2024 MIT Digital Technology and Strategy Conference - Startup Exchange Lightning Talks

Katie Trauth Taylor is CEO and Co-Founder of NarratizeAI, the Generative AI storytelling platform for innovative enterprise. Katie is a growth-focused entrepreneur executive with 10+ years of experience inspiring teams to design and deliver magnetic products, memorable experiences, and groundbreaking impacts. She has led strategic innovation narratives and served as a senior content strategist within fast-growth tech startups and the Fortune 500, including Boeing, NASA, Hershey, Sunoco, AAA, IFF, Dupont, Edgewell, Cincinnati Children's, Argonne National Lab, Crossover Health, Parsley Health, Omada, Physera, US Dept of Veterans Affairs, Millennium Challenge Corporation, World Food Forum, and the United Nations. She believes that everyone can be an innovator -- when empowered to share their bold ideas.

John Wass is the Co-Founder and CEO of Profit Isle, a SaaS startup based in Cambridge, MA. The Profit Isle Platform helps companies make their enterprise data speak profit—generating coherent datasets that are updated every period, ready for AI and BI applications. By integrating and transforming siloed, disparate datasets, the PI Platform assigns general ledger costs to each transaction and generates a full P&L for every invoice line. Having analyzed more than $300 billion in revenues, the Profit Isle platform provides teams across retail, distribution, manufacturing, and services industries with profit insights and recommendations grounded in a company’s data, delivering rapid ROI and value. John is a disruptor in the AI and fintech space and an entrepreneur at heart, with a proven track record of building and scaling companies, increasing profitability for customers, while scaling operations and driving innovation. John earned his master’s degree from MIT in Logistics and a B.S.E. from Princeton. John co-authored the book, Choose Your Customer: How toCompete Against the Digital Giants and Thrive, has lectured at MIT for 10+ years, wrote numerous published articles, and regularly presents at seminars across the country on topics such as profitability, digital transformation, RFID, and supply chain innovation.

Natalie Gil is the Co-Founder of Darshana Inc. Degrees from MIT and CMU and has experience at Amazon, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, and the Interamerican Development Bank. She is a Board Member of Latinas in Computing and the Boston Ballet. Natalie was recognized as one of the 50 most influential Hispanics in IT globally by HITEC 2019-2022 and was awarded the 2020 Latina in Technology Award by ALPFA.

Sid Probsteinis a startup leader with pioneering experience in unified search. He is currently the creator and CEO of SWIRL -AI Infrastructure software that enables enterprise users to have a conversation with their internal data without a vector database. Before founding SWIRL, Sid was the founding CTO of Attivio (acquired by ServiceNow), AI Foundry (acquired by Gateless/Guaranteed Rate) and Dele Health (acquired by Vayyar) and held senior engineering/product roles at FAST (acquired by Microsoft), Knowledgent (acquired by Accenture) and Northern Light Technology. He started his career at John Hancock Financial Services where the integrated reporting & client management system he delivered won a Microsoft Solution In Action award. He is an avid python hacker, futurist and live music fan.

Dr. Daphne Pariser is the CEO of HeronAI, where she focuses on AI-driven solutions for automated analytics. Daphne has over 10 years of experience in the data analytics industry, including a postdoc at Harvard and MIT. She was featured on Forbes and at MIT, where she discussed how her company, HeronAI, is leading the field of automated analytics and visualizations allowing businesses to focus on what matters -- their impact.

Dr. Stewart C. Jamieson is the Head of Technology at Themis AI, an MIT CSAILspinoff integrating compute-efficient uncertainty quantification into AI models through its flagship product, Capsa. He has applied uncertainty quantification to increase the safety and performance of AI systems across various industries, from autonomous vehicles and retail robotics to ecological monitoring of coral reefs. His research has been featured by NVIDIA and recognized with a Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), the world’s largest robotics conference, and he has co-organized workshops at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). Dr. Jamieson received his PhD and Master of Science in Aeronautics & Astronautics from MIT, and his Bachelor of Applied Science in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto.

Serge Vilvovsky is the founder of AltaStata, a company that provides a unique patented approach to data security for AI. He spent eight years at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he performed cybersecurity research funded by the DoD. Before MIT LL, Serge worked for several companies in the US and Israel, including Sun Microsystems, Cisco, and various startups. Most recently, Serge managed a cloud security risk group at Capital One. He is a member of the MIT Sloan School of Management cybersecurity consortium and have been a guest speaker at MIT cybersecurity classes and conferences.

Richard Rabbat (MIT S.M. ‘98, Ph.D‘01) is co-founder and CEO of Lighty AI, an agentic AI company based in Boston and San Francisco. Prior to Lighty, he was a Vice President of Product at Twitter leading the Platform team where he ran the Data Platform product team at Twitter, with focus on big data analytics and ML infrastructure. Richard was co-founder, CEO of Gfycat, the largest GIF platform (top 60 US website, top 250 worldwide). Gfycat was acquired by Snap, Inc. Richard had led ad monetization at a late-stage startup Tango and grew revenue from $0 to $30M ARR. Richard was a General Manager at Zynga, focused on monetization and platform, where he built the first SaaS platform for gaming. Richard started his career in product management at Google, where he worked on the search team and led a company wide initiative to make the web faster.

Manisha is a visionary technologist and artist who sits at the intersection of innovation and creativity, driving product innovation at Tellus. With a passion for harnessing technology to address social issues and enhance human experience, Manisha has developed cutting-edge sensors and AR/VR technologies that integrate immersive sensory layers. A pioneer in scent integration for AR and multi-media technology, Manisha debuted her work at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in 2019. Her expertise was honed during her master's program at MIT, where she designed a scent camera, and later led research and development initiatives at International Flavors and Fragrances. At Tellus, Manisha is revolutionizing the industry by integrating generative AI to create the world's first digital scent perfumer.

Notably, Manisha's innovative system was featured in Oscar awardee A.R. Rahman's movie LeMusk, which premiered at Cannes XR and won an award at the LA Infinity Festival. Through her work at Tellus, Manisha is redefining the boundaries of technology and art, creating immersive experiences that engage and inspire.

Paul Bosco Jr. is currently Head of Product at ProjectUs.ai, an MIT Media Lab spinout, where he is driving the development of products that aim to reshape leadership development and empathy within the workplace. His experience includes roles at the Mass Digital Health Initiative, IBM Watson Health, Harvard, and the MIT Media Lab, focusing on advancing the application of AI and ML in healthcare and workforce development, including NSF-funded research on Machine Learning and Bio-Signal Processing for Enhancing Empathy Training while at the Media Lab. His academic credentials include a BA/MS, and he is currently pursuing a dual master’s in computer science and engineering management from Tufts University.