Maher Damak is the CEO and co-founder of Infinite Cooling, an MIT spinout that recaptures the water vapor escaping from power-plant and industrial cooling towers using electric fields. A French-American mechanical engineer with a PhD from MIT and a degree from Ecole Polytechnique, he turned a fog-harvesting experiment in the Varanasi Research Group into a patented technology that recovers water more than 100 times purer than a plant's circulating supply. His work has earned Forbes 30 Under 30, the Lemelson-MIT prize, and an Edison gold medal, and his charged-mesh systems are now being tested on nuclear plants including EDF's Bugey site in France.
Vishnu Jayaprakash is the CEO and co-founder of AgZen, an MIT spinout that puts cameras and AI on crop sprayers so farmers can see, for the first time, where their pesticide droplets actually land. He grew up spraying rice and mangoes by hand on his family's farm near Chennai, spent more than a decade at MIT studying how droplets cling to leaves, and turned that physics into a business that went from zero paid acres to nearly a million in two years. His pitch is blunt: agriculture has sprayed at scale for 80 years without ever measuring whether the chemical reached the plant.