Alchemist Accelerator: Influencer Series Fireside Chat

Quantum computing has been promising to change everything for decades. BlueQubit might be the company that finally makes that promise real. Hayk Tepanyan is the Co-Founder and CTO of BlueQubit, an Alchemist company built by Stanford computer scientists who left Google to solve one of the hardest problems in deep tech. Their mission is simple to say and incredibly hard to do: make quantum computing...

What do synthetic neurobiology, an alcohol company sold out of a car, the Department of Energy, and a pesticide-killing RNA startup have in common? They're all stops on Nico Enriquez's path to becoming one of the most interesting VCs in deep tech. As a Principal at Future Ventures, the fund behind SpaceX, Tesla, and Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Nico backs founders solving the world's b...

Everyone is talking about quantum computing. Almost nobody actually understands it. Tommaso Demarie is going to change that. Tommaso is the Co-Founder and CEO of Entropica Labs, a company building the error correction infrastructure that sits at the very heart of making quantum computing actually work. He has a PhD in quantum information systems, nearly two decades in the field, and the rare abili...

What if everything you think you know about consciousness is wrong? And what if the machines we're building right now are about to prove it? Joscha Bach is the Executive Director of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness, and he might be the most interesting thinker you haven't heard of yet. With a master's in computer science and a PhD in cognitive science, and stints at M...

Hard tech is hard. Funding hard tech is even harder. Andrew Haughian has the answer, and it's not what you think. Andrew is a Partner at Pangaea Ventures, a hard tech focused VC fund with nearly 30 CVCs as limited partners. He's an engineer turned investor who has spent years sitting at the intersection of corporate innovation and early stage hard tech, working closely with companies like...

Most VCs will tell you to stay away from Corporate Venture Capital. Angelo Del Priore is here to tell you why they're wrong. Angelo is the Founding Managing Director of HP Tech Ventures, one of the most active CVCs in the game. He's led and followed investments in AI, edge compute, and the future of work, and he's sat on boards alongside companies that have exited to Google, Oracle, an...

Corporate venture capital has evolved. In this episode of the Influencer Series Fireside Chat, Ravi Belani sits down with Jay Eum, Founding Managing Director of GFT Ventures and one of the few investors who has helped build three venture initiatives, including Samsung Ventures and TransLink Capital. They explore how CVC has moved from slow, strategically entangled “dumb money” to independent, perf...

Enterprise AI startups don’t fail because the tech is weak. They fail because they sell the wrong way. In this episode of the Alchemist Influencer Series, Ravi Belani sits down with Gnani Palanikumar , former Head of Product at Apigee (acquired by Google for $725M) and chair of Alchemist’s GenAI track. Gnani shares a tactical, operator-level playbook for turning AI pilots into real enterprise adop...

Agentic AI is everywhere right now, but most teams are still struggling to price it, deploy it, and make it work in production. In this Fireside Chat, Ravi Belani sits down with Vibhor Rastogi , who leads AI investing at Citi Ventures, to unpack what’s actually happening inside enterprise AI adoption and what founders often get wrong. They dive into why pricing agentic software is still an unsolve...

Enterprise AI isn’t failing because of the models. It’s failing because of data. In this episode of the Alchemist Accelerator Influencer Series, Ravi Belani sits down with Sidney Rabsatt, Chief Product Officer at MindsDB and former AI and infrastructure leader at Google Cloud, AnyScale, and F5 Networks. Sidney breaks down why connecting AI to enterprise data is far harder than most teams expect an...

Manjeet Singh lives where AI hype meets real enterprise reality. He is the Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce AI and Agentforce, and previously led product teams at Iron Mountain and ServiceNow. He spends his days shipping AI products that millions of people actually use. In this episode, Manjeet sits down with Ravi Belani to talk about what is really working in enterprise AI adop...

Marcelo Calbucci has been building tech for over 30 years. He’s a serial entrepreneur, multi patent holder, former engineering leader at Microsoft and Amazon, and someone known for having bold, contrarian takes on where AI is actually heading. In this episode, Marcelo sits down with Ravi Belani to challenge some of the biggest assumptions people have about AI right now. They dig into: • Why layoff...

Amr Awadallah has seen multiple waves of hype in tech and helped build real companies through it. He co founded Cloudera, took it public, watched it get acquired for 5.3 billion dollars, and is now building Vectara, a platform that helps enterprises ship AI apps that are accurate, safe and actually usable in production. In this episode, Amr joins Alchemist Accelerator founder and CEO Ravi Belani t...

Dr. Shelby Heinecke, Senior AI Researcher at Salesforce, joins Ravi Belani to explain why the future of AI will not belong only to giant models with hundreds of billions of parameters. Shelby makes the case for small language models: compact systems with only a few billion parameters that can run faster, cost less, protect privacy, and still perform at a very high level when they are trained well...

Arjun Prakash, co founder and CEO of DistylAI, joins the Influencer Series to talk about one of the biggest shifts happening in tech right now. We all talk about generative AI, but Arjun breaks down the part that actually matters. Intelligence. Reasoning. And the rise of true AI assistants that can make decisions, take actions, and run workflows across a business. Arjun walks us through the three...

Yohei Nakajima is not your typical venture capitalist. He’s the Managing Partner at Untapped Capital and the creator of Baby AGI, the first open-source autonomous agent that helped kick off the AI agent movement. In this episode, Yohei joins Ravi Belani (CEO, Alchemist Accelerator) to unpack the rise of AI agents in the enterprise and why experimentation — not just strategy decks — is the real com...

As AI-powered copilots and agent tools reshape productivity, one question looms large: Will software engineers be replaced—or just evolve? In this thought-provoking episode of The Influencer Series , Roger Luo , Founding Partner of Embedding VC and former AI leader at Yahoo, Snap, and Niantic, joins host Ravi Belani to explore: Why today’s LLMs outperform average coders—but still can’t replace hum...

What does it really take for international founders to succeed in the U.S.? In this episode, Laurent Rains, Managing Director at Alchemist Accelerator, joins host Ravi Belani to unpack the challenges and opportunities facing global startups today. You’ll learn: Why diversity is a competitive advantage — but only if it’s real. What international founders must unlearn when entering the U.S. market....

Most enterprise AI projects today are built on models that can recognize and generate patterns — but what happens when pattern recognition isn’t enough? In this episode of the Alchemist Influencer Series, Vin Sharma, CEO and Founder of Vijil (and former AWS, Intel, and HP exec), joins Ravi Belani to explore the deeper realities of AI adoption — especially in regulated industries like banking, lega...

In this episode, Garuda Ventures co-founder Rishi Taparia joins Alchemist Accelerator CEO Ravi Belani to explore why the promise of AI teammates often stalls in the real world. Drawing on his experience as a VC, operator, and startup builder, Rishi explains why psychological friction, status dynamics, and expectation mismatches are bigger barriers than the tech itself. You’ll learn: Why “AI teamma...

In this episode, Alchemist Partner and GenAI expert Gnani Palanikumar reveals how AI agents are reshaping real industries like healthcare, supply chain, and life insurance. From reducing data prep time by 80 percent to enabling faster decisions, AI teammates are starting to do the work humans don’t have time for. Gnani shares the mistakes founders keep making with GenAI and the exact process he us...

Relying on a single AI model might be holding your team back. In this episode, Not Diamond co-founder and former VC Jeffrey Akiki joins Alchemist Accelerator CEO Ravi Belani to share why the smartest AI systems don’t depend on just one model or agent. They use a network of specialized agents, routed in real time for speed, cost, and performance. You’ll learn: Why “bigger” AI isn’t always better Ho...

Ever wondered why most enterprise AI projects never make it past flashy demos into real-world applications? Manjeet Singh, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce, sits down with Alchemist Accelerator CEO Ravi Belani to uncover why so many companies get stuck—and what it truly takes to move AI from proof-of-concept to full-scale production. In this episode, you'll learn: Why even p...

What if AI doesn’t just disrupt industries, but rewrites the rules of work and value? In this thought-provoking Fireside Chat, Ben Parr, Co-Founder of OctaneAI and Partner at TheoryForge Ventures, joins Ravi Belani to explore how automation is already reshaping hiring, productivity, and opportunity and why the real tipping point is closer than we think. Ben shares his vision for a future where AI...

Can a corporate venture arm operate with full financial independence and still deliver strategic value? In this episode of the Alchemist Accelerator Influencer Series, host Ravi Belani sits down with Jason Sydow, Partner at Next47, to explore how corporate venture capital (CVC) firms can successfully balance financial returns with corporate alignment or choose to focus on one without sacrificing v...