The CTOs behind 2025’s winning AI startups/scaleups
As 2025 draws to a close, a handful of AI startups have stood out. Behind each company’s rise are technical visionaries translating research breakthroughs into scalable products, infrastructure, and impact.
Below are five of the leading CTOs from the {Applied} Speakers network who've turned bold ideas into immense growth & opportunity - and who are now among the most in-demand AI speakers for anyone looking to understand how to find product market fit and apply AI at scale.
1. Mira Murati, Founder & CTO, Thinking Machines Lab
When Mira Murati left OpenAI in late 2024, she said she wanted “time and space to do her own exploration.” That exploration became Thinking Machines Lab, one of the most ambitious AI startups launched in recent times.
By mid-2025, the company raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation, one of the largest early-stage rounds in history. Thinking Machines Lab is building general-purpose, collaborative AI systems – designed to be more transparent, customizable, and accessible than today’s black-box models.
Murati’s team includes a who’s who of AI talent – including OpenAI co-founder John Schulman as Chief Scientist – making the company feel like a successor to OpenAI itself, but with that more open, community-driven approach.
What does 2026 look like for Mira's Thinking Machines Lab? It's not clear right now, but it's likely going to draw attention, and celebrate great advances.
2. Timothée Lacroix, Co-Founder & CTO, Mistral AI
Few European tech companies have scaled like Mistral AI. Co-founded in 2023 by Timothée Lacroix, Arthur Mensch, and Guillaume Lample, the Paris-based startup became Europe’s flagship foundational AI powerhouse.
In 2025, Mistral raised €1.7 billion in Series C funding, valuing it at €11.7 billion ($13.7 billion). Under Lacroix’s technical leadership, Mistral shipped both open-source and proprietary LLMs, including the conversational assistant “Le Chat.”
Lacroix’s focus has been on efficiency and accessibility - creating high-performance models that can be self-hosted or integrated without massive infrastructure. This emphasis on practical, applied AI has made Mistral a credible alternative to U.S. giants like OpenAI and Anthropic.
In short, 2025 has seen Mistral become a symbol of AI sovereignty for Europe.
3. Rahul Patil, CTO, Anthropic
Even though Rahul Patil only recently stepped into the CTO role, Anthropic’s 2025 success story is defined by its technical dominance. The company’s flagship model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, released in September 2025, became the go-to LLM for coding, reasoning, and building AI-driven agents.
Anthropic also launched a wave of developer tools that transformed how applied AI is built. Claude Code, the company’s AI coding assistant, introduced features like version checkpoints, a refreshed terminal interface, and a VS Code extension. A dedicated web app followed in October, allowing developers to build and deploy agents directly in the browser.
4. Fabian Hedin, Co-Founder & CTO, Lovable
If one startup has captured the public imagination in 2025, it's Lovable. Founded just a year ago in Stockholm, the AI-powered coding platform is exploding - now to >8 million users, and sees 100,000 new products built every day.
Lovable’s appeal lies in its simplicity: it lets users design and ship software using natural language, blending no-code accessibility with AI-driven precision. CTO Fabian Hedin leads the technical development behind this seamless experience - building scalable infrastructure.
The company has raised $228 million, including a $200 million round that valued it at $1.8 billion, with reports suggesting new offers at $5 billion.
5. Piotr Dąbkowski, Co-Founder & CTO, ElevenLabs
ElevenLabs began as a voice-cloning company, but in 2025, it became a global leader in conversational AI. Under CTO Piotr Dąbkowski, the company evolved from text-to-speech into real-time interactive voice agents.
ElevenLabs raised $180 million in Series C funding in January 2025, reaching a $3.3 billion valuation, which later doubled to $6.6 billion through a tender offer in November.
ElevenLabs moved from niche to necessity, powering customer support, media, and entertainment through applied voice AI. Dąbkowski’s technical vision has turned speech synthesis into a platform that flips how humans and machines interact.
In summary:
Each of these CTOs embodies a distinct form of AI leadership - from Murati’s mission-driven transparency to Lacroix’s open-source engineering, Patil’s enterprise infrastructure, Hedin’s creative enablement, and Dąbkowski’s voice innovation.
Together, they showcase how applied AI is moving from research labs into daily use.
For event organizers and businesses looking to hire AI speakers, these are the technologists at the frontier - translating complex systems into real-world change.