aerospace-engineer
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Dimi Kellari
Dimi Kellari is the co-founder and CEO of Neion Bio, a New York biotech using genetically engineered chicken eggs as biological factories to produce complex biologics like monoclonal antibodies at a fraction of the usual cost. An MIT-trained aerospace engineer who previously built autonomous-vehicle infrastructure at Cavnue and worked at Alphabet's X moonshot factory and McKinsey, Kellari co-founded Neion in 2024 with biologist Dr. Sam Levin around a single question: why, in 2024, are we still making our most important medicines in hamster cells? In June 2026 the company closed an oversubscribed $23 million Series A led by Caffeinated Capital.
Gregory Mark
Gregory Mark is a three-time founder and MIT-trained aerospace engineer who is rebuilding how physical things get made. After inventing continuous carbon fiber 3D printing and taking Markforged from a garage idea to a $2.1B public company, he launched Backflip AI in 2024, a generative AI tool that turns text, sketches, and scans into 3D-printable, manufacturable models. Backflip raised a $30M Series A co-led by NEA and Andreessen Horowitz, with angels including Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott and 'Attention Is All You Need' co-author Ashish Vaswani.
Martin Peryea
Martin Peryea is an aerospace engineer with more than 40 years in vertical flight who founded Jaunt Air Mobility in 2019 to build a quieter, more efficient electric VTOL air taxi. After 33 years at Bell Helicopter, where he became a Technical Fellow and chief engineer on the fly-by-wire Bell 525 Relentless, he bet his career on a contrarian idea: a single rotor that slows down in cruise while a wing does the lifting. That Slowed Rotor Compound design became the Jaunt Journey. He now leads the Electric Air Mobility division of The AIRO Group as Senior Vice President and General Manager.
Amaury Ciurana
Amaury Ciurana is the co-founder and CEO of REEV, a wearable-robotics company building intelligent motorized orthoses for people with neurological gait disorders. A French aerospace engineer trained at ISAE-SUPAERO and the X-HEC entrepreneurship track, he relocated to Boston in 2023 to lead REEV's US expansion. The company pairs DREEVEN, an AI-powered robotic knee orthosis, with REEV SENSE, a wearable gait-analysis system, and has raised roughly $14M total including a $9.2M round in 2025.
Chris Griffin
Chris Griffin is the co-founder and CEO of Hover Energy, a Dallas company that builds patented Wind-Powered Microgrids - arrays of 36kW rooftop turbines paired with solar and storage that let commercial buildings make their own clean power. An aerospace engineer turned Wall Street financier turned clean-energy entrepreneur, Griffin spent roughly two decades chasing the same idea before one of his rooftop systems rode out 105 mph gusts during Hurricane Ian. He has since taken the technology international, with a Royal Navy installation in Liverpool and a joint venture to scale deployments for blue-chip clients.
Kevin Stein
Kevin Stein is the CEO and cofounder of Delos Insurance Solutions, a San Francisco insurtech MGA that writes homeowners insurance for wildfire-exposed California properties that mainstream carriers refuse. A Bay Area native and aerospace engineer who once sold satellites at SSL/Maxar, Stein co-founded Delos in 2017 with Shanna McIntyre to apply satellite imagery, geospatial AI, and wildfire science to a problem the rest of the market treats as uninsurable. Delos accepts roughly two-thirds of the homes the standard market declines, and Stein reports it has never insured a home that later burned. He moonlights as a bassist and songwriter.
Kortney Opshaug
Kortney Opshaug is an aerospace-engineer-turned-ocean-entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of Blue Ocean Gear, a Sausalito-based startup whose orange-and-yellow Smart Buoys put GPS and sensors on fishing gear so commercial fishers can track, recover, and learn from equipment that would otherwise drift off as 'ghost gear.' With a Stanford PhD in aerospace and two MIT degrees in aeronautics, she spent years on docks listening to fishermen before designing hardware tough enough for the open ocean. Her buoys now ride the waters off Alaska, Nova Scotia, and the Caribbean, backed by NOAA SBIR funding and a Series A round, turning a tool for finding lost traps into a real-time data platform for a more sustainable ocean economy.
Fabian Gerlinghaus
Fabian Gerlinghaus is the Co-Founder and CEO of Cellares, a South San Francisco biotech company building the world's first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization (IDMO) for cell therapy. An aerospace engineer turned life-science entrepreneur, he co-founded Cellares in 2019 after spotting a critical gap: FDA-approved CAR-T therapies were sitting ready while patients died on waitlists because manufacturing couldn't scale. His Cell Shuttle platform — a fully automated, factory-in-a-box system processing 16 patient batches simultaneously — has attracted $630M in funding, a $380M partnership with Bristol Myers Squibb, and FDA's Advanced Manufacturing Technology designation. TIME magazine named it one of 2025's most important inventions.
Nida Farid
MIT and ETH Zürich-trained aerospace engineer who worked on Airbus programs before pivoting to children's literature and energy policy consulting. She is the author of 'The Extraordinary Life of Riz' and the founder of savejoules.com.