#FoundHerWorld – Vishakha Gupta

 From Intel Labs to Organizational Intelligence: Vishakha Gupta’s Decade-Long Bet on Getting the Data Layer Right.


The most powerful AI systems in the world have a surprisingly mundane problem: they can’t find what they need, when they need it, and fast.


Ask an enterprise AI agent to pull a customer video, cross-reference it with support transcripts, and surface a recommendation, and somewhere in that chain, something breaks. Not because the model isn’t smart enough, but because the data is scattered across systems that were never built to talk to each other, and is often of mixed modalities like tabular, audio, and documents.


Vishakha Gupta has been watching this happen since before most companies had an AI strategy. A decade ago, she was building in-memory graph databases at Intel Labs. As they started looking at various AI/ML use cases, she saw the same dysfunction repeating itself at every scale: teams cobbling together makeshift data stacks, only to watch their pipelines slow to a crawl or collapse entirely.

“AI kept breaking because companies had their data scattered across too many systems. We built a single high‑performance data layer that lets AI actually find, connect, and use what it needs, from search to RAG to full agentic workflows.”


Her answer is ApertureData, and its flagship product, ApertureDB, the first AI-native database built specifically for multimodal data. Text, documents, images, video, audio, embeddings, connected metadata, ApertureDB holds it all in a single high-performance layer that AI can actually navigate. The result: multimodal search & personalization, flavors of RAG pipelines, and agentic memory that work the way teams always assumed they would.


The client list reflects the ambition. Nielsen’s Gracenote, Jabil, Fanatics, and a Fortune 50 big box retailer are already using ApertureDB. And for builders not yet at enterprise scale, Gupta has open-sourced Nexus, a multimodal memory layer for founders experimenting with agentic applications, built with the assurance that it will scale when they do.
Now based in California, ApertureData focuses on reaching AI teams at the precise moment when infrastructure decisions become unavoidable.


That moment, Gupta knows, is arriving faster than most companies are ready for.

Learn More & Get Involved
🎬 Watch the ICONS Movie — Meet the women behind the movement. Icons by Women in Cloud
📣 Read the Campaign Launch — See how #FoundHerWorld is converting conversations into capital. Women in Cloud Launches #FoundHerWorld
✍️ Nominate a Founder — Know someone who belongs in this spotlight? Submit a Nomination

/by

#FoundHerWorld – Deborah Adeoluwasina

Deborah Adeoluwasina Wasn’t Looking for a Business Idea. The Business Idea Found Her on WhatsApp.

The businesses weren’t just buying airtime. They were trying to say thank you, and they had no good way to do it.


It started simply enough. Around 2020, Deborah Adeoluwasina was helping students buy airtime and data through a manual, WhatsApp-based system. Price lists were posted. Numbers collected. Requests fulfilled. It was unglamorous work, and it worked.


But something else was happening underneath it. Businesses kept coming, not just for airtime, but to run campaigns, reward loyal customers, and incentivize staff. One brand alone processed close to a million transactions through the system over just a few months. That wasn’t a side effect. That was the signal.
The problem, once she saw it clearly, was everywhere. There was no simple, scalable way for businesses to distribute rewards and incentives without wrangling customer data, managing manual processes, or navigating systems built for enterprises with budgets most SMEs would never see. The tools that existed were either too complex, too expensive, or both. So businesses improvised with spreadsheets, with WhatsApp threads, with processes that broke the moment they tried to grow.


Deborah rebuilt everything.
“The broken system was how businesses reward and engage customers, manual, fragmented, and hard to scale,” she says. “We built Swype to make incentives seamless. Businesses create campaigns, share a link, and customers redeem instantly while we handle everything behind the scenes.”


Swype is a loyalty and incentive platform that lets businesses create reward pools, distribute customizable redemption links, automate customer engagement, send birthday rewards without lifting a finger, and launch campaigns without a technical team. It has since expanded into vouchers, bulk SMS, email, WhatsApp automation, and a growing ecosystem where businesses can source rewards from one another.


From churches to corporates, SMEs to startups, the customers who find Swype tend to ask the same question Deborah heard from the very beginning: why wasn’t this always this easy?
What started as a hustle became a platform. And the platform is just getting started.

Learn More & Get Involved
🎬 Watch the ICONS Movie — Meet the women behind the movement. Icons by Women in Cloud
📣 Read the Campaign Launch — See how #FoundHerWorld is converting conversations into capital. Women in Cloud Launches #FoundHerWorld
✍️ Nominate a Founder — Know someone who belongs in this spotlight? Submit a Nomination

/by

#FoundHerWorld – Nehal Mehta

Nehal Mehta Got Breached. Then She Built the Authentication System That Would Have Stopped It.

The breach didn’t require a sophisticated hack. It rarely does.


A huge number of cyberattacks more often than not don’t need to break through walls; they walk through doors wide open. A stolen password here, an intercepted one-time code there, and suddenly an attacker is inside a system that its owner believed was protected. The uncomfortable truth of modern cybersecurity is that the tools companies trust most, such as passwords, SMS codes, and standard MFA, were designed for a threat landscape that no longer exists.


Nehal Mehta learned this the hard way. After experiencing account compromises that caused real personal and financial damage, she began pulling at the thread. What she found was a fundamental design flaw baked into authentication itself: the system assumed that if you had the right credentials, you were the right person. Attackers had long since proven that assumption wrong.
Traditional MFA, she realized, had the same vulnerability. Codes could be intercepted. Sessions could be replayed. The human, the one factor an attacker genuinely cannot steal, had been designed out of the equation entirely.


“The broken system assumed passwords and OTPs were enough, even when attackers could reuse them,” she says. “I built Rainbow Secure as a cognitive identity layer with Visual DNA, making authentication human-driven and impossible to replay.”


Rainbow Secure does what its name implies: it puts the human back at the center of identity. The platform’s Cognitive Interactive MFA and Company Visual DNA technology adds a layer of human interaction that makes stolen credentials useless, because knowing the password is no longer sufficient to pass authentication. It is identity verification designed for the way attackers actually operate today.
Based in New Jersey and gaining traction across regulated industries, including healthcare, finance, and pharma, Mehta is building toward a future where credential-based attacks are simply no longer viable, not because defenders got faster, but because the attack surface itself was redesigned.

Learn More & Get Involved
🎬 Watch the ICONS Movie — Meet the women behind the movement. Icons by Women in Cloud
📣 Read the Campaign Launch — See how #FoundHerWorld is converting conversations into capital. Women in Cloud Launches #FoundHerWorld
✍️ Nominate a Founder — Know someone who belongs in this spotlight? Submit a Nomination

/by

#FoundHerWorld – Jai Gibson

The Infrastructure Gap No One Talks About: How Jai Gibson Is Giving Small Business Owners the Systems Corporate Always Took for Granted

There is a moment most service-based founders know, and almost none of them talk about.

Clients were coming in. The work was good. The mission was real. But somewhere between the follow-ups that never got sent, the leads that fell through the cracks, and the hours lost to tasks that should have been automated years ago, the business was running the founder instead of the other way around. Nobody warned them that this part was coming. Nobody taught them how to manage it.


Jai Gibson didn’t just recognize that moment. She had sat across from it more times than she could count, in the faces of coaches, consultants, nonprofit leaders, and small business owners. Brilliant people who were doing everything right, showing up fully for their communities, building something that mattered, and still drowning in the operational chaos that no business school curriculum and no enterprise software suite had ever been designed to solve for them.


She came from both worlds. Education and technology. The community that needed the infrastructure and the tools that could deliver it. The bridge between them didn’t exist. So she built it.


“Small business owners were drowning in chaos no one taught them to manage,” she says. “I built Auxilio X to give them the systems, automation, and clarity that corporate companies take for granted, so they can finally run their business instead of the other way around.”


Auxilio X is a small business automation and CRM consultancy built specifically for the people most likely to be overlooked by traditional tech solutions and most likely to transform their communities when properly resourced. Gibson implements AI-powered systems, workflow automation, and operations infrastructure for service-based businesses, coaches, and nonprofits, done for them, not handed to them as a manual.
She runs it solo. Lean, intentional, and proof of concept all at once.

Learn More & Get Involved
🎬 Watch the ICONS Movie — Meet the women behind the movement. Icons by Women in Cloud
📣 Read the Campaign Launch — See how #FoundHerWorld is converting conversations into capital. Women in Cloud Launches #FoundHerWorld
✍️ Nominate a Founder — Know someone who belongs in this spotlight? Submit a Nomination

/by

#FoundHerWorld – Charmaine Joy Pasion

Charmaine Joy Pasion Saw People with Real Potential Being Left Behind. La Pasion Solutions Is Her Answer. 

Potential, it turns out, is not the problem. Access is.
Across the Philippines, a generation of young professionals is navigating a world that was not quite built for them, searching for mental health support that feels safe, a community that feels genuine, and opportunities that feel within reach. The ambition is there. What is often missing is the ecosystem to support it.


Charmaine Joy Pasion has been thinking about that gap for years. Not as a market opportunity, but as a human one. She watched people around her stall, not for lack of drive, but for lack of the right door to walk through, the right space to grow in, the right hand extended at the right moment.
Her response was not a single product. It was an entire ecosystem.


La Pasion Solutions is a portfolio of purpose-driven brands, each addressing a different dimension of what it means to build a better life. Founders of Joy supports mental health and personal growth. Paws & Passion brings community and convenience to pet owners. Euphoria Treats creates space for people to gather, connect, and belong. Together, they form something rarer than a startup, a philosophy made tangible.


“What’s broken is that people with real potential are left behind, no access, no support, no space to grow,” Pasion says. “I’m building La Pasion Solutions as an ecosystem of purpose-driven brands that connect people to opportunities, healing, and community so they can actually build better lives.”


Based in the Philippines and still in its early stages, La Pasion Solutions is currently launching and validating its core brands with paying customers, building trust one community at a time, one partnership at a time, one story at a time.
The vision is long. The need is immediate. And Charm Joy Pasion is building for both.

Learn More & Get Involved
🎬 Watch the ICONS Movie — Meet the women behind the movement. Icons by Women in Cloud
📣 Read the Campaign Launch — See how #FoundHerWorld is converting conversations into capital. Women in Cloud Launches #FoundHerWorld
✍️ Nominate a Founder — Know someone who belongs in this spotlight? Submit a Nomination

/by