Manik Surtani

Manik Surtani is CTO and co-founder of the Agentic AI Foundation, where he is responsible for the foundation’s technical output — the reference architecture, standards and protocols, and the work of its technical working groups — and partners with the Technical Committee and project maintainers to shape which projects join the foundation. Prior to AAIF, Surtani was Head of Open Source and VP of Cloud Infrastructure at Block, and earlier a Staff Engineer at Red Hat. He is the creator of Infinispan, the distributed in-memory data grid, and represented Block in the collaboration with Google that produced gRPC. He is also a public speaker, investor, startup mentor – and outside of work, a rock climber, mountaineer, and wannabe surfer.