In this Mixture of Experts interview from the NYSE studio, WomenofGenAI founder Aakriti Srikanth joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to map the shifting power lines between Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Srikanth traces the evolution of her community from its early roots in 2018, shaped by a network of women leaders across venture capital and enterprise tech. She explains why access, sponsorship and “give to get” culture matter as AI lowers the barrier to building, funding and scaling new companies.
The conversation widens to the entrepreneurial mood in San Francisco and the broader normalization of AI as a utility across industries. Srikanth shares her hands-on work incubating startups and backing female founders, then weighs in on what it means for companies to become “AI-native” in practice. From neocloud momentum to AI sales agents and even AI-driven ambitions in housing and real estate, the throughline is clear: the flywheel rewards those who start, adapt and keep shipping.
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Aakriti Srikanth, WomenOfGenAI
In this theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts segment from the New York Stock Exchange, theCUBE’s John Furrier sits down with Raj Verma, CEO of SingleStore, to unpack how the intersection of technology and finance is shaping enterprise strategy. Verma shares why SingleStore is “on course” for the public markets, reflects on brand-building through the company’s partnership with golf Hall of Famer Padraig Harrington and connects that ethos to how SingleStore helps organizations fix struggling data “swings.” The discussion zeroes in on what’s next as Wall Street watches the AI infrastructure buildout: after chips and systems, the software and data layers set the pace for value creation.
Verma outlines why enterprises must modernize “brown” data estates into “green” ones to safely bring corporate context, governance and compliance into LLM workflows via RAG – and why commoditized data-at-rest puts the advantage at the query layer that unifies data in motion with data at rest. He predicts agentic AI will gain reasoning capabilities in roughly 18 months, cites industry indicators like Google reporting ~25% of its software now built by AI and argues that high switching costs will give way to disruption as buyers reassess legacy vendors. The conversation closes with concrete momentum: ~33% YoY growth, ARR in the ~$135M range, gross dollar retention ~98%, cloud NDR ~130, ~50% of business now in the cloud, landing ~3 new customers per day, a path to cash-flow breakeven in the next two quarters and a teaser for AI-related announcements in the next two months. Listeners will find notable stats, real-world use cases and forward-looking views on how databases power reliable AI at enterprise scale.
In this Mixture of Experts interview from the NYSE studio, WomenofGenAI founder Aakriti Srikanth joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to map the shifting power lines between Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Srikanth traces the evolution of her community from its early roots in 2018, shaped by a network of women leaders across venture capital and enterprise tech. She explains why access, sponsorship and “give to get” culture matter as AI lowers the barrier to building, funding and scaling new companies.
The conversation widens to the entrepreneurial mood in Sa...Read more
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What is the significance of the Mixture of Experts series and who is Aku?add
What initiative was started in 2018 that involved working with women venture capitalists and aimed to support other women in the field?add
What are some observations regarding the current state of entrepreneurship, particularly with respect to diversity and the influence of AI on startups?add
What are the roles of women and men in supporting female leadership in the context of AI and workplace advancement?add
What initiatives or efforts have been undertaken to support women entrepreneurs in the tech industry?add
>> Welcome back right to theCUBE. We are here at the NYSE studio of theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street tech and money. Technology is the market we're in, and this is our Mixture of Experts series. Aku is here. She is the founder of Women in GenAI, as well as many other entrepreneurial endeavors. She really encapsulates the trend that we're seeing where technology and the capital markets are coming together, very tightly coupled. Thanks for coming in today.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Thank you, John.
John Furrier
>> Saw your photos on LinkedIn. You were at NRF, which we've been covering in depth this week.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yes.
John Furrier
>> Good to see you.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Well, thank you. Thank you so much.
John Furrier
>> So I saw a picture of Ray Wang, Alison Wagonfeld, who's now the new CMO of Google. I mean, she was the CMO of Google. Now she's the CMO of Nvidia, friend of theCUBE. That's Nvidia's first CMO.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yes.
John Furrier
>> She's got to be super excited by that.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yeah, we're super excited for her. We celebrated her. We treated her with a cake and a candle at twelve midnight when the announcement was made.
John Furrier
>> It's a great hire for Nvidia. I love the Women in GenAI. Talk about the founding of that, when it was started. You're starting to see AI certainly democratizing everything, and the tech as the utility is being used by everybody. So talk about the founding of this group, status, where it's at, and some of the data.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yeah, thank you. So I started this initiative. It was initially called AI Venture back in 2018, where I worked a lot with women venture capitalists like Heidi Roizen, who was the first woman venture capitalist, Lila Tretikov, who's now heading up AI at NEA, former deputy CTO of Microsoft, and others. Jean English, whom I worked for for over a decade, right from the time when she was at IBM to NetApp and other companies like Juniper. She's now CMO of CoreWeave, so it's been great. Also Shaloo Garg at Microsoft, so a number of amazing women in the field whom I've had the opportunity to work with over the decade. We created this environment where we could help other women, and we had a series of panels and entrepreneurship activities. I launched an AI accelerator with Microsoft for startups back in the days when Shaloo Garg was there, focused on AI For Good and responsible AI, incubated startups like Credo AI. I brought in their first seed investment, their first $5.5 million, from Jon Sakoda of Decibel, who was at NEA, as well as Anne Dwane at Village Global. And then Reid Hoffman followed in as an investor, and Andrew Wang was also involved, so been very involved in incubating these startups from scratch.
John Furrier
>> A lot of CUBE alumni on that list. In fact, one trivia stat is that Jean English was the first guest on theCUBE at the NYSE. So when we came here about a year and a half ago ... she was at Juniper at the time ... she was our first guest. So all right, here we go. So congratulations. So what's the mission of the group? Is it a collective? Is it a loose collective? Is it a formal group? Explain how it's organized and the mission.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yeah, thank you, and I love that Jean English was the first guest at NYSE. She's one of my favorite people in the world, and of course, my boss at various companies that I worked at, and so excited for her new chapter with CoreWeave. It was one of the most exciting IPOs of this year, right?
John Furrier
>> And you get the whole neocloud segment's booming, so that's awesome. Yeah. I mean, she's a great.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yeah. So we did a lot of ... Back to your question, Women of GenAI, we've very, very much ... It's all been about helping women. If you look at like the last hundred years, so many things have changed, with people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg changing the laws. Just about a hundred years ago, or less than a hundred years ago, we had the right to vote, right?
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> And in other countries, less than a hundred years ago, or the right to sign a mortgage without a man, buy a house without a man. Or in Saudi Arabia now more recently, the right to drive, and still in places like Afghanistan, women can't. We can't show our face, like with the Taliban reversing things now. So there's so many things that still are changing. And now we have women like the first woman CEO of Chanel, who's of Indian heritage, right, Leena, and people like Indra Nooyi. I also was with Kirthiga Reddy the other day, who reminds me of Indra Nooyi, so people like this who really are breaking glass ceilings.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, exactly.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Shifting barriers.
John Furrier
>> And also the entrepreneurship with AI has changed. I just wrote a post on Substack about founder mode and how AI is changing that. The speed of velocity to get a startup up and running is lowering the bar of entry, but the creativity is going to be based upon the human, the entrepreneur, so opportunity recognition is now open for everybody. You don't have to be a tech bro and go to Y Combinator or do that. It's completely wide open. You're seeing a lot more women VC firms. We had a panel in Palo Alto of all women VCs, so you're starting to see good momentum. There's still a lot more work to do. What's been some of the reactions and some of the momentum? Can you share some other stats in terms of like some things that you're observing around the Valley, New York, some of these hotbed areas? You're starting to see a lot more community.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yeah, totally. And the stats are interesting because if you look at the number of ... And someone that really calls it out well like Kevin O'Leary, whom I met personally last year, was telling me about how he really believes in investing in women entrepreneurs, because they do ... statistically when he looks at the numbers, they give him ROI.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. The data doesn't lie.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> The data doesn't lie, yes.
John Furrier
>> The results are there.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yeah. And it's interesting because I think women make decisions with emotional intelligence, and that's important, ultimately understanding human. Satya Nadella has quoted recently like emotional intelligence is the number-one thing you need as a CEO. We need more women CEOs. One of my favorite people in the world, Nancy Wang, she's going to be ...
John Furrier
>> A CUBE alumni. She's a CUBE alumni.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Oh, she is?
John Furrier
>> Yeah. When she was at Amazon, she was on multiple times.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Oh, yeah, she was a GM. She was the youngest GM at Amazon. Yes.
John Furrier
>> She's great. She's awesome. Again, you have all these power women. This is, to me, I think a big story that's not told very often, and that is the democratization of the technology, and I was just saying on the balcony when we were ringing the opening bell, watching y'all ringing the bell, the utility of AI is enabling superpowers, and that's indiscriminate on who's driving it.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yep.
John Furrier
>> So this is the superpower. I think it's going to change the game. And I think the numbers might change, and we'll do as much content with you and get the word out. We did it with a panel with women in GSA, the Global Semiconductor Association. I mean, I think that was a one-day. We did 12 interviews. I don't think I said women in tech once, because they were just really good at tech. And so it wasn't the fact that they were a woman, it was that they were good, but it was all women. And so you're starting to see the leveling up with AI, because AI will allow people to get in the game quicker.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yeah, totally. And I think it's so important, of course, we have this community of women, but we also want men who are supportive of that, who help empower other female leaders, and it's so important to have that sponsorship at work. I know a lot of great, amazing ... One of my friends was the former CEO of OpenAI, interim CEO, Emmett Shear, who's the founder of Twitch. He's also a great supporter of the initiatives we do and Women of GenAI.
John Furrier
>> We owe Emmett and the team at Twitch huge props, because it wasn't for Justin.tv, which became Twitch, TheCUBE would not have existed. So Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, Kevin, you guys, appreciate it. Again, those guys built a massive business.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yes.
John Furrier
>> But they're open. Again, they had the same philosophy, and then obviously, gaming streaming obviously kicked in. That was huge. That's my question for you, is what's the vibe in the entrepreneurial circles? We're in 2026, okay? We've been doing theCUBE for 16 years. We've seen many of the cycles with theCUBE personally, as well as before then, Web 2.0, Web 1.0. It seems like the vibe in San Francisco's changed a lot. How would you describe the entrepreneurial vibe? Because it seems like the tech bro era has come and gone, but there's still a lot of tech bro vibe. What's your reaction, if someone asks what's the scene like in San Francisco?
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yeah, it's interesting. The tech bro era, that's an interesting term. There's a joke.
John Furrier
>> It is. I'm going to get in trouble for the tech bro. No, but I mean, it was very bro.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> They used to call it Man Jose instead of San Jose, back in the days.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, but it was very tech bro-y. I mean, it was. I mean, that's factual, but I think now it's a lot more collaborative. It seems collaborative right now. There's a ton of activity. San Francisco's back.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> It wasn't as bad. The crime's down. Still a lot more work to do, but what's the vibe up in San Francisco? How would you describe that?
Aakriti Srikanth
>> I think San Francisco, I think there's more collaboration. You have more women in the room now. And I think initially when I got there back in the years, about a decade ago, I wanted to blend in. I tried to wear a t-shirt and a hoodie and just blend in. Now you could just really ... There's more women in the room.
John Furrier
>> Exactly.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> You have CEOs like Yamini, CEO of HubSpot. Others like that are Vessy Jokol, Christine Heckart. People like that are CEOs who have a seat at the table, who are making room for the next generation.
John Furrier
>> There's a lot of mentorship too. And I think you mentioned male involvement. There's a lot more men leaning in and being part of it too.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> Has that changed at all?
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yeah, definitely. That has been immensely important, sponsorship, because you have two things. You have mentors and sponsors. I've written an article back in the days on Forbes about how important it is, for women especially, to have that earlier in your career, and it all starts with giving before you get. How can you add value to the other person? I remember I had a one-on-one a long time ago with the CEO of Forbes, and I went in with, "How can I help you?" And he was like, "This is one of the few meetings where someone came in with, `How can I help you,' versus asking me for something, and this is so refreshing."
John Furrier
>> Community is so important. If you look at the surge of open source, a lot of these communities or these microcommunities, some are calling them, have great cohesion, but also, you have to give to get.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Totally.
John Furrier
>> There's a nice informal protocol developing around this. You're starting to see it. You mentioned you're helping companies get started, helping companies get funding.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> That's kind of normal in Silicon Valley, but the demographics were usually men, right? Or how would you describe that experience when you were helping companies get funding? I remember when John Sakoda left NEA to start Decibel, because I worked with him at NEA. He's done an amazing job at Decibel, and he's now got a full-blown firm. They're doing highly successful. His thesis was strong, but it's hard to start. So for people who want to start, a lot more solo GPs are coming out, so is that getting traction? I've seen a lot more women leading their own deals, putting SPVs together, so a lot more access. So it seems like things are breaking through.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yeah, totally. I think, yeah, a few women that I worked with, Jalak Jobanputra is one. She started Future Perfect Ventures. She has her own fund, and she just invested a round that I helped curate with the Informatica founder, who took his last company public on NYSE at $8 billion. So she just put the money in.
John Furrier
>> And now part of Salesforce, a big customer on theCUBE and we love their events.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Also Rashida Hodge, CVP of Microsoft, and I worked at IBM Watson back in the days. One of my favorite people. She also just invested in a round here, and that's really exciting, as they rebranded to DaVinci.
John Furrier
>> Okay, so share your goals for the organization. Again, you're doing a lot of things in addition to that on the entrepreneurial side, funding side. What are some of the goals you have for Women of GenAI? Share, for the folks watching, what you're working on. What are the key things you're focused on?
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yeah, I've been really focused on over the years helping women entrepreneurs, incubating companies, so Credo was one example.
John Furrier
>> Navrina, yep.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Navrina was a female founder, and partnering with her in the early days and bringing in that fundraising round, because the number of women who actually raise venture capital is relatively low if you look at the statistics. Also, most recently I incubated another company from scratch. It was my company, like the AI Foundation. I stepped in as their interim president to run it, and I partnered with their CEO and I brought in ... it was funded by Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, Chanel, family office, and a bunch of investors like that. I incubated a new company from scratch focused on AI sales agents from there, and now they raised another 40 million, first a $5 million round and another 40 million, so that's valued way above a hundred. So I've been very focused on helping female entrepreneurs, and I brought in a woman CEO there as well. So for me, it's very important to see women leadership.
John Furrier
>> How do people get involved? How do people get involved? They just hit you up on LinkedIn? Is there a site? What's the engagement strategy? How can people get involved?
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yeah. Yes, feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn, and would love to collaborate. I host a lot of things like panels. I host CXO and CEO forums. I also did one with Juniper and Microsoft. Google, SVB, Salesforce, they've been sponsors, great supporters, like the founder, interim CEO of OpenAI as well.
John Furrier
>> There's a lot of pay it forward. What's really nice and I like in this vibe is, in the AI vibe, there's a pay it forward vibe, there's a society vibe, in the sense of there's a bigger picture. It seems like if you go back maybe two cycles ago, where you say Web 2.0, it's all about money-making, money-making. Now, granted, I'm not allergic to money-making, believe me. I love making money, but there's more higher goals. What would you say to that? What's your reaction to that? Do you agree that people are thinking differently around how to align with bigger objectives than just money-making?
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yeah. I think people are definitely trying to align with making ... Every company right now is trying to make their company AI-native and automate everything. And I think, even if indirectly, that does contribute to becoming money-making because your ROI is higher. You're doing more with less and you're really becoming a profitable company that way. How can you automate tests and have your own AI personal assistant?
John Furrier
>> So I have to ask ... since you're in the trenches, you're spinning up ventures, you're partnering, you're teaming up with other entrepreneurs, female entrepreneurs, capital markets, so you're at the intersection of the tech buildout, ideation, opportunity recognition and value creation and capture ... has the equation changed with AI? Because one of the things we're seeing is you can get acceleration faster once you get in, and we're seeing that. Jensen Huang has said many times on stage, in seeing his speeches and one-on-ones with him, you gotta adopt it, get going, then the flywheel kicks in. That seems to be the recurring pattern in AI and with startups. Once you have, you can get to escape velocity faster. That seems to be the general thesis and reaction. What's your take on the founding equation, starting a company? What's changed? What's the same? What's different?
Aakriti Srikanth
>> I think in terms of founding a company, it's like having a baby. It's like your baby, and I think there's more venture capital money for AI. I feel like more female founders are coming now, and that's been my mission, to help female founders grow and help them get funded and see them to the next. And I've had quite a huge success rate on that, specifically working with female founders.
John Furrier
>> What's your observation? You're at NRF. You're seeing a lot of things. What's your take on the tech scene right now, in terms of there's a lot of people that are learning? I mean, smart people that aren't in AI don't even know what hallucination means, and they hear buzzwords like AI factory or agentic infrastructure. Certainly the semiconductors. Nvidia stock is leading the market. We can see them on the board every day here on the option side. What is your take on the tech scene right now, in terms of bubble, no bubble, real, what's real, what's not? What should people know about? What's just your general opinion?
Aakriti Srikanth
>> That's a great question. I think there's a lot of potential like Nvidia, who's leading the charge on this, and I'm so excited. Alison Wagonfeld is their first-ever CMO. It was like two days ago. We celebrated her with a cake and a candle after. We did this last year in Saudi as well at her birthday at twelve midnight, so we repeated the tradition and we were talking about this.
John Furrier
>> We're always traveling on our birthdays. It seems funny. My birthday's always at re:Invent. Alison's is always in the middle of events.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> It's like we're on the road more.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yeah. And I think there's so much happening, even with Nvidia's partnership with CoreWeave, and also generative AI for different areas like even generative AI for marketing, and the Informatica founder will talk more about that. But I think there's so many solutions in making companies AI-native and tech-driven, and also like the BOXABL CEO is going to take his company public soon. He's also making his company AI-native.
John Furrier
>> Every vertical. I mean, they're making homes. That's going to solve a lot of homeless problems, going to help people get a home, to ownership. Who would have thought that's an AI company? Everything's AI-native.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Yeah. I just also introduced him to a board member who's joining, who's going to help make the company AI-native, and a CTO.
John Furrier
>> Nice.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> It's so exciting that even companies in other areas like real estate are trying to make their companies more AI-native.
John Furrier
>> Well, great to have you on. I love what you do. Super support your mission. Looking forward to making content together with you. Certainly panels, we'll share and amplify that. Thanks for coming on our Mixture of Experts, and we'll get the word out. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it.
Aakriti Srikanth
>> Thank you so much.
John Furrier
>> I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here at our NYSE studio, part of the NYC Wired program, a CUBE original program that we started with the NYC, Brian Baumann and team, building a network, an open network of entrepreneurs to share their stories, but also get the word out and also collaborate with others. The collaborative market, the ecosystems, are a part of all the new ventures. They're happening faster. They're going to get the time to value to escape velocity, and AI is making it go fast. So it's an opportunity for all, and of course we're doing our part to bring that to you. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier