Toki Sherbakov is a member of Icon Ventures’ AI Advisory Council. Toki leads OpenAI’s global Applied AI Engineering team for startups as well as its global ecosystem team. He works with the Icon team and portfolio founders on putting frontier AI models into production, and led the hands-on AI workshop at Icon Forward, the firm’s 2026 annual meeting.

At OpenAI, his startups team works with some of the world’s most innovative startups to push the frontier of advanced AI, guiding them through ideation, development, delivery, and scaling solutions built on OpenAI’s platform.

His ecosystem team leads technical collaboration with partners building integrations into OpenAI’s products, spanning B2B plugins, consumer experiences, media, and shopping and commerce. 

Across both teams, he works closely with OpenAI’s product and research teams to bring feedback from developers and partners into product and model development.

Toki joined OpenAI as its second go-to-market (GTM) hire and first Applied AI Engineer over five years ago. Previously, he built and led the Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team at Peregrine Technologies, a San Francisco startup serving state and local governments. Before Peregrine, he led commercial FDE and GTM efforts in EMEA at Palantir Technologies, as well as deployments across the U.S. and Europe as an FDE.