From Day Zero to Acquisition: The Katanemo Blueprint

### 🌍 OPEN Seattle Presents

## From Day Zero to Acquisition: The Katanemo Blueprint

🎙️ A Fireside Chat with Mr. Salman Paracha
CEO, Katanemo
🎙️ Adil Hafeez
CTO, Katanemo
Join us for an insightful conversation on building from scratch, scaling AI-first companies, and navigating the journey from inception to acquisition in today’s fast-evolving tech landscape.

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📅 Wednesday, May 06, 2026
⏰ 6:00 – 7:30 PM
📍 Venue
DataScienceDojo / Ejento Office
5010 148th Ave NE, Building B
Redmond, WA

Speakers Introduction

Salman Paracha is Senior Vice President of AI at DigitalOcean, where he leads the agentic AI engineering organization. He joined in March 2026 through the acquisition of Katanemo Labs, the company he co-founded in 2022 and led as CEO. At Katanemo, he set the vision for Plano, the open-source data plane for agentic applications, along with the Arch-router and Plano-Orchestrator family of small models.
Before founding Katanemo, Salman spent more than a decade in senior product roles in cloud: as Group Vice President at Oracle Cloud, and at Amazon Web Services, where he was General Manager of the Serverless Applications Repository. He is based in the Greater Seattle area.

Adil Hafeez is a Principal Engineer at DigitalOcean's Agentic Inference Cloud, where he works on the infrastructure that powers AI agents in production. He joined DigitalOcean in March 2026 through the acquisition of Katanemo Labs, which he co-founded and where he served as CTO.
At Katanemo, Adil led the engineering team behind Plano, the open-source data plane for agentic applications, and the Plano-Orchestrator family of small models for intelligent LLM routing. He lives in the Greater Seattle area and is an avid mountaineer with multiple glacier ascents in the Pacific Northwest.