Aki Wijesundara is an AI leader with a PhD in Machine Learning and extensive experience mentoring startups at Google’s AI Accelerator. With a career spanning both research and applied AI, Aki has taught 5,000+ students worldwide how to design and deploy production-ready AI systems.
He has worked across cutting-edge areas of applied AI, from LangChain and RAG pipelines to observability and large-scale deployment. As a researcher and educator, Aki bridges the gap between theory and practice, making complex systems approachable and actionable for engineers, founders, and product leaders.
Aki is also a frequent speaker and advisor to organizations adopting AI, helping them transition from experimentation to production at scale.
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PhD in AI & Cognitive Systems with published research across top universities.
Former researcher with teams affiliated with MIT, University of Oxford, & King’s College London.
Co-founder of Snapdrum — delivered AI systems for finance, education, and healthcare.
Built and deployed AI product pipelines used by PMs, startups, and enterprise teams.
Instructor for multiple AI builder programs, helping 500+ professionals ship AI features fast.
Manu Jayawardana is a serial entrepreneur with multiple AI startup successes.
He is also the Co-Founder of Snapdrum, an AI consultancy helping companies integrate and automate their businesses using AI. Through Snapdrum, Manu has worked with top startups and enterprises across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, advising on automation, product development, and AI strategy.
Currently, Manu is the Co-Founder & CEO of Krybe, an AI voice agent startup in London transforming how businesses automate customer interactions. His experience spans fundraising, scaling products, and leading teams to deliver production-grade AI solutions adopted globally.
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Co-Founder of Krybe — ultra-realistic voice AI platform with 1000+ users and part of the NVIDIA Inception Program.
Built and scaled 10+ companies across AI, SaaS, analytics, and EdTech, including a B2B analytics product that grew 10× in one year.
Former Entrepreneur First Unlock Fellow, selected for high-potential AI founders.
Aki Wijesundara is an AI leader with a PhD in Machine Learning and extensive experience mentoring startups at Google’s AI Accelerator. With a career spanning both research and applied AI, Aki has taught 5,000+ students worldwide how to design and deploy production-ready AI systems.
He has worked across cutting-edge areas of applied AI, from LangChain and RAG pipelines to observability and large-scale deployment. As a researcher and educator, Aki bridges the gap between theory and practice, making complex systems approachable and actionable for engineers, founders, and product leaders.
Aki is also a frequent speaker and advisor to organizations adopting AI, helping them transition from experimentation to production at scale.
Career highlights
Manu Jayawardana is a serial entrepreneur with multiple AI startup successes. He exited Rise AI, a fintech app with over 35,000 users, to a private investor, demonstrating his ability to build and scale impactful products.
He is also the Co-Founder of Snapdrum, an AI consultancy helping companies integrate and automate their businesses using AI. Through Snapdrum, Manu has worked with top startups and enterprises across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, advising on automation, product development, and AI strategy.
Currently, Manu is the Co-Founder & CEO of Krybe, an AI voice agent startup in London transforming how businesses automate customer interactions. His experience spans fundraising, scaling products, and leading teams to deliver production-grade AI solutions adopted globally.
Career highlights
Hi, I’m Hamza. I’m a founder by day and a professor by night, working at the intersection of Agents and Product Design.
I started Traversaal.ai with a simple goal: to build scalable AI products for startups and enterprises that integrate smoothly into existing systems while staying flexible and cost efficient.
We’ve had the opportunity to work with Fortune 100 companies, and the lessons from those experiences are woven directly into this course.
This course brings together everything I’ve learned in practice, along with the material I teach across universities.
I still spend a lot of time writing code, you can check out my GitHub.
I also share my thoughts and learnings on how organizations should think about moving demos to production grade scale on, The Production Gap: Substack.
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Beyond work:
→ I host The Founder’s Foyer, a podcast and builder collective where we deconstruct how raw ideas become real-world products
→ I mentor startup founders as a part of incubators and programs like Stanford Seed Spark
→ I tinker with AI + video workflows, expanding the boundaries of GenAI filmmaking and storytelling
→ And when I’m not building, you’ll find me sketching old cities, hosting heritage art walks, and running my tech-led e-commerce brand, Rue Des Arts.
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Most importantly, she's mastered career transition strategy, helping hundreds land their first technical roles and/or launch their first AI businesses through mentorship and strategic coaching.
Hai advises and invests in top-tier YC-backed AI startups on production-ready systems:
As a LangChain Python contributor, he built one of the first viral projects combining LLMs with web scraping, establishing him as an early innovator in the field.