ai-for-engineering
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Jake Taylor
Jake Taylor is a physicist turned founder and the CEO of Axiomatic AI, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup building 'Axiomatic Intelligence' - AI that combines frontier models with formal mathematical and physics-based verification so engineers can design and prove out hardware like semiconductors and photonic chips. Before Axiomatic, Taylor spent 16 years at NIST as a Fellow and ran the first U.S. effort to coordinate quantum science, serving as the inaugural Assistant Director for Quantum Information Science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he architected the National Quantum Initiative. He holds a PhD in physics from Harvard, has authored more than 200 publications, and his honors range from the Presidential Early Career Award to the Service to America Medal. In March 2026 he led Axiomatic to an $18M seed round.
Maor Farid
Maor Farid is the co-founder and CEO of Leo AI, the first AI copilot purpose-built for mechanical engineers. A former Captain in Israel's Unit 8200 intelligence corps and the youngest-ever PhD graduate from the Technion at age 24, he went on to do postdoctoral research at MIT as a Fulbright fellow, studying how to predict catastrophic failures in complex physical systems. He founded Leo AI in 2023 to build what he calls 'the most boring, unsexy AI' - a tool trained on more than a million vetted engineering sources that handles documentation, part searches and calculations so engineers can focus on design. Leo AI raised $9.7M and is used by teams at Toyota, HP, Mobileye, Philips and Scania.