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Jonathon Barkl Is Teaching Parking Lots to Pay Attention
A student parking problem became a lesson in door-to-door sales, operational grit, and the value of seeing what everyone else ignores. Now AirGarage is using parking as the first test of a larger idea: physical real estate can behave like software once it becomes observable.
Arno Merkle
Arno Merkle is the co-founder and CEO of Crystal Sonic, a Phoenix deep tech startup whose patented Sonic Lift-Off technology uses sound waves as an 'acoustic scalpel' to split thin device layers off semiconductor wafers so the costly substrate can be reused. A materials scientist with a Ph.D. from Northwestern and more than 75 technical papers to his name, Merkle spent two decades building and exiting X-ray and electron microscopy companies (Xradia, acquired by Carl Zeiss in 2013; XRE, acquired by Tescan in 2018) before turning his attention to one of chipmaking's quietest scandals: that conventional wafering throws away 90% or more of pristine, expensive crystal. With Crystal Sonic he is trying to make next-generation chips cheaper and far less wasteful, one sound wave at a time.