Venture with Grace Rob Ferguson, Microsoft Startups CTO on AI Infra, GPUs & Scaling
Rob Ferguson is the CTO and Head of AI at Microsoft for Startups, where he helps high‑growth founders access GPUs, frontier models, and strategic partnerships to scale AI products. A veteran engineering leader with more than two decades in AI and infrastructure, he previously served as Global Head of AI/ML for Startups and VC at AWS and has been a three‑time startup CTO/VPE with over $100M in exits, including Automatic Labs’ acquisition by SiriusXM. He has scaled engineering teams from early seed stages to hundreds of people at companies like Automatic Labs and Standard Cognition, and is known for making early, market‑shaping bets on platforms such as Databricks, Weights & Biases, and Ray. As a global AI keynote speaker, he focuses on turning cutting‑edge AI—LLM ops, RAG, and distributed training—into pragmatic playbooks for founders, enterprises, and investors navigating hyperscale cloud and modern AI infrastructure.Topics:
- How Hyperscalers Actually Evaluate AI Startups
- Lessons From Being a Three-Time Startup CTO
- The 2026 AI Infrastructure Landscape
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