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Diagrid
Our Mission

Make durable execution affordable and ubiquitous.

Leadership

Executive Leadership Team

Sam Yang

Sam Yang

Chief Executive Officer

  • Leads Diagrid as CEO, uniting sales, marketing, customer growth, product, and engineering to bring durable and verifiable execution for AI agents and workflows to enterprises in every industry
  • As revenue leader at data.ai (App Annie), was instrumental in driving the company past $150M in revenue; later led revenue at Zilliz, scaling the developer-first vector database company
  • 20+ years of experience at Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and multiple venture-backed startups across enterprise software and infrastructure; studied Economics at the University of California, San Diego
Mark Fussell

Mark Fussell

Chief Product Officer & Co-founder

  • Co-founder, maintainer and steering committee member of Dapr
  • Previously led product development for Azure Service Fabric and managed the Azure CTO Incubations team at Microsoft
  • 30 years of experience developing technical strategies, building computing platforms and running product teams
Yaron Schneider

Yaron Schneider

Chief Technology Officer & Co-founder

  • Co-founder, maintainer and steering committee member of Dapr
  • Co-founder, emeritus maintainer of KEDA
  • Previously led engineering architecture for Azure Container Apps and Azure CTO Incubations team at Microsoft
Engineering and Operations

Leadership Team

Joni Collinge

Joni Collinge

Cloud & Platform Team Lead

  • Engineering lead for the team responsible for building and operating the Catalyst platform, Diagrid's enterprise-grade platform for running secure, resilient distributed applications and agentic workflows
  • Over a decade of experience building large-scale cloud services, bringing deep expertise across cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, distributed systems, and open-source technologies including Dapr
  • Previously Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft building solutions for their most strategic and innovative customers
Alice Gibbons

Alice Gibbons

Customer Engineering Team Lead

  • Founding member of Diagrid's Solutions Architecture and Customer Support teams, guiding enterprises through app modernization & agentic enablement scenarios from architecture design to hands-on proofs of concepts
  • Trusted advisor behind marquee customer successes across automotive, fintech and payments, including distributed systems processing millions of critical transactions daily
  • Previously Cloud Architect and Cloud Native Global Black Belt at Microsoft; B.Sc. in Computer Science and Mathematics
Casper Nielsen

Casper Nielsen

AI Engineering Team Lead

  • Leads Diagrid's agentic AI engineering, shaping Dapr Agents into the production-grade foundation for durable, reliable AI agents
  • Elected Co-Chair of the Accuracy & Reliability Working Group at the Agentic AI Foundation, helping set global standards for trustworthy agentic systems
  • Previously Principal Platform Architect and Senior Security Software Developer at Novo Nordisk
Yael Schirmer

Yael Schirmer

Leading Technical Product Manager

  • Drives product delivery for Diagrid Catalyst, the enterprise platform for durable workflows and AI agents — from enterprise deployment models to cost governance
  • Expert in secure distributed systems, applied cryptography and Zero Trust architecture — nearly five years at SpiderOak Mission Systems building decentralized platforms for space and defense
  • Previously Cryptography Engineer at Genity; M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics with Distinction, Royal Holloway, University of London
Nelson Parente

Nelson Parente

Dapr Runtime Team Lead

  • Leads the runtime team, building the Dapr engine behind durable workflows and AI agents in Diagrid Catalyst, and drives releases of Dapr, one of the biggest CNCF-graduated open-source projects
  • Bridges open source and enterprise, steering how upstream Dapr innovation becomes hardened, supported capability for Catalyst customers. Additionally, helps shape engineering practices across Diagrid, from on-call and production reliability to AI-assisted development
  • Previously, Technical Lead at Anchorage Digital and senior engineer on Farfetch's identity platform
Roshni Hundel

Roshni Hundel

Head of People & Chief of Staff

  • Leads Diagrid's People & Operations function, owning recruiting, compensation, performance, and the full employee lifecycle alongside finance, IT, and business operations. As Chief of Staff, Roshni is the connective tissue across Diagrid's org, keeping the leadership team aligned and moving so priorities stay visible and decisions turn into action
  • Over a decade scaling high-growth tech companies: built RudderStack's people function from scratch as it grew globally, and helped Cloudflare grow from ~250 to 1,800 employees through its IPO, including expanding its Singapore & EMEA functions
  • Began her career in recruiting at Apple and CA Technologies; member of the CPOHQ and StartupExperts HR leadership communities; B.A. in Political Science from The Ohio State University. Enjoys learning about different cultures, perspectives, and trends that shape our world
Timeline

Milestones

  1. Microsoft and Red Hat announce KEDA, co-created by Yaron.

  2. Dapr is released as open source.

  3. Dapr 1.0 is ready for production use.

  4. Diagrid launches with $24.2M from Amplify Partners and Norwest Venture Partners, along with Conductor, its managed Dapr service for Kubernetes.

  5. Catalyst is previewed at KubeCon North America.

  6. Dapr graduates from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the foundation's highest level of maturity.

  7. Dapr Workflow becomes stable in Dapr 1.15.

  8. Dapr Agents launches, bringing durable AI agents into the Dapr project.

  9. Dapr 1.18 adds verifiable execution.

  10. Catalyst 2.0 brings durable, verifiable execution to more than 10 agent frameworks, in the cloud or fully air-gapped.

  11. Dapr Ops Dashboard is free forever.

Who we are

Our Story

Mark Fussell and Yaron Schneider spent years at Microsoft building platforms that large companies run their applications on. Mark led product development for Azure Service Fabric. Yaron led engineering architecture for Azure Container Apps. Both worked in the Azure CTO Incubations team, where Yaron co-created KEDA, the event-driven autoscaler for Kubernetes. Together, the two of them created Dapr.

Dapr gave developers ready-made building blocks for messaging, state, workflows and security, so every team didn't have to write that plumbing again. It spread fast. Companies put it into production and needed a team that could support it, run it for them and keep the project healthy. Mark and Yaron started Diagrid to be that team.

Today the focus is durable execution: making sure workflows and AI agents finish what they start, even when a server crashes or a model call times out. The engineers who maintain Dapr also build Catalyst, our platform for durable and verifiable agents and workflows.

Diagrid co-founders Mark Fussell and Yaron Schneider
Co-foundersMark Fussell & Yaron Schneider
Open source

Built on 100% open source.

Diagrid is built on Dapr, the open source runtime our founders created. Dapr is released under the Apache 2.0 license and has graduated from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Tens of thousands of organizations use it, and more than 3,700 people have contributed to it.

View Dapr on GitHubJoin the Dapr Discord
Why we exist

Confidence in Production

The problem

Trusting it in production is the hard part.

Most teams can get an AI agent or a workflow running on a laptop. In production, a long-running process can fail halfway through a payment or a customer order.

  • Servers restart
  • APIs time out
  • Processes fail halfway

Teams end up writing retry logic and recovery code by hand. When something breaks, they still can't say exactly what happened.

Our answer

Ship with confidence.

With durable execution, work picks up where it stopped instead of starting over or failing silently. Our mission is to make that affordable and available everywhere, so every team can use it.

Teams keep the framework they already use and add durability without a rewrite.

  • LangGraph
  • CrewAI
  • Microsoft Agent Framework
  • Any framework of your choice

Regulated industries

Prove what ran, where, and what it touched.

Regulated industries need more than reliability. Banks, insurers, healthcare providers and public-sector teams have to prove what ran, where it ran and what data it touched.

  • Our cloud
  • Your cloud
  • Fully air-gapped

Every step can carry a cryptographically signed audit trail for auditors and post-incident reviews.

Open by default

Built on Dapr, given back to Dapr.

All of this is built on Dapr, the CNCF-graduated open source project our founders created. Thousands of companies run it in production. Diagrid engineers are core maintainers, and our co-founders sit on its steering committee. We put major features like verifiable execution into open source Dapr.

Teaching and tools are free too: the Dapr Ops Dashboard is free forever, and Dapr University teaches durable execution at no cost.

Hear more in our episode of the Open Source Startup Podcast, Making Distributed Systems More Accessible with Diagrid.

Our reputation

Diagrid in Numbers

Investors

Backed By

  • Amplify
  • Norwest
  • Quiet Capital
  • Third Point Ventures