Speakers

Andrew Ray represents public and private companies, financial sponsors, investors, including venture capital and private equity firms, entrepreneurs and management teams in cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&A), financings, and growth equity transactions. He has transactional experience in a broad range of industries, including technology, financial services, government contracts, life sciences, real estate, energy and the not-for-profit sector. Various industry publications and credentialing organizations recognize Andy as a leader in both M&A and in technology, media, and communications law, among other fields. Andy is the former leader of the interdisciplinary corporate practice in Washington, DC, and he is the former leader of the financial technology (fintech) initiative.

Phil Bronner is the Co-founder and Managing Partner of Ardent Venture Partners, an early-stage venture fund investing in AI-native applications, vertical SaaS, and B2B fintech. He is currently on the boards of Verituity, ExecOnline, OneMain Financial (NYSE: OMF), and Incentivio. He is also an investor in Givebutter, LEO1, Method Financial, Collective, LendFlow, Pickleheads, Crux Climate, Rainforest, Roe AI, and Drillbit. Before co-founding Ardent Venture Partners, Phil was the Founder/Managing Member of Summer League Ventures (SLV). Active SLV deals include Morning Consult, Ordway Labs, Gather.ai,, Anno.ai, Kudos, Montra, and Materia AI.

Before SLV, Phil was a General Partner with Novak Biddle Venture Partners. Throughout his 15-year career, he led 16 investments totaling over $100 million. Investments include 2U (Nasdaq: TWOU), Infoblox (Acquired by Vista Equity Partners), SolidFire (Acquired by NetApp), AddThis (acquired by Oracle), Webs (Acquired by Vistaprint), Approva (Acquired by Infor), LifeShield Security (acquired by DirectTV), ClearStandards (Acquired by SAP), Social Gaming Network, and Logic Library (Acquired by SOA Software). Following his time at Novak Biddle, Phil founded Quad Learning, a venture-backed startup acquired by Wellspring Higher Education. He also served as a Management Consultant at McKinsey & Co. and worked as a Software Engineer at IBM.

Phil earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania's School of Law, and an MBA from the Wharton School.

Mudar Yaghi is a leading innovator in AI and machine learning for human language technologies, with over 35 years advancing the science of global language recognition, cognition, and generation. As CEO and Co-Founder of AppTek, Yaghi has built one of the industry's pioneering platforms-spanning automatic speech recognition, neural machine translation, large language models, and emotive text-to-speech-and is a primary contributor to six of the company's seven patents. AppTek serves enterprise customers including Meta, Microsoft, AWS, Deluxe Media, and Zoom across media and entertainment, government, and contact center sectors. Yaghi has led M&A transactions with SAIC and eBay, held executive positions at both companies, and currently serves on the boards of Pixelligent, BluLogix, and other technology ventures. He holds an M.S. in Information Systems from George Washington University.