Krishna Gade

Krishna Gade is the Founder and CEO of Fiddler AI, the San Francisco–headquartered company building the Control Plane for AI Agents — a centralised layer for observability, policy enforcement, and trust that operates across the agentic AI stack. Founded in October 2018 with co-founder amit paka, Fiddler began with AI explainability, expanded into AI observability, and in 2026 launched Fiddler 2.0 as the runtime trust layer for distributed AI systems where agents coordinate with memory, retrieval, tools, policies, and feedback loops.The last twelve months mark a clear inflection point. Fiddler closed a $30 million Series C led by RPS Ventures, bringing total funding to $100 million, with participation from Insight Partners, Lightspeed, Lux Capital, Mozilla Ventures, BGV, and others. The company acquired Lumeus.ai in early 2026, extending the control plane upstream into coding agents — the first solution in the market governing AI agents at both creation and runtime layers. Krishna was invited to the India AI Summit plenary alongside global AI leaders including Brad Smith, Dario Amodei, Vinod Khosla, and Hemant Taneja, and presented Fiddler's vision at Davos 2026.Before Fiddler, Krishna was Engineering Manager for News Feed at Facebook, leading the team behind one of the most consequential ranking systems on the consumer internet. Earlier, he was Head of Data Engineering at Pinterest for over two years, scaling the team from a handful of engineers to 25+ and building the A/B experimentation platform, batch-processing infrastructure, and real-time spam detection systems. He worked on real-time search at Twitter (co-authoring the Earlybird and Storm@Twitter papers) and Microsoft. He holds an MS in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota and a Bachelor's degree from Acharya Nagarjuna University. He holds multiple US patents in search and ranking systems.Krishna earns his place on the AIM Next 15 AI CEOs in America 2026 for building the trust and governance layer that enterprise agentic AI cannot operate without. As organisations move from generative AI pilots to autonomous agents executing real workflows, the question of what did the agent do, why, what policy allowed it, and how do we ensure it doesn't repeat a mistake becomes existential. Fiddler is one of the few independent companies in the US solving that problem at the architectural layer the entire industry is converging on — and the Lumeus acquisition signals he is moving faster than the category itself.