Operators who've sat<br>in the room, not just the lab.

<p>Sophia Velastegui is a renowned tech industry leader with wide-ranging expertise in corporate strategy, product development, and artificial intelligence for Fortune 200 companies, startups, government, and academics. She currently advises Fortune 1000 companies on right-sized and scalable AI business strategies. Sophia is a highly sought-after speaker, presenting keynotes at TEDx, the Financial Times Future of AI Summit, co-chairing the WSJ Tech Council Summit, NACD, and the World Economic Forum.</p><p>Sophia Velastegui is the CEO of Velastegui Ventures, where she provides AI advisory, consulting, and develops cutting-edge AI products and services to Fortune 1000 companies. She was previously the Chief Product Officer of Aptiv, leading global product strategy and managing a multi-billion-dollar self-driving car and AI portfolio. Prior to that, Sophia served as Chief AI Technology Officer at Microsoft, leading the company's AI business application vision and initiatives. Her team worked extensively in traditional and generative AI, including Microsoft/OpenAI and ChatGPT. Her leadership journey also includes launching AI products and services at tech giants such as Google/Alphabet and Apple.</p><p>Currently, Sophia serves as a board director at BlackLine (NASDAQ: BL) and on Georgia Tech's President's Board. She is an AI advisor for the National Science Foundation (NSF), and is also a member of the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) on AI, technology, and corporate governance.</p><p>Sophia's impact extends to the World Economic Forum, where she chaired the Global Future Council around AI and business digital transformation. Her insights have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Information Week, TEDx, Forbes, and the World Economic Forum. She was named "The Most Powerful Female Engineer" by Business Insider for AI and emerging technology.</p><p>Sophia received a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech and an M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.</p>

<p>Nicholas brings deep silicon and hardware engineering discipline to Velastegui Ventures, with a career spent in design automation and physical design across VLSI, EDA, SoC, and ASIC teams at Intel Corporation and Altera. That hands-on chip-to-system experience grounds the firm's AI strategy work in the physical and engineering realities that make deployments actually ship.</p><p>He holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.</p>

<p>Anuradha Choudhury is a technology executive with more than 25 years leading engineering, AI/ML, and operations organizations at scale. She has advised and operated within organizations ranging from high-growth private companies to Fortune 500 enterprises, building deep fluency in how AI transformation actually gets executed — not just strategized — inside complex, regulated environments.</p><p>Her foundation in large-scale, mission-critical systems includes leading the engineering effort behind Amazon Alexa's location-based services, scaling infrastructure from 400 to 40,000 transactions per second at peak across more than 80 Alexa features, and driving the security strategy for Amazon's data-center switches to meet Department of Defense contract standards — experience that continues to inform her rigorous, execution-oriented approach to enterprise AI risk and technology governance today.</p><p>As Executive AI Advisor to Velastegui Ventures, Anuradha advises the firm's CEO and COO on AI product strategy and works directly with VV's clients — across healthcare, finance, and technology — on AI adoption strategy and the design of agentic workflows. She brings an operator's perspective to the boards and C-suite leadership teams VV advises, translating technical risk and opportunity into terms relevant to enterprise-scale AI governance and oversight decisions.</p><p>Anuradha currently serves as Chief Technology Officer at Reputation, a SaaS platform serving more than 2,000 enterprise and SMB customers, where she led a company-wide architecture overhaul that prepared the organization's data for AI features and delivered a 10x performance gain, and transformed engineering and technical support into a modern, AI-driven organization spanning product definition, deployment, and customer metrics tracking.</p><p>She holds a Master of Computer Science from Arizona State University and a Bachelor of Computer Science from the National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, India, and completed the University of Texas at Austin's certification program in AI/ML for Business Applications in 2024.</p>