Washington’s tech panorama has been reshaped by a whirlwind of political change, regulatory reversals, and an AI gold rush. President Trump’s takeover of the Federal Trade Commission is looking for to fight “tech censorship,” whereas the Defense Department’s $1.8 billion AI funding has contractors racing to capitalize on the federal government’s artificial-intelligence ambitions—whilst some business giants face federal scrutiny.
The AI business has been busy lobbying Congress to set an innovation-first agenda, with lighter rules versus restrictive oversight. But some firm heads are calling for guardrails. Among them is considered one of this 12 months’s Tech Titans, Rachel Appleton of Anthropic, who says she’d prefer to see the federal government take the lead in driving transparency round AI fashions, particularly as associated to national-security dangers.
Silicon Valley enterprise capitalists have had an outsize affect on Washington’s strategy to AI. Trump’s AI and crypto czar, David Sacks, and AI adviser, Sriram Krishnan—each VC buyers—together with Office of Science and Technology Policy director Michael Kratsios, a former adviser to Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel, wrote the White House’s AI Action Plan, launched in July. The plan seeks to take away limitations to AI innovation within the US, together with “ideological bias” and DEI efforts.
The crypto business has additionally loved a windfall in Washington currently. Senator Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican, has turn into a frontrunner in expertise in Congress, cosponsoring the GENIUS Act, which was signed into regulation in July to create the primary digital-asset regulatory framework. Industry leaders applauded the laws, calling it a “major step forward.”
Not all of tech has gotten the red-carpet remedy. FTC chair Andrew Ferguson is continuous his predecessors’ antitrust case in opposition to Meta, looking for to interrupt off WhatsApp and Instagram from the tech large. And Gail Slater, Trump’s new antitrust chief at DOJ, is pursuing cures to weaken Google’s dominant maintain over search and the internet marketing market.
DC additionally continues to be residence to a burgeoning tech hub with progressive options for healthcare, fairness, and cybersecurity. Kirsten Brecht Baker’s firm, Jeenie, is tackling language limitations in healthcare with each human interpreters and synthetic intelligence. Venture capitalists Omi Bell of Black Girl Ventures and the Agora Initiative’s Amelia DeSorrento, Ann Marie Guzzi, and Kelly O’Malley are utilizing their connections and funds to provide ladies entrepreneurs a good shot. J. Michael Daniel leads the Cyber Threat Alliance because it goals to remain on prime of the safety dangers that include AI’s fast proliferation.
Kay Rodriguez, the creator of Outerly—a social-impact tech platform that’s getting folks off their telephones and into nature with IRL walks—says she’s seen the world’s tech scene repeatedly add extra social-impact, well being, local weather, and consumer-tech corporations to the combo.
“I’m excited to see a more diverse set of companies call the DMV home,” she informed us.
Here are this 12 months’s 253 Tech Titans.
The Starters
Entrepreneurs, Founders, and Early-Stage CEOs
Reggie Aggarwal, Chuck Ghoorah, and David Quattrone
Cvent
CEO and Cofounder (Aggarwal), Cofounder and President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing (Ghoorah), and Cofounder and CTO (Quattrone)
Even after 25 years, Cvent stays a frontrunner in occasion expertise, serving greater than 24,000 prospects worldbroad, together with business giants resembling Walmart and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. This summer season, the multibillion-dollar Tysons firm launched its personal AI-powered instrument to streamline occasion planning and administration for purchasers.
Amena Ali
Optoro
CEO
Optoro has remodeled retail returns from a serious annoyance into a bonus for manufacturers like Gap, American Eagle, and Best Buy. As of final fall, prospects can drop off undesirable orders in choose shops and good lockers by scanning a QR code and getting immediate refunds.
Randy Altschuler
Xometry
CEO and Cofounder
Altschuler is digitizing the nation’s $2.9 trillion manufacturing business by way of his AI-powered market that enables corporations to make customized elements on demand. Since taking Xometry public in 2021, he has greater than doubled annual income whereas producing over $1 billion for small and medium-size American producers on the platform.
Josh Araujo
Forterra
CEO
Araujo’s Clarksburg firm stays a prime supplier of autonomous-vehicle programs for purchasers such because the Defense Department, and it gained a contract to supply the navy’s first fleet of self-driving floor autos.
Jim Bankoff
Vox Media
Cofounder, Chairman, and CEO
Bankoff is combating content material theft in court docket whereas increasing his media empire’s digital footprint. Vox joined greater than a dozen different publishers in February suing Cohere for allegedly coaching its AI on hundreds of stolen articles. Meanwhile, he’s launched Eater’s first app that includes 10,000-plus maps throughout 100 cities, in addition to a New York journal app that unifies Vulture, the Cut, and its 4 different verticals.
Jennifer Bisceglie
Interos
Founder and Executive Vice Chair
Bisceglie has constructed Interos right into a billion-dollar firm serving greater than 100 private- and public-sector purchasers who want to observe supply-chain dangers, from cyber threats to tariffs. In October, Interos closed a $40 million development spherical to boost its AI platform’s predictive capabilities, serving to purchasers anticipate disruptions reasonably than reply to them after the actual fact.
Aisha Bowe
STEMBoard and Lingo
Founder and CEO
A former NASA rocket scientist, Bowe dedicates her time to making sure that children have a decrease barrier to science careers. Lingo, which spun out of her tech advisory agency, STEMBoard, creates engineering kits that train college students construct and code actual gadgets, resembling a automotive backup sensor.
Jeenie
Cofounder and CEO
Nearly one in 4 sufferers struggles with language limitations. Baker’s Jeenie connects hospitals with dwell interpreters 24-7. With $13.6 million in funding, the platform serves purchasers in 150 international locations by way of 14,000 medically certified interpreters who converse greater than 300 languages, together with uncommon and Indigenous ones.
Michael Chasen
Class
Founder and CEO
Since Covid-era faculty shutdowns, digital studying has advanced past an emergency pandemic resolution. Led by Chasen, Class is working to blur the traces between digital and in-person studying by way of seamless course setup and interactive options that maintain college students engaged.
Niccolo de Masi
IonQ
CEO
A physicist by coaching, de Masi stepped into the lead position of the $12 billion quantum-computing firm earlier this 12 months. In July, IonQ acquired Capella Space to construct what would primarily be an unhackable satellite-communications community—with encryption keys that alert customers if anybody tries to spy on their messages.
Matthew Desch
Iridium Communications
CEO
Desch’s McLean satellite-communications agency has carved out a distinct segment serving disaster-relief organizations, navy contractors, and others that want connectivity in difficult circumstances or distant areas. In March, it partnered with José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen.
David Felsenthal
EAB
CEO
EAB (previously the Education Advisory Board), which works with nearly each higher-ed establishment, is leaping into postgrad alternatives with its acquisition of Forage, a job-simulation platform utilized by corporations like Goldman Sachs and Citibank. The deal tackles what’s turn into a difficult and costly hiring course of for early-career expertise by connecting employers to thousands and thousands of faculty college students whereas giving them hands-on profession publicity.
Andy Florance
CoStar Group
Founder and CEO
Florance has constructed his real-estate-intelligence agency right into a $37 billion juggernaut with 6,800 workers, and he’s not slowing down. This previous 12 months, CoStar snatched up Visual Lease to broaden its lease-management software program and purchased Matterport, the 3D spatial-mapping firm, so as to add digital property excursions to its platform.
David Fuscus
Précis AI
Founder and CEO
Fuscus spent greater than 20 years as head of the public-relations agency Xenophon Strategies and now leads Précis AI because it builds AI platforms tailor-made to the wants of particular industries and corporations. His newest product, created for PR professionals, includes a specialised chatbot, a marketing campaign builder, and a repository of 55 million pages of US authorities knowledge.
Fonta Gilliam
Wellthi
Founder and CEO
Gilliam’s Wellthi helps banks make their cell apps extra user-friendly for youthful prospects by way of customized financial-wellness instruments. She additionally offers tricks to financial institution and credit-union leaders by way of her weekly Banking MilZ e-newsletter on entice and retain millennial and Gen-Z purchasers.
Alix Guerrier
DonorsChoose
CEO
Guerrier’s platform has turned small-dollar donations right into a $1.8 billion–greenback drive for public training, connecting classroom wants immediately with donors. The previous 12 months introduced huge wins: Google funded all high-school mental-health initiatives final August, sending $1.5 million to greater than 2,000 school rooms, whereas the fintech firm Ripple helped elevate $10 million–plus throughout Teacher Appreciation Week in May.
Michael Huppe
SoundChange
President and CEO
As head of the music business’s digital watchdog, Huppe is championing laws to shut loopholes costing American musicians thousands and thousands yearly, whereas creating the Global AI Sound Recording Registry to provide artists management over whether or not their work is utilized in AI coaching. Under his management, the nonprofit has distributed greater than $12 billion in royalties for creators.
E. Wayne Jackson III
Sonatype
Executive Chairman
As hackers goal more and more standard open-source software program, Jackson’s software program supply-chain-management platform, Sonatype, identifies compromised instruments earlier than they will trigger injury, whereas publishing its quarterly Open Source Malware Index to tell builders about rising safety threats.
Reid Jackson and Monica Nicolau
Unison
CEO and President (Jackson) and CTO (Nicolau)
Unison works with every cupboard company to untangle authorities procurement’s infamous crimson tape. Over the previous 12 months, Jackson and Nicolau have been integrating generative AI into the acquisitions course of to automate tedious duties resembling compliance checks that may flip easy purchases into months-long ordeals.
TJ Leonard
Storyblocks
CEO
While opponents chase AI, Leonard is charting a unique course for this Arlington digital-content firm. He’s launched moral knowledge licensing to make sure that creators receives a commission when their work trains AI fashions, and he refuses to permit AI-generated content material in Storyblocks’ library. His guess: Human-created content material will outlast the generative revolution.
Alex Long
InPress
Cofounder and CTO
InPress isn’t your common courting app. First, customers charge information articles, then they swipe on profiles curated in response to their studying habits and preferences. Long turns media literacy right into a recreation with ranges and streak monitoring whereas connecting folks by way of shared mental pursuits reasonably than surface-level attraction.
Haroon Mokhtarzada
Rocket Money
CEO, Cofounder, and Chairman
Since Rocket Mortgage’s acquisition of Rocket Money (previously TrueBill), Mokhtarzada has expanded the service past its roots—canceling undesirable subscriptions—to a full-featured cash tracker. The app serves greater than 5 million members and claims to have saved customers over a billion {dollars} up to now 5 years.
Ramu Potarazu
Lynk
CEO and Chairman of the Board
Potarazu, a former Intelsat president, took the helm at Lynk final winter as it really works to attach satellites on to cellphones. This spring, he secured an funding from satellite tv for pc large SES to develop Lynk’s satellite tv for pc infrastructure and faucet into SES’s European buyer base.
Vijay Ravindran
Floreo
Founder and CEO
Ravindran leads Floreo, a virtual-reality remedy platform geared toward strengthening social and behavioral expertise in neurodiverse youngsters. The Chevy Chase firm is on observe to turn into the primary FDA-approved VR remedy for enhancing social expertise in youngsters with autism. By 12 months’s finish, the platform plans to broaden to incorporate ADHD remedy.
Abir Ray
Expression
CEO and CTO
For almost three many years, Expression has been working to make electromagnetic-spectrum administration—important for all the things from navy radios to civilian cell service—extra environment friendly throughout federal businesses.
Josh Resnik
FiscalNote
President and CEO
Resnik took over at FiscalNote with a transparent imaginative and prescient: Policy professionals want AI-powered intelligence, not simply knowledge dumps. In January, the digital-intelligence firm launched its new flagship platform, PolicyNote, which already boasts greater than 15 main options, together with a tariff tracker developed in simply two weeks after Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement.
Kay Rodriguez
Outerly
Founder and CEO
Rodriguez is out to deal with the post-pandemic loneliness epidemic with a social platform that makes use of algorithms knowledgeable by persona quizzes and surveys to curate strolling routes for small teams of like-minded strangers. Since September, Outerly has attracted hundreds of individuals throughout the Washington space.
Rick Rudman
Curbio
Cofounder and CEO
Rudman noticed a ache level in actual property: sellers scrambling to get houses prepared on the market whereas juggling contractors and timelines. His Potomac-based Curbio, which hundreds of brokers depend on, handles all the things from minor repairs to main renovations by way of an app that lets brokers observe progress in actual time.
John Serafini
HawkEye 360
CEO
Serafini’s HawkEye 360 makes use of satellites to map out and analyze Earth’s radio frequencies. The knowledge has led to geopolitical discoveries, resembling Chinese exercise close to the contested Senkaku Islands and environmentally hazardous strip-mining in Niger.
Eric Stradley
Caribou
President
Caribou works to cut back the monetary burden of automotive possession by matching customers with lenders providing extra inexpensive auto-loan charges. Launched in 2016, the billion-dollar firm has saved greater than 100,000 drivers a median of virtually $1,700 yearly on automotive funds.
Matt Theurer and Lauren Stack
HyperSpectral
Cofounder and CEO (Theurer) and Cofounder and COO (Stack)
Theurer and Stack’s Alexandria startup makes use of AI and spectral knowledge, or gentle wavelengths, which in minutes detect pathogens and contaminants that threaten meals security and well being. Last 12 months, HyperSpectral closed an $8.5 million funding spherical.
Steve Trundle
Alarm.com
President and CEO
Trundle leads the MicroStrategy spinoff Alarm.com because it deploys the newest tech to stop break-ins and theft. A latest innovation: AI Deterrence, launched in January, which delivers custom-made verbal warnings to intruders based mostly on their clothes and environment—creating the phantasm of dwell human monitoring.
Trenor Williams
Socially Determined
Cofounder and CEO
Williams has channeled his expertise as a household doctor into an analytics firm that examines how elements resembling housing, meals entry, and transportation have an effect on well being. With almost 40 million youngsters enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP, Socially Determined just lately launched My Minors, an software that helps healthcare organizations design focused interventions by figuring out the place monetary pressure, meals insecurity, and different social determinants are affecting sufferers.
Alex Wirth
Quorum
Cofounder and CEO
Quorum, the go-to platform for public-affairs professionals at nonprofits and massive corporations alike, affords purchasers knowledge on coverage points throughout worldwide, federal, state, and native ranges. Its new AI-powered assistant, Copilot 2.0, analyzes laws in actual time, tracks lawmaker dialogue, and drafts customized messaging and briefs.
Official DC
Appointees, Electeds, and Government Officials
Gregory Barbaccia
Office of Management and Budget
Federal Chief Information Officer
Barbaccia had a ten-year stint at Palantir and most just lately was the chief info safety officer at Theorem, a machine-learning-enabled asset supervisor. One of his early strikes was writing to prime federal businesses urging them to not hearth their cybersecurity groups, as a part of DOGE purges.
Representatives Don Beyer (D-Va.), Mike McCaul (R-Texas), Doris Matsui (D-Calif.), and Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.)
Congressional AI Caucus Chairs (Beyer, McCaul) and Vice Chairs (Matusi, Obernolte)
These 4 Congressional AI Caucus leaders are pushing for laws to set guardrails round AI growth whereas spurring AI innovation within the race in opposition to China. They have some AI chops as nicely—Obernolte is the one House member with a grasp’s in AI coverage, and Beyer is pursuing his grasp’s in machine studying.
Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.)
US Senate
As coauthors of the Kids Online Safety Act—which emerged by way of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and handed the Senate final 12 months—they’re looking for to carry tech corporations accountable for dangerous content material directed at youngsters.
Craig Burkhardt
National Institute for Standards and Technology
Acting Director, Deputy Undersecretary for Standards and Technology
Burkhardt is tasked with overseeing the administration’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation, beforehand referred to as the US AI Safety Institute, began within the Biden administration—marking a shift away from security and towards creating steering and finest practices for AI system safety, in addition to working with business to develop voluntary requirements.
Sean Cairncross
Office of the National Cyber Director
National Cyber Director
Cairncross has a lot of expertise in Republican circles, having served as COO for the Republican National Committee and as a senior adviser in Trump’s first time period. While he lacks expertise in cybersecurity, he’s been nominated to steer the workplace accountable for coordinating a number of federal businesses’ cyber postures.
Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.)
Ranking Member, Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee
The prime Democrat on the Commerce Committee has a historical past of pushing for laws to help US-led innovation, together with incentivizing home semiconductor manufacturing and R&D. She helped orchestrate an modification within the giant Trump funds invoice that stripped an earlier ten-year moratorium on implementing state-led AI legal guidelines, saying that Congress “can’t just run over good state consumer-protection laws.”
Brendan Carr
Federal Communications Commission
Chairman
Carr has targeted on rolling again Biden-era rules, together with nixing further environmental opinions to hurry the deployment of cell towers. A Trump loyalist, he has used his perch atop the historically unbiased company to pursue the President’s agenda, together with investigating Disney and ABC for DEI initiatives, plus 60 Minutes over edits to an interview with Kamala Harris.
Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.)
Chair, Senate Commerce, Transportation and Science Committee (Cruz), and Chair, Democratic Steering and Policy Committee (Klobuchar)
Few issues deliver Republicans and Democrats collectively lately, however combating on-line revenge porn is considered one of them. Cruz and Klobuchar coauthored the Take It Down Act to make the non-consensual on-line publication of intimate pictures a felony, together with deepfakes created by AI. The invoice had backing from First Lady Melania Trump and was signed into regulation this spring.
Andrew N. Ferguson
Federal Trade Commission
Chairman
Ferguson stepped into the highest spot on the FTC in January after serving as a commissioner beneath Biden, bringing a markedly completely different strategy than his predecessor. The former Virginia solicitor normal and chief counsel for Senator Mitch McConnell has signaled he’ll ease antitrust strain on highly effective American corporations whereas holding a agency hand on tech giants. He is also launching an investigation into “tech censorship,” arguing that social-media platforms illegally silence conservative speech with their content-moderation insurance policies.
Kelly Fletcher
State Department
Chief Information Officer
Fletcher, who’s been State’s CIO since 2022, was tasked with deploying the company’s AI market for workers this 12 months. So far, it’s launched the “AI Funhouse” and “AI Proving Ground,” which lets workers securely work together with AI and data-focused instruments and State Department knowledge, Fletcher tells Washingtonian.
Madhu Gottumukkala
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
Acting Director and Deputy Director
In May, Gottumukkala turned performing head of the nation’s company accountable for managing the safety of bodily and cyber infrastructure, together with elections. He lacks the deep cybersecurity expertise of his predecessors however served beforehand as South Dakota’s CIO. The administration has decreased CISA’s workforce by almost a 3rd (1,000 workers) and has lower state funding to help election-related cyber infrastructure.
Victor Hoskins
Fairfax County Economic Development Authority
President and CEO
Hoskins has seen a growth in enterprise in his Northern Virginia suburb, as AI, quantum, and house corporations are selecting Fairfax for his or her headquarters, R&D facilities, and innovation hubs. This contains Google saying plans so as to add extra workplace house to its Reston location, Booz Allen opening a tech hub final fall, and Unison, maker of “AI-infused” tech, selecting Reston as its residence base.
Michael Kratsios
White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Director
As Trump’s prime scientific adviser, Kratsios has referred to as for a return to “gold standard” analysis and claims that DEI poses a risk to “diversity of thought.” His previous place as Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel’s chief of workers helped launch his tech profession. He’s additionally served as Trump’s chief expertise officer within the first administration and later as a managing director of Scale AI.
Sriram Krishnan
White House
Senior Policy Adviser on AI
Krishnan, a former venture-capitalist investor at Andreessen Horowitz, stepped into the senior policy-adviser position on AI on the White House in January and has maintained a comparatively low profile whereas spending months creating the White House’s “AI Action Plan,” launched in July. It goals to take away perceived limitations to AI growth resembling DEI and create streamlined allowing for knowledge facilities to energy energy-guzzling generative-AI programs.
Representative Ted Lieu (D-Calif.)
Co-Chair of Congressional Caucus on Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality Technologies
Lieu, the highest-ranking Democrat within the House with a computer-science diploma, has been an early chief on AI coverage and in addition sits on the Congressional AI Caucus. He was the primary member to introduce a invoice in 2023 written by AI, urging Congress to manage the expertise. He additionally co-chaired the House Bipartisan AI Task Force with Representative Jay Obernolte, which culminated final 12 months in a report providing 80 suggestions to Congress.
Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.)
Chair of Senate Banking Committee’s Digital Assets Subcommittee
Lummis has been main bipartisan efforts to ascertain markets for cryptocurrency. One of her payments, the GENIUS Act, signed into regulation in July, units up a regulatory mannequin for stablecoins. She’s additionally launched a framework for a invoice that might permit cryptocurrency exchanges to register with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and scale back the SEC’s regulation of digital currencies.
Erin Horne McKinney
DC Innovation & Technology Inclusion Council
Chair
McKinney was busy in her second 12 months main the DC mayor’s effort to make the tech sector extra inclusive. She helped launch the DC Venture Capital Program and leverage $52 million in mixed DC and personal {dollars} to make fairness investments in DC tech corporations. She individually cofounded the HBCU National Innovation Consortium, a community of HBCUs fostering innovation and collaboration.
Michael Rigas and Stephen Ehikian
General Services Administration
Acting Administrator (Rigas) and Deputy Administrator (Ehikian)
Rigas and Ehikian are main the federal government’s company accountable for contracts and procurements. Rigas was named performing director in July and had beforehand labored on the company and OMB throughout Trump’s first time period. Ehikian, previously a VP at Salesforce, is without doubt one of the many Trump appointees from the tech house aiming to modernize the federal authorities’s use of IT. At GSA, they’re working to overtake the Federal Acquisition Regulation to cut back spending on authorities IT and are overseeing the deployment of the primary federal generative-AI instrument (GSAi) that has been confirmed to spice up effectivity.
Buddy Rizer
Loudoun County Department of Economic Development
Executive Director
Over the previous 12 months, Rizer has helped stability increasing his Virginia county’s economic system whereas additionally navigating public scrutiny round energy and land utilization as an increase in AI drives elevated demand for knowledge facilities. Loudoun has 43 million sq. toes of information facilities, with 6 million extra beneath growth.
Senators Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.)
Co-Chairs of Senate AI Caucus
The bipartisan duo leads the Senate AI group tasked with creating coverage that seeks to stability the dangers and advantages of synthetic intelligence. The pair launched the American Science Acceleration Project this 12 months, looking for public suggestions on methods to make use of AI to make the US’s science and knowledge computation ten instances sooner by 2030. The caucus has had 15 payments turn into regulation since its founding in 2019.
David Sacks
White House
AI and Crypto Czar
Sacks, the All-In podcast host and founding father of the VC agency Craft Ventures, is the Trump administration’s first AI and crypto czar. The COO of PayPal supported laws to manage stablecoins to drive demand for US Treasuries. He additionally helped craft the “AI Action Plan” with Sriram Krishnan and OSTP’s Michael Kratsios—looking for to take away “barriers” to AI deployment and labeling “woke AI” as considered one of them after Google’s Gemini AI generated a picture of the Founding Fathers with various racial backgrounds.
Gail Slater
Department of Justice
Assistant Attorney General, Antitrust Division
Slater oversees the DOJ division that’s been suing Big Tech, together with a case in opposition to Apple’s alleged iPhone monopoly in addition to each lawsuits in opposition to Google, by which judges have discovered that the corporate violated antitrust legal guidelines in its dominance of search and the internet marketing market. Slater is a longtime Republican who labored for JD Vance within the Senate, sharing his views on needing to interrupt up giant tech corporations.
Catherine Szpindor
House of Representatives
Chief Administrative Officer
One of Szpindor’s most up-to-date efforts to modernize the House was issuing ideas on the usage of generative AI by places of work within the chamber. The coverage is meant to help members and workers to “safeguard potentially sensitive information while also empowering them to leverage AI to better serve the American people,” Szpindor stated in a press release.
Stephen Winchell
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
Director
Winchell joined DARPA in May and introduced his expertise main the Defense Department’s AI-and-autonomy portfolio. “DARPA is the most impactful organization in the DOD due to the speed of its unique innovation process, world-class program teams, and willingness to embrace risk,” he stated throughout his swearing-in.
Money Folks
VC’S, Investors, and Bankers
Jenny Abramson
Rethink Impact
Founder and Managing Partner
Abramson simply closed her third fund at $260 million, cementing Rethink Impact because the nation’s largest fund to solely again feminine and nonbinary C-suite leaders. Her portfolio reads like a playbook for addressing ladies’s wants: Winnie, a childcare market, and Univfy, which makes use of analytics to find out IVF success charges and affordability.
Mike Avon, Jennifer Krusius, and Bion Ludwig
ABS Capital
Managing Partner (Avon) and Partners (Krusius and Ludwig)
This agency’s profile retains getting larger. It just lately launched its ninth fund, already including three extra startups to its $2.5 billion portfolio. (*2025*) contains Certify Health, a patient-engagement platform for which ABS led a funding spherical
John Backus, Thanasis Delistathis, and John Burke
PROOF
Cofounder, Managing Partner, and Chief Investment Officer (Backus), Cofounder, Managing Partner, and COO (Delistathis), and Cofounder and General Partner (Burke)
The Reston trio runs PROOF—quick for pro-rata alternative fund—which invests in corporations which are already profitable and rising quickly. Its huge portfolio contains the sustainable grocery supply service Misfits Market and Colossal Biosciences, which is working to resurrect extinct animals by way of genetic engineering.
Dan Barker, Dahna Goldstein, and Kate Goodall
Halcyon
President and CEO, Halcyon (Barker), and Managing Partners/Halcyon Venture Partners (Goldstein and Goodall)
Barker runs the ten-year-old DC incubator that backs founders making an attempt to unravel huge social issues, whereas Goldstein and Goodall head the spinoff enterprise fund to jot down larger checks for a similar mission. Halcyon Venture Partners is elevating its second fund and just lately invested in Occupi, a platform that makes renting much less of a headache for tenants and property managers alike.
Omi Bell
Black Girl Ventures
Founder and CEO
Bell continues to get nearer to her aim of serving to 100,000 Black and Brown ladies entrepreneurs by 2030. After a million-dollar funding from TikTookay in 2023, Black Girl Ventures partnered with the social-media large to launch a six-week enterprise accelerator to assist Black-owned companies develop on TikTookay Shop.
Joe Benevento, Tom Weithman, and Jennifer O’Daniel
Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation
President and CEO (Benevento), Chief Investment Officer and Vice President, Investment (Weithman), and Senior Investment Director (O’Daniel)
The trio runs Virginia’s reply to holding tech expertise from leaving for Silicon Valley: an accelerator that makes use of public cash to jump-start personal funding. It’s working—they’ve funded 300-plus startups and pulled greater than $2 billion into the state, together with latest backing for McLean’s Spectrohm, which is making package-screening autonomous.
Jason Booma, Evan DeCorte, Jim Fleming, Patrick Hendy, Monish Kundra, and John Siegel
Columbia Capital
Partners
Columbia Capital, cofounded by telecom entrepreneur and Virginia senator Mark Warner, retains its give attention to corporations working in communications, digital infrastructure, and enterprise tech—elevating greater than $7 billion to push into its roster of 175 corporations.
Phil Bronner and Phil Herget
Ardent Venture Partners
Cofounder and Managing Partner (Bronner) and Cofounder and General Partner (Herget)
Bronner and Herget, each longtime buyers, are getting forward of the sport by writing checks for companies that supply specialised AI instruments. Of late, that has included the workflow-automation platform Swivel and the data-query engine Roe AI.
Steve Case, Ted Leonsis, Tige Savage, Todd Klein, and David Hall
Revolution
Chairman and CEO (Case), Cofounder and Partner, Revolution Growth (Leonsis), Managing Partner, Revolution Ventures (Savage), Managing Partner, Revolution Growth (Klein), and Managing Partner, Rise of the Rest Seed Fund (Hall)
One of the world’s highest-profile VC corporations, Revolution backs corporations exterior the dominant coastal tech hubs of Silicon Valley and New York City. Among its latest investees is the McLean precision-medicine firm Zephyr AI.
Michael Clarke, Michael Graninger, and Barron Martin Jr.
Sands Capital
Managing Partners
With greater than $58 billion in belongings, Sands Capital makes huge international bets and waits for them to repay. In June, that technique delivered: The legal-software firm Brightflag, which they backed since Series A, offered to Dutch information-services large Wolters Kluewer for $425 million.
McKeever “Mac” Conwell
RareBreed Ventures
Founder and Managing Partner
Conwell has constructed a $10 million pre-seed fund by betting on founders that conventional VCs overlook—these exterior main tech hubs, typically serving communities that mainstream buyers don’t perceive. His portfolio contains woman-led Backpack Healthcare, the nation’s largest pediatric Medicaid supplier.
Lawson DeVries, Steve Fredrick, and Julia Taxin
Grotech Ventures
Managing General Partner (DeVries) and General Partners (Fredrick and Taxin)
Grotech Ventures hunts for business-to-business software program corporations that conventional buyers typically overlook—unglamorous however worthwhile companies constructing supply-chain, cybersecurity, and fintech instruments. This 12 months, 4 of its portfolio corporations acquired acquired, proving that nice corporations exist exterior the Silicon Valley bubble.
Mina Faltas
Washington Harbour Partners
Founder and Chief Investment Officer
Faltas leads this Arlington agency because it builds the subsequent technology of blue-chip tech corporations, deploying greater than $3 billion throughout protection, cyber, government-software, and client companies. Last 12 months alone, it invested over half a billion {dollars} throughout 17 corporations, together with Hidden Level, a drone-detection firm, and Radiant, which is creating moveable nuclear microreactors.
Mark Frantz and Kevin Robbins
Blue Delta Capital Partners
Cofounders and General Partners
Frantz and Robbins write huge checks—$15 million and up—to cashmaking corporations that promote tech to federal businesses. Fresh off elevating $250 million for its fourth fund, Blue Delta put $25 million into Fairfax’s ITC Federal, which helps national-security and law-enforcement businesses handle their IT programs.
David Grain and Ted Manvitz
Grain Management
CEO and Founder (Grain) and Managing Director, Head of International Investments (Manvitz)
With backgrounds in telecom, Grain and Manvitz are invested in infrastructure that retains the world related—cell towers, fiber networks, and knowledge facilities. In March, for instance, the corporate struck a deal to purchase high-frequency radio airwaves from T-Mobile to construct personal networks for electric-power corporations.
Dayna Grayson and Rachel Holt
Construct Capital
Cofounders and General Partners
Grayson and Holt wish to reinvigorate what they name “foundational industries,” resembling manufacturing, logistics, mobility, and important infrastructure. Construct’s just lately closed $300 million fund will again founders who’re utilizing software program, automation, and AI to modernize these sectors.
Carter Griffin and Jon Seeber
Updata Partners
General Partners
Griffin and Seeber’s Updata Partners is without doubt one of the most profitable on the business-to-business software program scene, with greater than $1.5 billion beneath administration and dozens of exits beneath its belt, together with fellow Tech Titan TJ Leonard’s Storyblocks.
Ron Gula and Cyndi Gula
Gula Tech Adventures
President (Ron) and Managing Partner (Cyndi)
Tenable vets Ron and Cyndi Gula have used $125 million of their very own funds to put money into corporations that defend our nation’s our on-line world whereas educating the general public about “data care,” by which everybody—not simply consultants—has a accountability to guard their knowledge.
Matthew Hanson
Pax Momentum
Cofounder and Managing Partner
Hanson’s greatest recommendation? Startups fail as a result of they will’t promote, not due to a mediocre product. His Pax fund writes checks whereas placing founders by way of a gross sales boot camp to show technical expertise into revenue-generating machines.
Jim Hunt, Daniel Hanks, and Steve Smoot
Lavrock Ventures
General Partner (Hunt) and Managing Partners (Hanks and Smoot)
Hunt, with the assistance of Hanks and Smoot, leads this Arlington funding agency that targets corporations engaged on important points in nationwide safety and cyber. Their portfolio spans hypersonic weapons, secure-communications platforms, and quantum infrastructure.
Jack Kerrigan, Richard Moxley, Steve Pann, Mark Spoto, and Peggy Styer
Razor’s Edge Ventures
Cofounders and Managing Partners
The Reston agency hit a serious milestone this 12 months, reaching a billion {dollars} in whole belongings after elevating $560 million—all going towards national-security tech. Last 12 months additionally introduced an enormous win when the digital-signal processing firm BlackSign was purchased by Chantilly tech large Parsons in a $200 million deal.
Troy A. LeMaile-Stovall and Jack Miner
TEDCO
CEO (LeMaile-Stovall) and Chief Investment Officer (Miner)
As enterprise capital tightens nationbroad, TEDCO—the Maryland Technology Development Corporation—has ramped up help for its port-folio corporations and different early-stage companies statewide. Their Social Impact Funds present each capital and customized steering to entrepreneurs who historically lack entry to enterprise funding.
Mike Lincoln
Cooley
Vice Chair
Nearly 30 years after beginning Cooley’s DC workplace, Lincoln continues to shut main offers for East Coast startups and venture-capital funds, securing acquisitions and thousands and thousands in funding for purchasers just like the contactless-payment platform Rooam and QED Investors, a number one VC agency.
Nigel Morris and Frank Rotman
QED Investors
Cofounder and Managing Partner (Morris) and Cofounder, Partner, and Chief Investment Officer (Rotman)
The duo, who shook up the banking world with Capital One, are professionals at scoping out different fintech entrepreneurs who’ve what it takes to reshape how folks save, spend, and borrow cash. With $4.3 billion beneath administration, their Alexandria agency has invested in 250-plus corporations and minted 31 unicorns, together with buy-now-pay-later large Klarna and on-line financial institution SoFi.
Jim Pastoriza
TDF Ventures
Managing Partner
Pastoriza, who lower his tooth in telecom gross sales, understands what enterprise prospects will truly purchase—and what they gained’t. His crew at TDF makes use of their $200 million fund to again startups constructing instruments that fully change how corporations work, resembling BlackCloak, which protects company execs from cybercrime.
Nasir Qadree
Zeal Capital Partners
Founder and Managing Partner
Qadree’s agency simply closed its third fund, bringing belongings beneath administration as much as $186 million throughout three funds targeted on fintech, healthcare, and the way forward for work. While different VCs chase Silicon Valley traits and lean on sample recognition, Qadree hunts for “performance signals” in missed markets, reaching past traditional geographies and founders.
Fredrick D. Shaufeld and Anthony Nader
SWaN & Legend Venture Partners
Partners
Shaufeld and Nader launched SWaN & Legend with a watch for corporations that contact folks’s each day lives. Since 2012, they’ve backed some severe winners: Mediterranean fast-casual chain Cava, Airbnb, and mobile-payment powerhouse Square.
Michael Steed, Mark Maloney, Edward Albrigo, and Christopher Steed
Paladin Capital Group
Founder and Managing Partner (Michael Steed), Cofounder, Managing Director, and Chief Compliance Officer (Maloney), COO (Albrigo), and Chief Investment Officer and Managing Director (Christopher Steed)
Paladin is a go-to funder for corporations that construct digital defenses for an more and more harmful world, specializing in “responsible tech” that protects reasonably than exploits. A latest instance is the data-loss-prevention startup MIND, which makes use of AI to mechanically cease knowledge breaches.
Devin Talbott
Enlightenment Capital
Founder and CEO
Talbott simply closed Enlightenment’s fifth fund at $825 million, pushing the agency’s whole belongings beneath administration to $2.3 billion—all focused at corporations within the aerospace, protection, and government-tech sectors.
Grant Verstandig
Red Cell Partners
Founder, Chairman, and CEO
When a knee damage uncovered him to healthcare’s systemic points, Verstandig sought to repair the business from inside, founding the digital well being firm Rally Health and later promoting it in a serious deal to UnitedHealth. Now he helps different startups—in healthcare, nationwide safety, and cyber—go from easy concept to launch. His $425 million portfolio contains DEFCON AI, which landed considered one of protection tech’s largest seed rounds, and Epirus, valued at greater than half a billion {dollars}.
Tien Wong
Opus8/The Big Idea CONNECTpreneur Forum
Chairman and CEO/Founder and Host
Wong’s calling card is to attach founders with the cash they want, working what he claims to be the world’s largest month-to-month pitch occasion. His CONNECTpreneur gathering repeatedly brings in 150-plus buyers keen to listen to what inventors have to supply. So far, greater than 600 corporations have secured funding by way of his community.
Policy People
Advocates, Lobbyists, and Nonprofit Leaders
Rachel Appleton
Anthropic
Head of Federal Affairs
Appleton joined the AI firm after stints with the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department, and Instacart. She says she’s targeted on pushing laws in Congress to mandate transparency of frontier AI fashions, resembling Anthropic’s Claude, to guard in opposition to national-security dangers.
Michael Beckerman
TikTookay
Vice President and Head of Public Policy, Americas
Beckerman and the corporate’s government-affairs staff have been lobbying the White House to maintain the favored video-streaming app within the US after Congress handed a regulation looking for to ban it. So far they’ve had some success—the Trump administration has delayed enforcement of the regulation till September. However, amid different firm departures, Beckerman plans to step down and transition to a global-advisory position inside TikTookay by the top of the 12 months.
Karan Bhatia, Karen Dahut, Leigh Palmer, and Josh Marcuse
Vice President, Government Affairs and Public Policy (Bhatia), CEO of Google Public Sector (Dahut), Vice President, Google Public Sector (Palmer), and Director of Strategic Initiatives for Google Public Sector (Marcuse)
Google’s public-policy staff has been busy advancing its generative-AI mannequin, Gemini. Bhatia has targeted on pushing AI laws in Washington in addition to Europe and Asia. Dahut and Palmer have targeted on acquiring FedRAMP’s excessive certification of Gemini AI instruments—making it the primary generative-AI providing to earn that authorization.
Stoney Burke and Ryan Dattilo
Aquia Group
Founder and CEO (Burke) and Partner (Dattilo)
Burke, previously chief of workers for Representative Will Hurd, and Dattilo, as soon as counsel on the Senate and House judiciary committees, met at Amazon Web Services. Burke began Aquia Group in 2018 and relaunched it in 2022. Dattilo joined the next 12 months. Named after the sandstone within the White House, Aquia Group has been busy advising the White House and national-security businesses about alternatives and dangers of AI, on behalf of Amazon Web Services and AI startup Anthropic.
Kara Calvert
Coinbase
Vice President of US Policy
As the pinnacle lobbyist for the cryptocurrency alternate, Calvert has labored exhausting to get the crypto laws throughout the end line, together with the GENIUS Act, which created a federal regulatory framework for stablecoins. Her staff has additionally collaborated with the Trump administration to combine blockchain applied sciences inside the authorities, and just lately Coinbase partnered with the Commerce Department to make financial knowledge extra accessible on the blockchain.
Teresa Carlson and Maryam Mujica
General Catalyst Institute
President (Carlson) and Chief, Public Policy (Mujica)
Former AWS exec Carlson, and ex-Twitter and Google staffer Mujica launched General Catalyst’s coverage arm final September to work extra intently with governments worldwide. But reasonably than advocating for particular person corporations, the duo represents the San Francisco–based mostly venture-capital agency’s 800-plus firm portfolio in direct conversations with business leaders and legislators about coverage areas, resembling healthcare, protection, and AI. So far, the institute has already expanded to India and Europe.
Mèlika Carroll
Cohere
Vice President, Global Government Affairs and Public Policy
Carroll just lately took the public-policy helm of this AI enterprise firm, whose purchasers embody regulated industries like finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and vitality. She has a protracted historical past of management at tech corporations, together with Intel, Micron, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Salesforce. She’s additionally cofounder of the Global Women in Leadership Network and a member of the Canadian authorities’s Advisory Council on AI.
Maura Colleton Corbett
Glen Echo Group
Founder and CEO
The small however mighty communications and public-affairs agency represents giant corporations like Google and Dish in addition to smaller coalitions. In 2025, it shaped two new ones: the Coalition on Digital Impact, to broaden multilingualism on-line, and a coalition to guard car homeowners’ rights to their automotive’s knowledge.
Dante Disparte
Circle
Head of Global Policy and Operations, Chief Strategy Officer
Disparte has been a longtime advocate for stablecoin regulation in DC. At Circle, the primary publicly traded stablecoin issuer within the US, he backed laws to create a regulatory framework for digital belongings. He’s testified earlier than Congress and repeatedly meets with policymakers across the globe, together with in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, to advertise regulatory harmonization.
Hugh Gamble
Salesforce
Vice President, Federal Government Affairs and Public Policy
Previously a longtime Senate staffer, Gamble has labored exhausting to make sure that the business-to-business software program firm stays prime of thoughts in the case of AI merchandise. The firm offered enter on the Office of Science and Technology’s National AI Action Plan targeted on human-centered AI growth.
Kathy Grillo
Verizon
Senior Vice President, Public Policy and Government Affairs
Grillo, who leads the $180 billion telecommunications firm’s international, federal, and state public-policy groups, has been busy pushing for federal and state lawmakers to undertake insurance policies round affordability and entry to broadband companies, use of AI, and privateness.
Mike Harney
IBM
Vice President, Government and Regulatory Affairs
Harney, a Capitol Hill veteran, joined IBM in March and has been targeted on driving accountable AI governance on the firm that’s residence to the Watson supercomputer. He served as chief of workers for former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and has huge sneakers to fill at IBM following the departure final summer season of Chris Padilla, who was IBM’s prime lobbyist for 15 years.
Jacob Helberg
Hill and Valley Forum
Cofounder, Nominee for State Department’s Undersecretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment
Helberg performs a robust position in advising Trump’s staff on AI and tech coverage, having based the Hill and Valley discussion board in 2023 with VC buyers Delian Asparahouv and Christian Garrett to attach Silicon Valley with Capitol Hill. The group’s aim is to combat China’s affect on the US tech business, main efforts to cross a regulation banning TikTookay final 12 months and holding an occasion for the White House to unveil its AI Action Plan this July. Helberg, a former adviser to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, can also be nominated to a brand new position beneath Secretary of State Marco Rubio to supervise US financial growth.
Fred Humphries
Microsoft
Corporate Vice President, US Government Affairs
Humphries has led Microsoft’s policy work for greater than 25 years. This 12 months, he’s steered the corporate’s push for what it calls accountable AI and workforce readiness.
Brian Huseman and Steve Hartell
Amazon
Vice President, Public Policy (Huseman), and Vice President, US Public Policy (Hartell)
Amazon’s prime lobbyists in DC, the 2 give attention to insurance policies associated to synthetic intelligence and satellite tv for pc broadband. In the previous 12 months, Amazon’s $10 billion satellite tv for pc web service—Project Kuiper—launched its first satellites into house to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink. “Space is a great economic opportunity for our country,” says Huseman.
Sarah Beth Jansen
Franklin Square Group
Partner
A former Senate Judiciary and Senate Homeland Security staffer, Jansen is without doubt one of the tech business’s prime Republican advocates. She leads a staff specializing in synthetic intelligence, cybersecurity, and content material moderation. Jansen beforehand labored on the Information Technology Industry Council, targeted on immigration coverage.
Joel Kaplan, Kevin Martin, and Brian Rice
Meta
Chief Global Affairs Officer (Kaplan), Vice President, Global Public Policy (Martin), and Vice President, Public Policy (Rice)
Meta adjusted its lobbying staff after Trump took workplace. Kaplan, a former Republican adviser, was promoted to the highest global-affairs position after Nick Clegg left, and Martin took Kaplan’s previous job. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has cozied as much as the Trump staff, with a number of visits to the White House and the acquisition of a DC residence. Despite these efforts, Trump’s FTC is transferring forward with a serious antitrust trial begun beneath the primary Trump administration to drive the sale of WhatsApp and Instagram.
Michael Kennedy
Intuit
Senior Vice President and Chief Corporate Affairs Officer
Kennedy leads Intuit’s staff targeted on the intersection of expertise and coverage, together with AI, monetary companies, tax, knowledge safety, and small-business advocacy. Intuit has been working to help the White House AI Education Pledge to supply AI supplies to Ok–12 college students over the subsequent 4 years and the UK authorities’s AI Skills program to increase AI literacy to thousands and thousands of individuals.
Daniel Kroese
Palo Alto Networks
Vice President, Public Policy and Government Affairs
Before becoming a member of the cybersecurity agency, Kroese held a number of Republican political roles, together with coauthoring a e book about presidential transitions. He then labored on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and now leads public-policy work for Palo Alto Networks, particularly targeted on AI infrastructure by design.
Travis LeBlanc
Cooley
Partner
LeBlanc is co-chair of Cooley’s cyber, knowledge, and privateness observe and a Democratic member of the US Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. The Trump administration fired LeBlanc and the 2 different Democratic PCLOB board members in January. A federal court docket dominated that these firings had been unlawful.
Luther Lowe
Y Combinator
Head of Public Policy
Lowe, a Yelp alum, leads the voice of “little tech” in Washington—representing 11,000 founders and seeding 5,000 startups. He helped manage a Little Tech Competition Summit this 12 months with FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson and DOJ’s Gail Slater.
Brittany Masalosalo
HP
Chief Public Policy Officer
When she labored on the White House’s vice-presidential workplace beneath each Joe Biden and Mike Pence, Masalosalo targeted on nationwide safety and overseas coverage. At HP, this background helps her in key legislative and regulatory discussions, starting from AI adoption to cybersecurity requirements.
Collin McCune
Andreessen Horowitz
Head of Government Affairs
McCune, who began his profession within the House working for the Rules Committee and the Transportation Committee, joined the Silicon Valley venture-capital agency, valued at $42 billion, in 2022. McCune and his staff have lobbied on laws making a stablecoin regulatory framework and for the federal government to assist develop a nationwide AI market.
Chandler Morse
WorkDay
Vice President, Corporate Affairs
Morse, a Senate veteran, is engaged on behalf of the cloud-based human-resources firm to make sure that any insurance policies stability AI safeguards and innovation. He says the corporate has supported language to reform the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, which might modernize federal market-data reporting to give attention to rising roles and expertise.
Richard Nash and Andy Halataei
PayPal
Vice President and Head of Global Government Relations (Nash) and Head of Americas Government Relations (Halataei)
Nash has labored as the highest lobbyist for PayPal for the final decade, whereas Halataei joined up to now two years. They’ve labored to deliver consideration to stablecoins, after PayPal launched its personal dollar-tied stablecoin in 2023. The firm CEO stated the trouble was instrumental within the formation of the GENIUS Act, which handed the Senate and established a federal regulatory framework for stablecoins.
Edward Palmieri and Eliza Jacobs
Roblox
Senior Director, Public Policy (Palmieri), and Senior Director, Product Policy (Jacobs)
The on-line video-gaming platform geared towards youngsters is the newest tech firm to ascertain a noticeable DC presence—opening an workplace subsequent to the White House this previous spring. Palmieri got here from Meta, Jacobs from Airbnb.
Chan Park
OpenAI
Head of US and Canada Policy and Partnerships
Park, who joined OpenAI after stints at Microsoft and within the Senate, is working to remain on the great aspect of Washington as ChatGPT continues to dominate generative AI. The firm’s lobbying—which elevated almost sevenfold, from $260,000 in 2023 to $1.76 million in 2024—has targeted on all the things from payments crafted to stop faux AI adverts in elections to boosting federal AI analysis funding.
Tim Powderly and Alexis Marks Mosher
Apple
Senior Director, Government Affairs for the Americas (Powderly), and Director of Congressional Relations (Mosher)
Powderly and Mosher are House alumni and longtime public-policy leaders at Apple—Powderly for 14 years, Mosher for 11. In the previous 12 months, they led lobbying efforts on behalf of the $3.44 trillion tech firm on laws associated to privateness, youngsters’ on-line security, and commerce.
Jennifer Park Stout and Gina Woodworth
Snap
Vice President, Global Public Policy (Stout), and Senior Director, Americas Public Policy (Woodworth)
Stout and Woodworth have been busy on Capitol Hill this 12 months as lawmakers have superior laws geared toward holding youngsters secure on social media. The firm backed the Take It Down Act, which criminalizes the sharing of AI-generated and non-consensual intimate pictures.
Nate Tibbits
Qualcomm
Senior Vice President, Global Government Affairs and Corporate Responsibility
Tibbits has led Qualcomm’s public-policy staff for greater than a decade and has been busy. The chip maker, together with opponents Intel and Micron, has urged the administration to not enact tariffs on imported semiconductor chips and associated supplies. Qualcomm warns that retaliatory actions in opposition to American corporations by overseas governments may threaten US international semiconductor management.
Kathi Vidal
Winston & Strawn
Partner
Vidal is without doubt one of the prime intellectual-property and patent attorneys within the nation. She beforehand served as US Patent and Trademark Office director beneath Biden. Before her authorities stint, she managed Winston & Strawn’s Silicon Valley workplace.
Big Business
Movers and Shakers
Craig P. Abod
Carahsoft
President and Founder
Abod has created what’s turn into one of many nation’s fastest-growing and largest personal authorities IT distributors, producing almost $15.5 billion in income. Despite going through DOJ allegations over fraudulent government-contract practices, the Reston firm continues to rack up thousands and thousands in Defense offers.
David Appel and Dave Levy
Amazon Web Services
Vice President, US Federal and Global National Security and Defense (Appel), and Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector (Levy)
Appel and Levy oversee AWS’s deepest authorities partnerships. Appel focuses on the DOD, together with work with the Defense Innovation Unit to decrease its carbon footprint and scale back mission prices. Levy oversees a number of public-sector initiatives, headlined by a $50 million marketing campaign to speed up the adoption of generative AI.
Thomas A. Bell
Leidos
CEO
Bell leads the Reston government-contracting firm, which boasts roughly $16.7 billion in annual income and 47,000 workers worldwide. In May, Leidos purchased Chantilly-based Kudu Dynamics to supply extra superior AI-enabled cyber capabilities for warfighters.
Matt Calkins
Appian
Founder and CEO
Since beginning Appian in 1999, Calkins has turned his Tysons startup right into a $663 million public enterprise. His AI-powered platform helps organizations streamline operations, profitable over purchasers together with eight of the world’s ten largest non-Chinese banks, eight of the largest pharmaceutical corporations, and each cabinet-level federal company.
Mark Ein
Kastle Systems
Executive Chairman
Ein leads the Falls Church supplier of safety programs for business actual property. Working with Mayor Muriel Bowser and MPD chief Pamela Smith, Kastle built-in its 1,000-plus camera-surveillance community into DC’s new Real-Time Crime Center to assist police entry dwell footage from business properties throughout emergences.
Amy Gilliland
General Dynamics Information Technology
President
Gilliland heads the worldwide expertise firm and authorities contractor, valued at $8.75 billion. It just lately acquired Iron EagleX, a number one supplier of AI, cyber, software program growth, and cloud companies. GDIT, headquartered in Falls Church, additionally expanded partnerships with AI, cyber, software program, and quantum corporations to assist make their authorities companies extra progressive.
Zach Leonsis
Monumental Sports & Entertainment
President, Media and New Enterprises
Leonsis, who drives the corporate’s tech technique, is revolutionizing how DC sports activities followers watch their groups. His MNMT community—holding native TV media rights for the Capitals, Wizards, and Mystics—noticed 37 % viewership development and have become the primary exterior Las Vegas to combine real-time sports activities betting throughout livestreams. Beyond broadcasting, he additionally leads Monument’s e-sports division.
Kim Lynch
Oracle
Executive Vice President, Government Defense and Intelligence
Lynch, who joined Oracle in 2023, leads the cloud-computing large’s push into the federal government’s most delicate computing environments, aiming to modernize cloud infrastructure for protection and intelligence businesses. The Booz Allen vet has targeted on breaking down knowledge silos which have lengthy plagued the intelligence group, with latest wins together with a contract emigrate the Army’s personnel and pay system to Oracle’s cloud service.
Phebe N. Novakovic
General Dynamics
Chairman and CEO
The Reston contractor has 117,000-plus workers in additional than 60 international locations, working in aviation; shipbuilding; fight autos and munitions; and tech and IT options. Novakovic was as soon as an intelligence officer and a director at JP Morgan Chase.
Horacio Rozanski
Booz Allen
Chairman, CEO, and President
Rozanski heads the $13.6 billion contractor as its 35,000-person workforce tackles all the things from quantum clocks for GPS-denied environments to wearable tech for astronauts. In his 30-year tenure, he has remodeled the McLean firm from a easy consulting agency into an enormous advanced-technology firm. A latest breakthrough: launching the primary giant language mannequin in house.
Michael J. Saylor
Strategy (previously MicroStrategy)
Executive Chairman
The largest publicly traded holder of Bitcoin expanded its treasury to 628,940 BTC just lately. Saylor’s firm used generative-AI design and launched a collection of Bitcoin-backed securities—STRK, STRF, and STRD—creating a brand new class of digital-asset-linked most well-liked shares which have raised billions in capital. He’s additionally suggested senior officers on the White House’s 2025 Digital Assets Summit, advocating for Bitcoin as a strategic-reserve asset.
Husein Sharaf
Cloudforce
Founder and CEO
Sharaf, a local of Fairfax, landed his first job at Booz Allen Hamilton at age 18 and not using a school diploma and continued his fast-rising profession on the Commerce Department earlier than founding Cloudforce in 2010. The cloud-consulting firm teamed up with Microsoft to develop nebulaONE, a first-of-its-kind platform that lets college students, researchers, and healthcare employees use generative AI with out worrying about knowledge breaches.
Jim Taiclet
Lockheed Martin
Chairman, President, and CEO
A former Air Force pilot, Taiclet is aware of firsthand concerning the jets that his $99 billion defense-and-aerospace firm helps manufacture. The Bethesda firm—the most important authorities contractor when it comes to income—has currently targeted on integrating AI, because of 1,500-plus AI/machine-learning builders who work for the corporate.
Allen Thompson
Intel
Vice President, US–Canada Government Affairs
Thompson leads US public-private partnerships for the tech large, which is investing $100 billion in semiconductor manufacturing on this nation. Separately, the corporate introduced final fall that it had finalized $7.86 billion in direct funding from the 2022 US CHIPS and Science Act, the most important tranche given to any firm, which Thompson and his staff performed a key position in securing.
Toni Townes-Whitley
SAIC
CEO
A veteran of Microsoft, Townes-Whitley has been main the federal government contractor accountable for engineering, digital, and AI choices to protection and civilian markets, together with the DOD, since 2023. She oversees greater than 24,000 workers world wide, who generate an annual income of over $7.5 billion.
Kathy J. Warden
Northrop Grumman
Chair, President, and CEO
Warden, a veteran of General Dynamics, leads Northrop Grumman’s roughly 100,000 international workers and pulls in an annual income of $41 billion, made up largely of protection and aerospace authorities contracts.
Trade Groups, Media, and Think Tanks
Nonprofits and different organizations selling and reporting on concepts
Dmitri Alperovitch, Maureen Hinman, and Sarah Stewart
Silverado Policy Accelerator
Cofounder and Chairman (Alperovitch), Cofounder and Executive Chair (Hinman), and CEO and Executive Director (Stewart)
Alperovitch, cofounder of the cybersecurity agency CrowdStrike, teamed up with former US Trade Representative negotiators Hinman and Stewart to tackle the thorniest geopolitical and expertise challenges going through corporations right this moment. The bipartisan assume tank is concentrated on AI threats, the semiconductor chips race, the way forward for warfare, cyberassaults, and industries of the longer term.
Perianne Boring and Cody Carbone
The Digital Chamber
Founder and Chair (Boring) and CEO (Carbone)
In 2014, Boring launched the blockchain and digital-asset commerce affiliation, which now has greater than 200 members, together with Microdelicate, Cisco, and IBM. The group lobbied for the CLARITY Act, which might set a regulatory construction for the sale of digital belongings on the SEC and CFTC.
Summer Mersinger and Peter Van Valkenburgh
Blockchain Association and Coin Center
CEO, Blockchain Association (Mersinger), and Executive Director, Coin Center (Valkenburgh)
Cryptocurrency is having a second, with the Trump administration rolling again Biden-era SEC crypto guidelines. The Blockchain Association, a commerce group whose members embody the cryptocurrency alternate Coinbase, and Coin Center, a nonprofit targeted on crypto coverage, are busy making an attempt to make sure that any laws and market regulation of stablecoins gives clear guidelines and helps innovation. The Blockchain Association, led by former CFTC commissioner Mersinger, applauded developments of the GENIUS Act to create a brand new digital-asset regulatory framework.
Brad Carson and Eric Gastfriend
Americans for Responsible Innovation
President (Carson) and Executive Director (Gastfriend)
Carson, undersecretary for the Army beneath Obama, and Gastfield, a digital-health tech entrepreneur, launched their nonprofit in 2024. It seeks to strike a difficult stability—enacting guardrails round AI security whereas guaranteeing that America stays aggressive within the international AI race.
Adam Conner
Center for American Progress
Vice President, Technology Policy
Conner has held jobs on the intersection of tech, politics, and coverage for 18 years in Washington. He based Meta’s DC workplace in 2007 and was Slack’s first worker right here. He now leads tech-policy applications beneath the progressive CAP, specializing in a venture mapping the potential financial influence of AI and figuring out harmful makes use of of the rising expertise.
Steve DelBianco
NetChoice
President and CEO
DelBianco is an business veteran who has led Washington’s most litigious tech commerce group for greater than 23 years. His affiliation is concerned in essentially the most lively lawsuits it has pursued thus far—not less than 17 in state and federal courts—looking for to guard member corporations, resembling Google, Meta, and X, from legal guidelines it claims try to curtail free speech and expression on-line.
Victoria Espinel, Craig Albright, and Aaron Cooper
BSA, The Software Alliance
CEO (Espinel), Senior Vice President, US Government Relations (Albright), and Senior Vice President, Global Policy (Cooper)
Espinel has led the enterprise-software commerce affiliation’s efforts to advertise AI adoption world wide. Espinel, Albright, and Cooper have labored with the US authorities and traveled to Japan, India, and Paris (for the AI Summit) up to now 12 months to fulfill with authorities leaders and stress the significance of AI adoption for his or her economies. They’ve additionally laid the groundwork to advertise the event of quantum computing and are working with international locations all through Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Alexandra Reeve Givens
Center for Democracy and Technology
President and CEO
Head of the tech-advocacy nonprofit since 2020, Givens has been pushing again on the Trump administration’s efforts to quash free speech and civil liberties, together with DOGE’s unprecedented entry to private and non-private info. She was on the steering committee for the 2025 AI Action Summit in Paris, targeted on secure use of latest AI applied sciences.
Karen Kornbluh
Center for Democracy and Technology
Visiting Fellow
As a visiting fellow on the tech assume tank, Kornbluh works with international financial organizations and AI-safety institutes to set the norms for regulating AI. She was deputy White House chief expertise officer for Biden and in addition based the Digital Innovation & Democracy Initiative on the German Marshall Fund. Kornbluh is presently a senior adviser for rising expertise on the Milken Institute.
Adam Kovacevich
Chamber of Progress
Founder and CEO
Kovacevich, a former Google lobbyist, created his tech commerce group because the progressive antidote to conservative-leaning NetChoice. This 12 months, he says he’s targeted on repairing the relationships between tech corporations and Democrats after CEOs had been turned off by “the Biden administration’s war against the tech industry.” He’s additionally combating the rising variety of what he sees as “anti-tech” payments in blue states.
Nicol Turner Lee
Brookings Institution
Senior Fellow, Governance Studies, and Director, Center for Technology Innovation
Lee, who is concentrated on rising tech-policy points, has devoted her profession to advancing equal entry to new applied sciences. She based the AI Equity Lab to advertise inclusive AI fashions and purposes within the US and the Global South, and she or he’s creating the primary “(un)Hidden Figures Repository” to spotlight various consultants contributing to the equitable design and use of expertise.
Billy Mitchell
Scoop News Group
Executive Editor
Billy Mitchell leads the editorial operations of FedScoop, DefenseScoop, AIScoop, CyberScoop, StateScoop, and EdScoop. His staff of reporters has expanded the corporate’s readership with their in-depth protection of the DOGE layoffs of presidency employees and the influence of the cuts on federal IT programs and knowledge safety.
Linda Moore
TechInternet
President and CEO
Moore, who has led the tech commerce group for greater than a decade, says she continues to champion AI insurance policies to help American innovation and strengthen the US economic system and nationwide safety. So far this 12 months, the group’s lobbyists have engaged with state lawmakers on 723 tech payments throughout all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico.
Travis Moore
TechCongress
Founder and Executive Director
Moore’s group helps place fellows in lawmakers’ House and Senate places of work, which regularly lack experience in tech and AI coverage. His staff has positioned 16 fellows this previous 12 months, targeted on AI coverage, rising expertise, cybersecurity, knowledge privateness, and international competitors. Since its inception in 2015, TechCongress has positioned 130 fellows, and two-thirds have landed jobs within the authorities or within the social-impact sector.
Ajit Pai
CTIA
President and CEO
The former FCC chair throughout Trump’s first time period now leads the nation’s largest wireless-mobile-communications commerce affiliation, with members together with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. His group efficiently secured future wireless-spectrum auctions in Congress’s reconciliation package deal that Trump signed on July 4.
Katie Paul
Tech Transparency Project
Director
Paul has led analysis that exposes dangerous content material from Big Tech for the watchdog group, together with dozens of sanctioned people and designated terrorist teams that had been fundraising by way of X Premium. The group’s analysis has influenced lawmakers and led to coverage modifications at main tech platforms.
Morgan Reed
App Association
President
Reed has led this commerce group, which represents 5,000 small software program builders and tech corporations, for twenty years. He opposed laws to set an age-verification customary for app shops and backed a invoice—the WEAR IT Act—that might permit versatile and well being financial savings accounts to be spent on wearable well being tech.
Eric Schmidt and Ylli Bajraktari
Special Competitive Studies Project
Chair (Schmidt) and President and CEO (Bajraktari)
Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, launched SCSP in 2021 to assist make sure the US’s success within the international race on AI and different rising tech. Bajraktari, who leads the group, beforehand was govt director of the National Security Commission of Artificial Intelligence. SCSP hosted its second AI+ Expo in DC in June, drawing 15,000-plus attendees from the private and non-private sectors to discover the way forward for AI.
Gary Shapiro, Kinsey Fabrizio, Tiffany Moore, and Michael Petricone
Consumer Technology Association
CEO and Vice Chair (Shapiro), President (Fabrizio), Senior Vice President, Political and Industry Affairs (Moore), and Senior Vice President, Government and Regulatory Affairs (Petricone)
The commerce group that throws the business’s greatest convention yearly—CES—has been vocally against Trump’s tariffs, which Shapiro, Moore, Fabrizio, and Petricone say drive up inflation and harm American companies and shoppers. Fabrizio was promoted final 12 months to president, with Shapiro relinquishing the title and retaining the CEO position, which he’s held for greater than 40 years.
Jonathan Spalter
USTelecom
President and CEO
Spalter leads the commerce group representing America’s broadband corporations. In June, he backed a serious win within the Supreme Court for the FCC that upheld the constitutionality of the Universal Service Fund, a telephone-service program for low-income people, whereas additionally calling for an replace to this system and urging tech corporations to chip in to its funding.
Kara Swisher
Vox Media
New York Magazine Editor-at-Large and Podcast Host
Swisher has constructed a reputation as some of the influential tech-policy podcasters, internet hosting two profitable exhibits—On With Kara Swisher and Pivot With Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. In the previous 12 months, she’s interviewed influential tech leaders, together with Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
Elham Tabassi
Brookings Institution
Director, Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative
Elham joined Brookings in March and has targeted on bridging technical understanding with coverage implementation, establishing analysis methodologies for AI programs, and selling accountable AI. She beforehand was chief AI adviser on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the place she helped set up a consortium of 290 organizations spanning business, academia, civil society, and extra working to develop pointers and requirements for AI measurement.
Jennifer Taylor
Northern Virginia Technology Council
President and CEO
As chief of one of many nation’s largest tech councils, Taylor has labored to affect the White House’s nationwide AI technique—urgent for high-quality knowledge, expert expertise, improved digital infrastructure, and accountable governance. “NVTC is helping shape the future of AI—at home and on the world stage,” she says.
Kate Tummarello
Engine
Executive Director
Tummarello’s group advocates for tech startups. The former Politico reporter stated her staff has been busy this 12 months, together with flying in entrepreneurs to DC in May to fulfill with lawmakers and the Trump staff to name for a pro-startup AI agenda.
Miriam Vogel
EqualAI
President and CEO
Vogel wears a number of vital hats in Washington’s AI universe. As head of EqualAI, she leads the nonprofit’s work on correcting and stopping unconscious bias in AI. She’s additionally chair of the National AI Advisory Committee (NAIAC) inside NIST, which gives suggestions to the president on AI. Lastly, she’s an adjunct professor of tech regulation and coverage at Georgetown Law.
Cyber World
Inventors, Agitators, and Defenders
Bryson Bort
Scythe
Founder and CEO
With 25 years of cybersecurity expertise, Bort has made it his mission to coach business consultants, policymakers, and the general public on higher defend important infrastructure resembling water-supply programs. Scythe permits purchasers to run simulated cyberattacks in opposition to their very own networks to evaluate their protection capabilities.
Thomas P. Bossert
Trinity Cyber
Cofounder and President
Instead of detecting threats after they occur, Trinity Cyber has developed “automated preventive control” to cease them from occurring within the first place. Bossert, a former Homeland Security adviser, says the tech has attracted purchasers amongst companies, federal businesses, and universities within the US and Australia.
Ken Carnesi
DNSFilter
Cofounder and CEO
Carnesi’s platform, utilized by greater than 40,000 organizations worldwide, strips out malicious content material on the web’s domain-name-system layer—primarily, the net’s handle e book—to dam customers from accessing harmful web sites and malware.
Nichole Clagett
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
Deputy Associate Director, Cyber Incident Reporting Program Management Office
When Biden signed the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA) in 2022, Clagett, a regulatory lawyer, was tasked with writing the principles for a way corporations that run important companies should report cyber incidents to the federal government—then truly implementing them. Her focus: streamlining the reporting course of so the federal government can get a greater image of the largest threats to the nation’s infrastructure.
J. Michael Daniel
Cyber Threat Alliance
President and CEO
Daniel parlayed his expertise as a National Security Council cybersafety coordinator into constructing a coalition of three dozen cybersecurity suppliers that share intelligence on rising threats. An enormous focus this 12 months is addressing the twin problem of AI-assisted cyberattacks and vulnerabilities in AI programs.
Robert Johnston
N-able
General Manager, Adlumin
In November, Johnston, a former Marine Corps officer, struck a $266 million cope with the Boston IT software program firm N-able to combine Adlumin’s threat-detection-and-response companies into its platform, serving 25,000 purchasers worldwide.
Lisa Kaplan
Alethea
Founder and CEO
Kaplan, a political-disinformation skilled, runs Alethea, which combats misinformation campaigns and social-media manipulation concentrating on companies in actual time. This spring, an investigation in partnership with the Independent revealed greater than 1,000 deceptive TikTookay movies concerning the dangers of contraception—some had been subsequently eliminated.
Robert M. Lee
Dragos
Cofounder and CEO
Lee heads this Hanover, Maryland, cybersafety large because it protects industrial programs world wide from ransomware assaults. Last fall, the corporate expanded its companies to the US authorities with the creation of its public-sector arm.
Dave Merkel
Expel
Cofounder and CEO
Merkel has constructed a billion-dollar agency by combining three many years of cybersecurity experience with shopper care—a philosophy he’s not abandoning for the AI period. Sure, AI is now customary in cybersecurity, however Merkel cautioned in a July Forbes op-ed that it “isn’t a magic bullet” and shouldn’t eclipse what actually issues: human oversight and stable customer support.
Grant Schneider
FGS
President and CEO
After 4 years at Venable, Schneider introduced his cybersecurity experience to the La Plata, Maryland, protection contractor because it gives intelligence evaluation and engineering to purchasers such because the Navy, the Secret Service, and the Indo-Pacific Command.
Steve Vintz
Tenable
Co-CEO and CFO
Vintz, who’s been serving to lead Tenable since December, has targeted on advancing the $3.5 billion large’s place in a aggressive business. In February, for instance, the Columbia agency acquired Vulcan Cyber to create what it believes will likely be “the most comprehensive exposure-management platform.”
Rick Wagner
Agile Defense
CEO
A former Microsoft exec, Wagner leads Agile Defense because it helps federal businesses modernize typically outdated IT programs and shield them from cyber threats. This 12 months has featured huge strikes together with the doubling of its workforce by way of acquisition of the McLean protection data-analytics agency Intellibridge and the launch of its inner R&D store, Agile Labs.
John B. Wood
Telos
CEO and Chairman of the Board
Thirty years in the past, Telos was near-bankrupt. But beneath Wood, the Ashburn cybersecurity firm has grown to serve huge purchasers such because the State Department, AWS, and Verizon, changing into the official messaging system for the Defense Department and the second-largest TSA PreCheck enrollment supplier.
The Connectors
Organizers, conveners, and facilitators
Doug Anderson
DCA Live
Founder and President
Anderson has made himself one of many DC tech scene’s chief connectors by way of his wide-reaching community of conferences and meetups. His second annual CapitalCapital convention drew greater than 500 attendees, cementing it because the area’s greatest native tech and VC gathering. Beyond the marquee occasion, he hosts common meetups and salon-style roundtables for enterprise capitalists, founders, and tech execs.
Allie Brandenburger
TheBridge
Cofounder and CEO
Brandenburger has constructed TheBridge right into a nationwide community connecting tech, coverage, and political professionals who wish to collaborate to unravel points within the business. With her background in each the coverage and company worlds, she goals to interrupt the barrier between typically incompatible languages of innovation and regulation. Starting in DC and the Bay Area, the group has expanded to 5 extra cities throughout the nation.
Amelia DeSorrento, Ann Marie Guzzi, and Kelly O’Malley
The Agora Initiative
Cofounders and Co-Organizers
DeSorrento, Guzzi, and O’Malley determined to deal with enterprise capital’s gender hole head-on. Their resolution: the Agora Initiative, launched final 12 months to attach feminine entrepreneurs with funders and influencers by way of enterprise challenges, dinners, and completely satisfied hours. With backing from sponsors resembling JP Morgan and the DC Tech & Venture Coalition, their Female Founder Showcases have already drawn 300-plus attendees.
Anthony Jamison
CivStart
Cofounder and CEO
After a decade serving to state and native governments deal with expertise challenges, Jamison launched the nonprofit CivStart to bridge the hole between govtech startups and municipal leaders. In 5 years, his group has hosted an accelerator program, a group hub, and occasions which have drawn greater than 970 attendees whereas serving to 56 startups elevate $152 million in enterprise capital.
Rachel Koretsky
DC Startup and Tech Week
Director and Executive Producer
An entrepreneur herself, Koretsky helps manage the most important startup and tech convention within the area, which has grown to 16,000-plus members beneath her management. Over the previous decade, DC Startup & Tech Week has hosted greater than 150 periods and 300 audio system, bringing collectively early- and growth-stage founders and buyers.
Kevin Morgan
Washington DC Economic Partnership
Senior Vice President, Tech Sector Attraction and Retention
DC Tech & Venture Coalition
Founder, Board Chair, and President
Morgan has made it his mission to ascertain DC as a vibrant tech hub by way of group constructing and company partnerships. To do that, he splits his time between drawing corporations to the area with the Washington DC Economic Partnership and accelerating development for native startups by way of the DC Tech & Venture Coalition. His DC Tech Meetup—one of many largest meetups of its variety—showcases native innovation.