qiao first got her start in 2003 as a research co-op at the IBM Silicon Valley Lab. From there, she went on to LinkedIn, before eventually rising to senior director of engineering at Meta, her most recent position prior to joining Fireworks AI. Qiao graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a PhD in computer science and from Fudan University with a master’s degree and bachelor’s degree in computer science.
20. Melody Meckfessel
Company: Jasper.ai
Title: CTO
Melody Meckfessel is the CTO of Jasper.ai, an AI marketing platform that enables companies to reimagine their end-to-end marketing workflows and drive higher ROI through increased brand consistency, efficiency, and personalization at scale. At Jasper, she oversees the company’s technical vision, guiding the development of tools that support large-scale creative and operational teams. Meckfessel is a hands-on builder with more than 25 years of experience in building and maintaining large-scale distributed systems and solving problems at scale.
Before joining Jasper, she co-founded and served as CEO of Observable, a data visualization platform used by enterprises to explore and communicate data more effectively. She also served as vice president of Engineering at Google, where she led DevOps for the company, including Google Cloud Platform’s tools and systems. She also led teams responsible for Google’s core search systems, search quality, and cluster management. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.
21. Scott Wu
Company: Cognition
Title: Co-Founder and CEO
Scott Wu is the CEO and Co-Founder of Cognition, the applied AI lab behind Devin, which it describes as the first AI software engineer. Devin is capable of executing end-to-end development tasks—from debugging to writing and submitting pull requests—and is designed to collaborate with human engineers to automate routine programming work and free teams to focus on more complex challenges. Wu views this technology as a way to democratize software creation, not replace programmers.
Wu brings 11 years of experience to his current role. Before joining Cognition, Wu co-founded and served as the CTO of Lunchclub. Earlier in his career, he worked with Addepar as a software engineer. Wu graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in economics.
22. Mira Murati
Company: Thinking Machines Lab
Title: Founder and CEO
Mira Murati is the Founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence research and product company. An engineer and researcher by training, Murati previously served as chief technology officer at OpenAI from May 2022 to September 2024, where she helped lead the development and deployment of foundational AI products, including ChatGPT, DALL·E, and GPT-4. Her work at OpenAI focused not only on advancing general-purpose models but also on integrating safety, usability, and public feedback into the development process.
Murati briefly worked for Zodiac Aerospace as an intern before joining Tesla in 2013 as a product manager on the Model X. From 2016 to 2018, she worked at augmented reality startup Leap Motion (now Ultraleap), then joined OpenAI as VP of applied AI and was later promoted to CTO. She holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Dartmouth College.
23. Bhavin Shah
Company: Moveworks
Title: Co-Founder and CEO
Bhavin Shah is the CEO and Co-Founder of Moveworks, an AI assistant platform designed to help employees across an organization find information and automate routine tasks through natural language. Moveworks integrates with enterprise systems like Microsoft, Workday, and Salesforce, allowing companies to streamline internal operations and improve workforce productivity. The platform uses proprietary models to learn an organization’s unique language and supports a wide range of use cases across departments. Shah has over 25 years of experience founding and scaling technology companies.
Prior to Moveworks, Shah was CEO of Refresh.io, which was acquired by LinkedIn in 2015. He began his career in the toy and video game industry. Shah holds a master’s degree in education, technology, and business from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of California, San Diego.
24. Jaleh Rezaei
Company: Mutiny
Title: Co-Founder and CEO
Jaleh Rezaei is the CEO and Co-Founder of Mutiny, a platform that helps B2B companies generate pipeline and revenue from target accounts using AI-driven personalization. Mutiny creates 1:1 microsites and leverages account-level intelligence to tailor messaging for each visitor without requiring engineering support. The idea for the company grew out of Rezaei’s early realization that personalized customer experiences were key to closing high-value deals but difficult to scale with existing tools. She and her co-founder built Mutiny’s MVP in just two weeks and worked closely with early users to refine the product and validate its fit. The platform is used by marketing and sales teams to accelerate conversion and drive measurable growth from high-value prospects.
Rezaei first got her start in 2006 as the general manager of the retail division at Stanford Student Enterprises. From there, she went on to co-found Snailbox, before eventually rising to head of marketing and business development at Gusto!, her most recent position prior to founding Mutiny. Rezaei graduated from Stanford University with an MBA and a master’s degree in management science and engineering, and from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering.
25. Mati Staniszewski
Company: ElevenLabs
Title: Co-Founder and CEO
Mati Staniszewski is the CEO and Co-Founder of ElevenLabs, a voice AI company developing advanced text-to-speech tools. He co-founded the company in 2022 with the goal of improving the quality and accessibility of synthetic speech. Since launch, ElevenLabs has grown to over one million users and partnered with media organizations such as The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, as well as several gaming studios and content platforms. Under his leadership, ElevenLabs raised significant funding, expanded its team, and opened new offices globally.
Staniszewski brings 11 years of experience to his current role. Before joining ElevenLabs, he was a deployment strategist at Palantir Technologies and, before that, he worked in product development at BlackRock. Earlier in his career, he worked in business intelligence at Opera Software. Staniszewski graduated from Imperial College London with a degree in mathematics.
