Axion Ray (operating as Axion) builds an AI 'observability command center' that helps the world's largest manufacturers catch product quality and safety problems months before they turn into recalls. Founded in 2021 by former McKinsey AI strategist Daniel First, the company fuses fragmented, unstructured field data - service tickets, dealership notes, call-center transcripts, sensor telemetry - into early-warning intelligence for engineering teams. Backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, RTX Ventures, Amplo and Inspired Capital with $25M raised, Axion works with manufacturers across aerospace, automotive, medtech and consumer goods.
AAA Mountain West Group is the not-for-profit auto club formerly known as AAA Northern California, Nevada & Utah. Headquartered in Walnut Creek, California, it serves AAA members across seven western states - Northern California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming and Alaska - with roadside assistance, insurance, travel planning, financial services and discounts. Rooted in a 1900 gathering of motoring enthusiasts in San Francisco, it is one of the largest clubs in the national AAA federation.
Del Grande Dealer Group (DGDG) is the largest family-owned automotive group in the San Francisco Bay Area. Founded in 1998 with a single dealership, it now operates a portfolio of franchised new- and used-car dealerships across Northern California, representing more than a dozen brands. DGDG pairs a high-volume retail operation with a culture obsession - it has been named a Bay Area Top Workplace for more than a decade - and a digital-first buying experience it markets as No Brainer Pricing and No Brainer Checkout.
Lucid Motors is an American luxury electric-vehicle maker based in Newark, California, building the longest-range production EVs in the world. Its in-house powertrain and battery engineering deliver class-leading efficiency in the Lucid Air sedan and the Gravity SUV, backed heavily by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund.
MIPS is a San Jose-based semiconductor IP company with a 40-year heritage in RISC computing. After abandoning its own legacy architecture, MIPS reinvented itself around the open RISC-V instruction set and now builds compute subsystems for autonomous platforms across automotive, industrial, robotics, and edge AI markets. Its Atlas portfolio - spanning Sense, Think, Act, and Communicate building blocks - targets the low-latency, safety-critical demands of what the company calls Physical AI. In July 2025, GlobalFoundries announced a deal to acquire MIPS.
One Mobility is the automotive brand of Foxconn Interconnect Technology (FIT), unveiled in September 2025 to unite the acquired German engineering houses Voltaira and Auto-Kabel under one banner. It is a build-to-print development and manufacturing partner for OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers, delivering power distribution systems, high- and low-voltage modules, safety and accessory components, and charging systems for electrified and connected vehicles. The company pairs 90+ years of German automotive engineering heritage with the manufacturing scale of the world's largest electronics maker, operating 40+ certified sites across 17 countries with roughly 11,000 employees.
Reputation (reputation.com) is a San Ramon, California SaaS company that helps multi-location and enterprise brands manage what the internet says about them. Its platform pulls reviews, surveys, social posts, business listings and customer feedback into one place, scores it with a proprietary metric called RepScore, and uses AI to help companies respond, rank locally, and turn sentiment into operational decisions. It serves roughly 750 enterprise customers across industries like healthcare, automotive, retail, financial services, hospitality, senior care and property management.
Bill Lin is the Deputy CEO and Board Member of One Mobility GmbH, the automotive arm of Foxconn Interconnect Technology (FIT), headquartered in Reutlingen, Germany. With a career spanning supply chain management, management consulting, and EV business leadership at Foxconn, Lin bridges Taiwan's electronics manufacturing powerhouse with Germany's century-old automotive precision engineering heritage. He also serves as Chief Integration Officer at FIT, steering the integration of One Mobility's 11,000-person global workforce across 40+ locations in 17 countries following the 2024 acquisition of Auto-Kabel Group.
Dennis Howard is CEO and President of GILLIG LLC, America's oldest surviving bus manufacturer and the second-largest heavy-duty transit bus maker in North America. Based in Livermore, California, GILLIG produces clean diesel, CNG, hybrid electric, battery electric, and hydrogen fuel cell buses that move millions of commuters across the United States daily. Under executive leadership, the company has leaned into the electric revolution - deploying fleets for King County Metro, PSTA, and dozens of transit agencies - while remaining a privately held American family business rooted in 135 years of craftsmanship.
Derek Maunus is the President and CEO of GILLIG LLC, America's oldest surviving bus manufacturer, founded in 1890 and now headquartered in Livermore, California. He joined GILLIG in 2011 and rose through roles in aftermarket parts and manufacturing before being appointed CEO in 2018. Under his leadership, GILLIG has expanded its clean-energy portfolio - including battery electric, hybrid, CNG, and hydrogen fuel cell buses - and executed a complex relocation from Hayward to a new 600,000 sq ft solar-powered facility in Livermore. With roughly 1,100 employees and annual revenue near $325M, GILLIG holds significant market share in North American heavy-duty transit bus manufacturing.
Jeremy Beaver is the CEO of Del Grande Dealer Group (DGDG), Northern California's largest family-owned automotive retailer. He started in the business at sixteen, cold-calling from a Dodge BDC, and now runs roughly 17 dealerships moving 25,000-30,000 cars a year at about $1.3 billion in revenue. He is known for building dealerships that operate like tech companies, treating data, culture, and team experience as the operating system of car retail.
Marshall L. Doney is the President and CEO of AAA Mountain West Group, the federation arm serving more than 6.8 million members across Northern California, Nevada and Utah. A 40-year AAA lifer who started in 1984 as an assistant manager at AAA Wisconsin, he climbed through strategy, marketing and automotive services before running the national office for nine years. He took the Mountain West top job permanently on July 2, 2024.
Marc Winterhoff is the interim Chief Executive Officer of Lucid Motors, the Newark, California luxury EV maker behind the Air sedan and Gravity SUV. A German-trained electrical engineer who spent decades advising automakers at Roland Berger and Arthur D. Little, he joined Lucid as COO in December 2023 and was elevated to interim CEO in February 2025 after founder Peter Rawlinson stepped aside. He has steered the company through a fragile stretch: stretching the cash runway into 2027, deepening the PIF and Uber partnerships, and prepping a robotaxi-ready Midsize platform. In April 2026 Lucid named Schindler veteran Silvio Napoli as permanent CEO; Winterhoff will return to the COO role.
Philipp Skogstad runs Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America - the Sunnyvale-to-San-Jose corridor of the company that invented the car. A Stanford-trained engineer who once managed open innovation programs at SAP, he now oversees an 830-person R&D operation that ships Drive Pilot (the only SAE-certified Level 3 system on US roads), the MBUX infotainment stack, and Mercedes' ChatGPT-in-the-dashboard experiment.
Sameer Wasson is the CEO of MIPS, the storied semiconductor IP company now reborn as a RISC-V pure-play targeting the physical AI era. He joined in September 2023 after 18 years at Texas Instruments, where he ran the Processors business and earlier built TI's mmWave radar franchise. MIPS is now a subsidiary of GlobalFoundries.
AutoFi is a San Francisco-based automotive commerce and finance platform that lets dealers sell and finance cars online and in the showroom. It connects buyers to a network of lenders, runs real-time credit decisioning, and powers checkout for big-name OEMs and dealer groups - most notably Ford Motor Credit.
Motorq is a connected vehicle intelligence platform that ingests embedded OEM telematics data, runs analytics and AI on top, and ships it to fleets, automakers, insurers, and dealers via APIs and a portal - no aftermarket hardware required.
Numa is the leading AI platform for automotive dealerships, powering customer operations across 1,300+ rooftops in the U.S. and Canada. Founded by the team behind Location Labs (acquired by AVG for $220M), Numa's AI agents handle calls, texts, appointments, and customer satisfaction monitoring - reducing response times from 24 hours to 20 minutes and driving measurable increases in dealership profitability and CSI scores.
Andy Ruff is the co-founder and Chief Product & Tech officer at Numa, an AI communication platform purpose-built for automotive dealerships. A lifelong product builder who started writing software at 13, Ruff led the 100-person team that created the first Microsoft Outlook for Mac client, then scaled Location Labs to over 3 million monthly subscribers before its $220M acquisition. At Numa, he is building the AI stack that converts missed dealership calls into revenue - helping the $1.2 trillion retail automotive sector catch up to the digital age.
Arun Rajagopalan is the Co-Founder and CEO of Motorq, a San Francisco-based connected vehicle data platform that gives enterprises direct access to OEM-embedded vehicle data without any aftermarket hardware. With a career arc that spans vehicle control systems engineering at Robert Bosch, strategy consulting at Booz & Company, and big-data leadership at Mu Sigma, Arun founded Motorq in 2016 to solve a deceptively simple problem: cars are generating enormous amounts of data, but that data is locked inside hundreds of incompatible systems. Motorq unlocks it, normalizes it, and pipes it to fleets, insurers, and OEM dealers through clean APIs. The company has raised $89.3M in total funding, including a $40M Series B led by Insight Partners in February 2022, and now has partnerships with 10 of the top global OEMs covering more than 51 million vehicles.
Rescale is a San Francisco-based digital engineering platform that turns high-performance computing into an on-demand cloud utility. Founded in 2011 by ex-Boeing engineer Joris Poort and Adam McKenzie, it gives scientists and engineers at companies like Samsung, Arm, General Motors Motorsports, and the U.S. Department of Defense a single workbench for simulation, AI physics, and multi-cloud orchestration.
Stress-Free Auto Care is a tech-enabled chain of automotive repair shops modernizing a $200B+ legacy industry. Founded in 2016 and based in Mountain View, California, it operates 30+ ASE-certified shops across California and Texas, pairing proprietary software with neighborhood mechanics to offer transparent pricing, digital vehicle inspections, text updates, and live video feeds of repair bays.
Yinon Weiss is a serial entrepreneur, decorated military veteran, and the Founder and CEO of Stress-Free Auto Care - a tech-enabled auto repair chain with 30+ locations across California and Texas. Before Stress-Free, he co-founded RallyPoint (the 'LinkedIn for the military') and CarDash (a transparent auto repair marketplace that went through Y Combinator S17 and was acquired). A UC Berkeley bioengineering grad with a Harvard MBA, Weiss served 10 years on active duty as a Marine Corps Scout/Sniper Platoon Commander and Army Special Forces officer, earning the Bronze Star before transitioning to Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.
Code Metal is a Boston-based AI startup building a verifiable code translation platform for mission-critical industries - aerospace, defense, automotive, semiconductors and robotics. Founded in 2023 by AI researchers Peter Morales and Alex Showalter-Bucher, the company combines large language models with formal verification so engineers can write software once and ship it - safely - to any chip.
Icertis is the AI-native contract intelligence company that turns enterprise strategy into faster execution at scale. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, Icertis helps 1 in 5 Fortune Global 500 companies manage millions of commercial agreements across 90+ countries through its Icertis Contract Intelligence platform - powered by Vera AI, a proprietary model trained on 17+ million contracts. With $496M in total funding, a $5B valuation, and nearly $350M in annual recurring revenue, Icertis has redefined what contract lifecycle management can do: turning buried legal text into live business intelligence.
Kinetic is a Southern California startup turning the messy, hours-long job of recalibrating modern vehicle sensors into a 15-minute, robot-run procedure. Through its network of Kinetic Hubs and its in-house AI and robotic arms, it services EVs, ADAS-equipped cars, and eventually robotaxis on behalf of collision shops, dealerships, fleets, and insurers.
Omni Design Technologies builds high-performance, ultra-low-power semiconductor IP - the data converters and mixed-signal blocks that move information between the analog and digital worlds. Its Swift family of ADCs, DACs and analog front-ends sits inside SoCs for AI infrastructure, 5G/6G, Wi-Fi 7, automotive lidar/radar, satellite links, and quantum control, fabricated on processes from 28nm down to advanced FinFET nodes.
Pebble Mobility is a Fremont, California startup building the Pebble Flow, an all-electric, self-propelling travel trailer designed to make RVing as easy as using an iPhone. Founded by ex-Apple, Tesla, Zoox, Rivian and SpaceX engineers, the company is rethinking the 50-year-old RV playbook around electrification, automation, and off-grid living.
Seyond (formerly Innovusion) is a Sunnyvale-based maker of image-grade LiDAR sensors and perception software for autonomous vehicles, ADAS, smart infrastructure, robotics and industrial applications. Best known as the long-range LiDAR supplier behind NIO's ET7, ET5 and ES7, the company has shipped more than 250,000 Falcon units and is pushing solid-state designs into mass production.
Sonatus is a Sunnyvale-based automotive software company building the AI-powered, software-defined vehicle. Its Digital Dynamics platform - including Sonatus Updater, Automator, Collector AI, and AI Director - lets automakers deploy, monitor, and update vehicle software and edge AI models without rewriting code. Sonatus technology is in production in over 6 million vehicles, including models from Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis.