Attended Geodesic Forum 2026 Tech Conference

I attended the Geodesic Forum 2026 Tech Conference hosted by Geodesic Capital.

The venue was The Okura Tokyo Prestige Tower. The theme was “From Adoption to Impact: Leading in the AI Era”, focusing on the transition from AI adoption to generating real business impact. The event consisted of a Tech Conference (3:00 PM - 5:30 PM) followed by a Networking Reception (5:30 PM - 7:30 PM), with CEOs and executives from 10 companies taking the stage.

I plan to share my personal impressions and thoughts on each company in a separate article. In this post, I will introduce the host Geodesic Capital and provide an overview of the 10 presenting companies.

Host: Geodesic Capital

Geodesic Capital is a venture capital firm bridging Silicon Valley and Japan. It was founded in 2015 by John Roos, former U.S. Ambassador to Japan. The firm manages approximately $1 billion in assets, with a portfolio of 92+ companies including Databricks, Figma, Netskope, Scale AI, and Vercel, of which 21 have reached unicorn status.

Their distinctive approach is helping U.S. technology portfolio companies expand into the Japanese market. LPs include major Japanese corporations such as Mitsubishi Corporation, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and NEC. Nearly half of their portfolio companies now operate in Japan. In 2025, they also launched the Alliance Fund ($250M) to strengthen U.S.-Japan security and technology collaboration.

At this Forum, Founding Partner John Roos, Partner Jon Rezneck, and Partner Matt Fuller presented.

John Roos (Founding Partner)

John V. Roos is the Founding Partner of Geodesic Capital.

He also serves on the Board of Directors of Salesforce and advises organizations including the Toyota Research Institute and Centerview Partners. Previously, he was CEO and Senior Partner of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

From 2009 to 2013, Ambassador Roos served as U.S. Ambassador to Japan, where he led the U.S. response to the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis and helped launch the TOMODACHI Initiative. He has received numerous honors, including the U.S. State Department’s Sue M. Cobb Award and Japan’s Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun. He is a graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Law School.

Jon Rezneck (Partner, Head of Investment & COO)

Jon Rezneck is the Partner, Head of Investment Team, and COO of Geodesic Capital, where he covers fintech and other sectors.

A founding member of the firm, he previously spent over a decade in investment banking at Greenhill & Co. and J.P. Morgan in Tokyo and New York, and has experience in private equity and venture operations.

Prior to Geodesic, Jon also served as Director of Business Development and a member of the senior management team at Crowley Technologies, a global wireless telecommunications venture development company. He brings deep cross-border experience, particularly between the U.S. and Japan.

Jon holds an MBA with Honors from the Wharton School and an AB, magna cum laude, from Harvard College. He is fluent in Japanese.

Matt Fuller (Partner)

Matt Fuller is the Partner of Geodesic Capital.

He leads Investor Relations, fundraising, and international activities. Previously, he served eight years as a U.S. diplomat, including at the White House National Security Council, with postings in Tokyo and Jerusalem. Prior to the Foreign Service, he worked in Baghdad as Special Assistant to CPA Administrator L. Paul Bremer and at the United Nations in Geneva.

Matt holds a master’s degree from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor’s degree from Pepperdine University, and speaks conversational Spanish, Japanese, and Hebrew.

Presenting Companies

1. Arena — Accelerating Hardware Development with AI

Speaker: Pratap Ranade (CEO & Co-Founder)
Founded: 2019 / New York
Funding: ~$62M (Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, etc.)

Arena uses AI to accelerate hardware engineering. Their flagship product Atlas ingests technical documentation, schematics, and design files using LLMs, integrates real-time data from instruments like oscilloscopes and thermal cameras, and automates test plan generation, fault diagnosis, and performance optimization.

AMD has deployed Atlas in production for Radeon GPU testing, reporting 35% reduction in engineering person-hours and 65% faster time to market. Target industries include semiconductors, aerospace, automotive, defense, and medical devices.

Pratap Ranade Bio

Pratap Ranade is the CEO and Co-Founder of Arena.

Pratap brings 15 years of experience building companies, products and teams that specialize in engineering and machine learning.

Most recently, Pratap led Engineering & Machine Learning at Enigma, where he re-built the engineering team, growing it to 75. Beyond engineering, he created and launched a new flagship product. Previously, Pratap was at Palantir, which acquired kimono, where he was co-founder and CEO. Kimono boasted unique AI technology, 130,000 users, funding from Peter Thiel, Sam Altman (founder of OpenAI), Max Levchin, Y-Combinator and other notable investors.

Pratap was previously an Associate Partner at McKinsey & Co.

He holds a B.S. in Physics from Stanford University and an M.Phil. and M.S. in Physics from Columbia University where he was pursuing a Ph.D. before leaving to join McKinsey.

2. Cartesia — Real-time AI with State Space Models

Speaker: Karan Goel, PhD (CEO & Founder)
Founded: 2023 / San Francisco
Funding: ~$86M (Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, etc.)

Cartesia was founded by a team from the Stanford AI Lab and commercializes State Space Models (SSMs), a novel architecture alternative to Transformers. SSMs scale linearly, enabling ultra-low latency inference (as low as 45ms) and on-device deployment.

Their flagship text-to-speech model Sonic supports 40+ languages with natural laughter and emotion generation. Over 50,000 customers use the platform for AI agent voice interfaces, call centers, gaming, and more.

Karan Goel, PhD Bio

Karan Goel is the CEO and Founder of Cartesia, a startup building multimodal foundation models to power the next-generation of real-time applications.

During his PhD, Karan contributed to the development of state space models, a new architecture for foundation models that Cartesia is now pioneering. He has a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford, a Masters in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University, and a Bachelors and Masters in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He is a recipient of the Siebel Scholarship.

3. Distyl AI — Making Enterprises AI-Native

Speaker: Jenn Gamble (Head of Data Science)
Founded: 2022 / San Francisco
Funding: ~$200M (Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed, etc. / $1.8B valuation)

Distyl AI was founded by Palantir veterans and builds enterprise AI solutions. Their Distillery platform converts standard operating procedures (SOPs) into auditable AI workflows called “Routines.” A no-code visual builder lets subject matter experts refine prompts, with full logging of all inputs, outputs, and reasoning steps.

They have a deep partnership with OpenAI and deploy frontier AI at Fortune 500 companies. In healthcare, they have achieved over $23 million in annual cost savings for clients.

Jenn Gamble Bio

Jenn Gamble, Ph.D., is the Head of Data Science of Distyl AI and is one of the founding team members. Distyl works alongside enterprise organizations to reimagine core business processes through purpose-built AI applications that drive rapid, measurable results and a sustained competitive advantage. Jenn has spent more than a decade architecting and deploying AI solutions into production, bringing dozens of enterprise applications from concept to real-world impact. She is a trusted advisor to Fortune 50 executives on AI strategy, problem selection, and high-value use case development.

She holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and an M.Sc. in Statistics.

4. Harness — Automating Software Delivery with AI

Speaker: Jyoti Bansal (CEO & Co-Founder)
Founded: 2017 / San Francisco
Funding: ~$650M (Goldman Sachs, etc. / $5.5B valuation)

Harness automates everything “after code” — testing, security, deployment, and operations — with AI. Founder Jyoti Bansal previously sold AppDynamics to Cisco for approximately $3.7 billion.

The platform integrates CI/CD, feature flags, cloud cost management, and chaos engineering, with an AI DevOps Agent for natural language pipeline creation. ARR exceeds $250M, with customers including United Airlines, Priceline, and Rakuten. In 2025, they completed a merger with API security company Traceable.

Jyoti Bansal Bio

Jyoti Bansal is the CEO and Co-Founder of Harness.

Jyoti is a multi-unicorn founder, serial technology entrepreneur, and passionate mentor and investor. He is the co-founder and CEO of Harness, the $5B AI Software Delivery platform company that recently merged with Traceable, the API security startup that Jyoti also founded, to bring application security and software delivery together in a single, unified platform. The combined company reflects Jyoti’s long-standing vision: that software can and should be built and secured faster, smarter, and more safely.

Previously, Jyoti founded AppDynamics which was acquired by Cisco for $3.7B. He also launched BIGLabs, a startup studio focused on solving difficult tech problems, and co-founded Unusual Ventures, a VC firm with over $1B under management that supports early-stage founders.

He’s been recognized with honors, including EY Entrepreneur of the Year and Forbes’ Best Cloud Computing CEO. Jyoti holds a BS in Computer Science from IIT Delhi and over 25 U.S. patents.

5. Island — Pioneering the Enterprise Browser

Speaker: Mike Fey (CEO & Co-Founder)
Founded: 2020 / Dallas
Funding: $730M (Coatue, Sequoia, etc. / $4.85B valuation)

Island develops a Chromium-based enterprise browser with security, compliance, and IT governance controls built directly into the browser. This approach has the potential to replace VPNs, VDI, and SASE solutions.

The browser provides granular control over downloads, uploads, copy/paste, and screenshots, with zero trust architecture support. 7 of the world’s 10 largest financial institutions have adopted it, with approximately 450 enterprise customers across finance, healthcare, and government. Geodesic Capital is among the investors.

Mike Fey Bio

Michael Fey is the CEO & Co-Founder of Island.

Fey was President and COO at Symantec. Prior to Symantec, he was President and COO of Blue Coat. Prior to that, Mike was EVP & GM for enterprise products at McAfee and CTO of Intel Security playing a pivotal role in Intel’s acquisition of McAfee for $7.7 billion in 2010.

Fey holds a degree in Engineering Physics and Mathematics from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and was co-author of Security Battleground: An Executive Field Manual, providing a playbook for security obligated executives coping with the new realities of cyber security responsibilities to the board.

6. Modular — The Unified Compute Layer for AI

Speaker: Tim Davis (President & Co-Founder)
Founded: 2022 / San Francisco
Funding: ~$380M ($1.6B valuation)

Modular was co-founded by Chris Lattner (creator of LLVM and Swift) and Tim Davis (creator of TensorFlow Lite).

Their AI inference engine MAX is a hardware-agnostic platform that runs models across NVIDIA, AMD, and Apple GPUs and various CPUs without code changes. Benchmarks show AMD chips running 50% faster under Modular’s stack than AMD’s own ROCm software. Their new programming language Mojo combines Python’s ease of use with C++ performance, with a 1.0 release planned for H1 2026.

Tim Davis Bio

Tim Davis is the President & Co-Founder of Modular, building unified AI compute infrastructure powering trillions of tokens daily with hundreds of thousands of developers. He previously spent 7 years at Google working on TensorFlow Lite (scaled to billions of devices) and led TensorFlow APIs, XLA, TPUs, and MLIR - foundational infrastructure defining how AI is built and deployed globally.

7. Parallel — Web Search Infrastructure for AI Agents

Speaker: Parag Agrawal (CEO & Co-Founder)
Founded: 2023
Funding: ~$130M (Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, etc. / $740M valuation)

Parallel was founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and builds web search and research APIs designed natively for AI agents. Unlike traditional search engines that return links for humans, Parallel delivers information optimized for AI model context windows.

They built a proprietary web index and retrieval infrastructure from the ground up, achieving reduced hallucinations and fine-grained source attribution. Over 100 customers including Replit, Sourcegraph, and Clay use the platform, processing millions of requests daily.

Parag Agrawal Bio

Parag Agrawal is the Co-Founder of Parallel Web Systems, a company unlocking the web for AI agents.

Previously, he spent 11 years at Twitter, where he joined as an engineer before serving as CTO, and then CEO. Parag has a PhD from Stanford University in Computer Science and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT, Bombay.

8. Smack Technologies — AI for National Security

Speaker: Andrew (Andy) Markoff (CEO & Founder)
Founded: 2024 / San Antonio

Smack Technologies positions itself as “The Frontier AI Lab for National Security.” Founder Andy Markoff is a former Marine Special Operations Officer with four combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Their flagship product Alpha and Omega is an AI decision-support platform using deep reinforcement learning and real-time computer vision. Omega generates campaign-level courses of action (COAs) in minutes, while Alpha deploys lightweight agents to front-line units. They have contracts with the Joint Fires Network and Marine Corps Warfighting Lab.

Andrew (Andy) Markoff Bio

Andrew (Andy) Maroff is the CEO and Founder of Smack Technologies.

Andrew brings more than a decade of leadership in the U.S. Marine Corps, including roles as a Marine Special Operations Officer, Fires Instructor at MAWTS-1, and Special Operations Forces J3 during the Battle of Mosul. His experience spans four combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as working on operations and strategy at Palantir. Andrew holds a BA in Political Science from Princeton University.

9. TinyFish — Enterprise Web Agents

Speaker: Sudheesh Nair (CEO & Co-Founder)
Founded: 2024
Funding: $47M (ICONIQ Capital, etc.)

TinyFish builds Enterprise Web Agents that autonomously navigate and interact with websites like humans. Founder Sudheesh Nair was formerly CEO of ThoughtSpot and President of Nutanix.

The agents can operate on legacy systems without APIs, extracting data through browser-based interactions. A notable use case is their work with Google Hotels, surfacing inventory from thousands of small Japanese hotels that lacked modern API connectivity. The platform runs hundreds of thousands of concurrent agents accessing the “deep web” — over 90% of internet content inaccessible to traditional search engines.

Sudheesh Nair Bio

Sudheesh Nair is the Co-Founder and the Chief Executive Officer of TinyFish, an enterprise web agent infrastructure company.

A seasoned technology executive, Sudheesh previously served as CEO at ThoughtSpot, where he led the company’s global expansion and continued product innovation in search-driven analytics. Prior to joining ThoughtSpot, he served as President at Nutanix, where he helped scale the hybrid multicloud computing leader from its earliest days to over $1 billion in annual revenue and a successful IPO. Sudheesh has also held senior leadership roles at IBM, DataDirect Networks, OnStor, and Zambeel.

10. Vast — Building Commercial Space Stations

Speaker: Max Haot (CEO)
Founded: 2021 / Long Beach
Funding: ~$150M (founder Jed McCaleb committed up to $1B)

Vast is developing the world’s first commercial space station, Haven-1. The company was founded by Jed McCaleb, co-founder of Ripple (XRP) and creator of Stellar (XLM). CEO Max Haot joined through the acquisition of his rocket startup Launcher.

Haven-1 offers approximately 45 cubic meters of habitable space for crews of 4 for up to 30 days, launching on SpaceX Falcon 9. Artificial gravity experiments through centrifugal rotation are planned. In February 2026, NASA selected Vast for its sixth private astronaut mission. The future Haven-2 aims to succeed the ISS.

Max Haot Bio

Max Haot is the CEO of Vast.

Max is an aerospace, consumer electronics, and internet entrepreneur. Founded, scaled, and successfully sold four companies including Launcher (acquired by Vast), Mevo (acquired by Logitech), and Livestream (acquired by IAC/Vimeo).

A Diverse Lineup Beyond AI

While AI-related companies dominated the lineup, the inclusion of Island (enterprise browser), Smack Technologies (defense tech), and Vast (space) showcased the breadth of Geodesic Capital’s portfolio.

As mentioned at the beginning, I plan to share my personal impressions and thoughts on each company in a separate article.

That’s all from the field, reporting on attending the Geodesic Forum 2026 Tech Conference.