applied-physics
(8)
Li Sun
Li Sun is the founder and CEO of Shennon Biotechnologies, a San Francisco single-cell immunotherapy company that profiles millions of immune cells in hours to pinpoint the rare T cells and antibody targets that fight cancer. A physicist by training (PhD from Harvard's Weitz lab, M.Eng from MIT), she spent five years as a deep-tech venture investor at Bessemer and Foundation Capital before building the platform herself. Shennon emerged from stealth in March 2023 with a $13M seed round led by DCVC.
Noah Helman
Noah Helman is the co-founder and CEO of Industrial Microbes (iMicrobes), an Alameda, California synthetic biology company that engineers the central metabolism of microbes so they can eat cheap, renewable feedstocks - ethanol and methane - and spit out the chemicals normally pumped from petroleum. A Stanford applied-physics PhD who spent roughly a decade in physics labs before crossing into biology, Helman co-founded the company in 2014 with two fellow alumni of the biofuels startup LS9. iMicrobes targets drop-in, cost-competitive, net-zero versions of acrylic acid (for paints and adhesives) and acrylonitrile (for carbon fiber). The company went through Y Combinator's W15 batch, holds more than 20 patents, raised a $10M+ seed round in late 2024, and in 2025 announced it had scaled production of 100% bio-based, high-purity acrylic acid.
Ophir Gaathon
Ophir Gaathon is the co-founder and CEO of DUST Identity, a Massachusetts deep-tech company that sprinkles microscopic, industrial diamond dust onto physical objects to give them an unclonable fingerprint. A Columbia-trained applied physicist who once chased the quantum properties of diamonds for computing, he turned that research into an identity layer for the physical world, used across defense, aerospace, automotive and luxury supply chains. Backed by Kleiner Perkins, Airbus Ventures, Lockheed Martin and Castle Island Ventures, his company has raised more than $50M and works on problems originally posed by DARPA.
Xiao Zhang
Xiao Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of Collov Labs (Collov AI), a Redwood City visual-AI company that turns a single photo of a room into reimagined interior designs and staged real-estate listings. A Stanford applied-physics PhD who trained machine-learning models on free-electron lasers before pivoting to product, he is betting that the next interface for AI is the camera, not the chat box. In April 2026 Collov raised a $23M Series A and launched a research lab to push diffusion models, spatial reasoning, and agentic workflows toward AI that understands and acts on the physical world.
Pratap Ranade
Pratap Ranade is the CEO and co-founder of Arena (Arena Physica), a New York startup building Atlas, an AI hardware engineer grounded in applied physics that helps semiconductor, aerospace, automotive, medical-device and defense companies design and test physical hardware. A Stanford and Columbia-trained physicist who left a PhD to join McKinsey, he previously co-founded Kimono Labs (acquired by Palantir) and led engineering and machine learning at Enigma. Arena raised a $30M Series B in April 2025 and counts AMD, Bausch & Lomb and Anduril among its partners.
Rob Devlin
Rob Devlin is the co-founder and CEO of Metalenz, the first company to take metasurface optics out of the lab and into mass-market consumer devices. A Harvard-trained applied physicist who studied under Federico Capasso, he turned a Science cover paper into a fabless optical-semiconductor company that prints flat lenses in standard chip foundries. Under his leadership Metalenz shipped the world's first metasurfaces in consumer products with STMicroelectronics in 2022 and launched Polar ID, a polarization-based face authentication system. He keeps the first wafer of 10,000 metasurface lenses on his desk as a reminder of how a single fabrication shot eclipsed an entire PhD's worth of handmade devices.
William Fitzhugh
William Fitzhugh is the co-founder and CEO of Adden Energy, a Harvard spin-out scaling a self-healing, solid-state lithium-metal battery that has charged in as little as three minutes and survived more than 10,000 cycles in lab cells. A Harvard PhD in applied physics, he is trying to turn a coin-cell breakthrough into a roll-to-roll pilot line and, eventually, batteries that let an EV recharge in the time it takes to fill a gas tank.
Alex Hartz
Alex Hartz is a General Partner at Shine Capital, a New York seed-stage venture firm with about $435M across three funds. He came up at SciFi VC over eight years, trained as an applied physicist at Caltech, and writes checks into ambitious founders working at the intersection of hard sciences, financial infrastructure, and applied AI.