Kiara Nirghin is co-founder and CEO of Emanate, a San Francisco company building autonomous AI agents that run revenue operations for industrial materials companies, from inbound inquiries to pricing decisions. She grew up in South Africa and won the Google Science Fair Grand Prize in 2016 for research on a low-cost superabsorbent polymer to help drought-hit farmland retain water. She became a Thiel Fellow, studied AI at Stanford, and served on the board of the Google.org Impact Challenge before starting Emanate, which came out of stealth in early 2026 with backing from a16z, Peter Thiel, and Alexis Ohanian.