The Tasting Menu: 5 Course AI Startups (Dreamforce Edition)
Dreamforce week and every party in the city is a badge scan and a branded cocktail napkin.
This one is different. Five AI startups, from pre-seed to Series B, get five minutes each to demo a live product to a room of GTM, engineers, marketing, and platform leaders from Fortune 500 companies.
Then three minutes of questions from the room, and the rest of the night is yours.
What you get out of it
If you run a GTM, SE, Eng, or marketing function at a large company: you see five leading-egdge products from teams nimble enough to build what you actually need, and you leave with the founders' contact info instead of a booth swag bag.
If you build one of those products: you demo to buyers, not to other founders.
The night
5:00pm: Doors, food, drinks, name tags
5:30pm: Welcome, why we run this, who is presenting
5:40pm: Five demos. 5 minutes each, 3 minutes of Q&A. Hard stops.
6:25pm: Open networking
7:00pm: Soft close
Who's presenting
Lineup announced the week before the event. Approved registrants get the list first.
The Judges
Shriram Bagavathyappan · Google DeepMind
Shriram is a Group Product Manager at Google DeepMind, where he leads Gemini model quality for factuality and steerability.
Paari Krishnamurthy · OpenAI
Paari Krishnamurthy is a strategy and operations leader at OpenAI specializing in human evaluations and automation. His experience spans enterprise AI and voice-agent startups, Bain & Company, and Goldman Sachs, bringing a practical lens to customer value, reliable deployment, and business viability.
Krishna Chaitanya Sanka · Microsoft
Krishna Chaitanya Sanka is a Director of AI Engineering at Microsoft, leading AI platforms, data platforms, and applied AI for Microsoft’s devices operations. He builds AI-powered products and agentic workflows that transform enterprise decisions and business processes.
Royston Monteiro · Meta
Royston Monteiro is a Staff Software Engineer at Meta, leading large-scale backend and AI systems for Facebook Stories. His work spans consumer GenAI experiences and the evaluation, reliability, and infrastructure needed to run AI systems at scale.
Saurabh Yergattikar · eBay
Saurabh Yergattikar is a MTS-2 and Tech Lead at eBay, focused on backend financial services, platforms, and distributed systems. He created ShieldMCP, an open-source runtime framework for MCP-based AI agents, and has published and presented his work at leading AI and software engineering venues.
About XTrace
XTrace helps teams turn scattered AI work into shared intelligence that humans and AI agents can use to do work faster.
Learn more about XTrace → xtrace.ai
About Persona
Persona is an online identity verification platform that enables businesses of all sizes to collect, verify, and manage user identities throughout the customer lifecycle. Trusted in over 200 countries and territories.
Learn more about Persona → withpersona.com