
Kevin Conley is the CEO of Applied Brain Research (ABR), the Waterloo-based startup commercializing brain-inspired, ultra-low-power chips for edge AI. A 30-plus-year semiconductor veteran, he spent more than two decades at SanDisk - rising to Senior Vice President and CTO - then led Everspin Technologies as President and CEO. He is named on 90+ patents covering non-volatile memory architecture and management.
LEXI is a California-founded IoT company that builds a universal, multi-protocol platform connecting smart-home and commercial-building devices across Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Z-Wave, 900MHz, LoRaWAN, Thread and Matter. Its Universal IoT Gateway, white-label devices, mobile apps and cloud stack help enterprises retrofit buildings for energy efficiency and decarbonization compliance.
Deptrum (光鉴科技) is a Chinese 3D vision company founded in 2018 by three Silicon Valley scientists, including a former Apple depth-hardware lead. It builds full-stack 3D depth-sensing solutions - nanophotonic chips, structured-light and Time-of-Flight cameras, and AI perception algorithms - that let machines see and measure the physical world. Its hardware powers robots, smart cockpits, palm-payment terminals, smartphones and new-retail systems across finance, automotive and IoT.
BrightAI is a Palo Alto-based physical AI company building Stateful OS, a platform that pairs edge sensors, robots, and multimodal AI models to monitor, inspect, and maintain critical infrastructure - pipes, power grids, HVAC systems, and more. Co-founded in 2019 by SmartThings creator Alex Hawkinson, the company crossed $80M in revenue while bootstrapped before raising a $51M Series A in July 2025.
Nathan Hanks is the co-founder of BrightAI, a physical AI platform company that deploys IoT sensors and edge AI to monitor and optimize critical infrastructure for enterprises. Previously, he co-founded ReachLocal, scaling it to $500M in annual revenue and 2,200 employees before its NASDAQ IPO in 2010 and subsequent acquisition by Gannett in 2016. He also founded Music Audience Exchange (MAX), a music sponsorship technology platform. At BrightAI, Hanks and his team bootstrapped the company to $80M in revenue before raising a $15M seed round in November 2024 and a $51M Series A in July 2025, with the company now surpassing $100M in annual revenue and 250,000+ AI endpoints deployed.