autonomous-systems
(22)
Jaz Banga Drew a New Fence in the Sky
Before drones became ordinary, Jaz Banga saw the awkward question hiding above every fence: who belongs in the sky, and what happens when they do not? His answer has taken a decade, a hundred prototypes, and a career-long habit of connecting machines to identity.
Matt Cox Is Building the AI Co-Pilot He Wanted in the Cockpit
A Navy cockpit taught Matt Cox where attention breaks. Cruise taught him how autonomy reaches the real world. Beacon AI is where those lessons meet - beside the pilot, not in place of one.
Mario Paniccia Put Light on a Chip. Now He Is Teaching Machines Not to Get Lost.
The former Intel Fellow spent decades persuading silicon to carry light. At ANELLO, he is using the same stubborn physics to help vehicles find their way when satellites cannot.
Gabe Sibley Left the Road for the Row
After Mars-yard robots, self-driving cars and sidewalk couriers, Gabe Sibley found a more immediate autonomy problem in a farm field - one weed, one nozzle and one careful shot at a time.
Darcy Zhang Is Betting on the Signal Before the Drone
A commerce graduate and former infanteer is building Greypoint Industries around a severe test: would he trust the hardware with his own life?
Colby Adcock Is Moving AI From the Deal Room to the Dirt
After fourteen years in finance, the Scout AI co-founder is betting that the next important interface will not live on a screen. It will connect a commander's intent to machines working at the tactical edge.
Chuck Gershman Is Teaching Machines to See After Dark
After three decades in semiconductors and five startup teams, Chuck Gershman is betting that autonomy's hardest problem is not intelligence alone. It is reliable perception when light, weather, cost, and physics stop cooperating.
James Kinsey
James Kinsey is the CEO of Humatics, a Waltham, Massachusetts company building microlocation technology that pinpoints the position of vehicles and machines to sub-millimeter precision. An engineer and scientist by training, he holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins and spent years on the scientific staff at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution developing GPS-denied navigation for deep-sea robots and manned submersibles. He joined Humatics as a founding officer in 2016, led its Milo software and systems work, delivered train-signalling projects for New York City's MTA, and founded the company's Mobility division before taking the top job.
Philong Duong
Philong Duong is CEO and co-founder of NODA AI, an Austin-based defense technology company building an AI-native orchestration platform (Urza) that acts as the 'chess player' coordinating heterogeneous unmanned and manned assets across vendors. A Marine Corps veteran, former CH-46E and MV-22B pilot, and JTAC on multiple Middle East deployments, he was C3.ai's first Federal Product Manager, helping scale its federal ARR from under $1M to nearly $100M. NODA closed a $25M Series A in February 2026 led by Bessemer at a $125M valuation.
Ashish Kapoor
Ashish Kapoor is the co-founder and CEO of General Robotics (formerly Scaled Foundations), a Redmond, Washington startup building a unified intelligence layer for robots of every shape. After 17 years at Microsoft, where he led the Autonomous Systems and Robotics Research group, created the open-source AirSim simulator, and co-authored the widely read 'ChatGPT for Robotics' paper, Kapoor set out in 2023 to make robot intelligence portable across hardware. His thesis: general intelligence emerges from the rich composition of many robot skills, not from a single ever-larger model. He holds a PhD from the MIT Media Lab, flies and has built his own airplane, and treats simulation as the laboratory where machines learn to be safe before they touch the real world.
Kyle Moore
Kyle Moore is co-founder and Software Fellow at Pyka, the Alameda, California company building the world's largest commercially-approved autonomous electric aircraft. A self-taught programmer who started writing code at age 11 from rural Washington, Moore brought firmware and robotics expertise from Google X to help design Pyka's Pelican — a 1,320-lb autonomous electric aircraft now spraying crops across four continents and delivering cargo for the U.S. Air Force. Pyka has raised $95M in total funding and achieved back-to-back FAA authorizations for the largest uncrewed aircraft systems in U.S. commercial history.
Tom Eliaz
Tom Eliaz is the Co-Founder and VP of Engineering at Bedrock Robotics, a San Francisco-based startup building autonomous systems for heavy construction equipment. With over two decades of software engineering leadership spanning robotics, cloud infrastructure, and AI, he previously led 100+ engineers at Twilio Engage, directed engineering at Segment through its $3.2B acquisition, and was an early cloud platform engineer at Anki. Before Bedrock, he also founded a healthcare technology company. At Bedrock - a $1.75B-valued company that raised $270M in Series B funding in February 2026 - Eliaz applies engineering depth to the problem of retrofitting excavators and heavy machinery with LiDAR, GPS, and AI software to run autonomously on construction sites 24/7.
Forest Baskett
Forest Baskett is a Special Partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA) in Menlo Park, California, where he has been investing in technology companies since 1999. A systems-level computer scientist by training, he co-designed the original Sun workstation with Andy Bechtolsheim, designed the operating system for the Cray-1 supercomputer, founded DEC's Western Research Laboratory, and served as CTO of Silicon Graphics during the formative years of 3D graphics. He earned a BA in Mathematics from Rice University and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, later becoming a professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1994. At NEA, he has guided dozens of technology investments to successful IPOs and acquisitions, backing companies across semiconductors, storage, cloud security, robotics, and AI.
Peter Barrett
Peter Barrett is the Founder and General Partner of Playground Global, a Palo Alto-based deep tech venture firm managing over $1.2 billion across three funds. An Australian-born engineer turned investor, Barrett holds 100+ patents, gave Elon Musk one of his first jobs in the 1990s, and built the world's most popular IPTV platform at Microsoft before pivoting to backing founders working on problems that sit 'somewhere between improbable and impossible.' Playground Global's portfolio spans quantum computing, robotics, synthetic biology, and energy transition — representing Barrett's conviction that the computing and industrial revolutions are still ahead of us.
Tammie Siew
Tammie Siew is a General Partner and Co-Founder at Pebblebed, a San Francisco-based deep tech venture capital firm focused on foundational infrastructure—AI simulation engines, robot operating systems, developer platforms, and formal verification systems. A Cornell-educated economist and literature scholar who spent years investing at Sequoia Capital Singapore before co-founding a healthcare startup, she brings a rare operator-investor lens to backing the infrastructure layer of next-generation technology. Pebblebed's Fund II closed at $125M in 2024, with roughly 35 investments backing companies like Augment Code, OpenMind, Zeromatter, Lemurian Labs, and Logical Intelligence.
Frank Ferrante
Frank Ferrante is the CEO of ForwardEdge ASIC, a Lockheed Martin subsidiary dedicated to advancing U.S. domestic semiconductor chip design. A 30-year veteran of the semiconductor industry, Ferrante has held leadership roles at Intel (Senior Director of Military, Aerospace and Government), Wolfspeed (VP of Worldwide Automotive Sales and Marketing), and Altera. He is a vocal advocate for U.S. advanced manufacturing policy, having advised policymakers on the CHIPS Act, SHIP, and RAMP-C initiatives. Under his leadership, ForwardEdge ASIC achieved U.S. Government Trusted IC Vendor Status in February 2026 and selected the MIPS S8200 for mission-critical autonomous platform ASICs.
Arthur Dubois
Arthur Dubois is the co-founder and CEO of Grid Aero, a Palo Alto-based autonomous cargo aircraft startup building what he calls 'the pickup truck of the skies' - rugged, unmanned aircraft capable of hauling thousands of pounds over thousands of miles to places conventional logistics can't reach. A Stanford-trained aerospace engineer who helped scale Joby Aviation and led engineering at Xwing before its acquisition by Joby, Dubois founded Grid Aero in 2024 after growing frustrated with the complexity and cost of retrofitting legacy aircraft for autonomy. In January 2026, Grid Aero raised a $20M Series A to bring its Lifter Lite autonomous cargo aircraft from prototype testing into real-world military and commercial operations.
John Keh
John Keh is the Founder and CEO of Valtec, a San Diego-based maritime AI and drone company that deploys autonomous VTOL systems on commercial fishing vessels to detect tuna schools in real time. A UC Berkeley alumnus and former US Air Force geospatial intelligence analyst with 250+ missions across South Korea and the Middle East, Keh pivoted from food delivery (3rd employee at Caviar, Uber Eats courier intelligence lead) to maritime defense after four years building startups in Taiwan. Valtec raised a $2M pre-seed round in March 2025 backed by SparkLabs Taiwan, Wavemaker VC, DRONE FUND, Guitar Hero founder Kai Huang, and Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, with the company's Larus VTOL drone and Fulcan AI platform now deployed on 40+ fishing vessels across Taiwan and the Philippines.
Marty Beard
Marty Beard is the CEO and Board Member of Hayden AI, the largest provider of mobile automated bus zone and bike lane enforcement systems in the United States. A serial enterprise technology executive with a track record spanning Oracle, Sybase, LiveOps, BlackBerry, and alwaysAI, Beard brings deep expertise in scaling AI and computer vision platforms. At Hayden AI, he leads a 190-person company backed by $246M+ in funding - including a $90M Series C - to deploy vision AI on city transit vehicles that detect lane violations in real time, improving bus speeds, reducing collisions, and making urban transit safer and more reliable across cities in the US and Europe.
Samuel Joseph
Samuel Joseph is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hakimo, a San Francisco-based AI security platform that uses computer vision and generative AI to autonomously monitor physical security infrastructure - cameras, badge readers, access control systems - in real time. A Stanford PhD and IIT Madras gold medalist (President's Medal for topping the entire graduating batch of 2016), Joseph built Hakimo to solve a deceptively simple problem: security teams drowning in false alarms. The company has raised $20.5M in total funding, including a $10.5M Series A in March 2025, and protects 400+ properties across self-storage, construction, automotive, higher education, and corporate sectors - saving customers roughly $125,000 per year compared to a human security guard.
Trae Stephens
Trae Stephens is a co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril Industries, the defense-tech startup that hit $1 billion in revenue in 2024 and reached a $30.5 billion valuation in its 2025 Series G. A partner at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund since 2014, Stephens has spent his career at the intersection of national security and Silicon Valley - from Arabic computational linguistics in the US intelligence community, to early days at Palantir, to co-founding Anduril with Palmer Luckey in 2017. A devout Christian from Lebanon, Ohio, he frames building autonomous weapons as a moral imperative and became a billionaire in June 2025.
Kanu Gulati
Kanu Gulati is a Partner at Khosla Ventures investing in enterprise AI, robotics, and autonomous systems. With a PhD in electrical engineering, over a decade as a research scientist at Intel and Cadence, and experience as a founding engineer at multiple acquired startups, she bridged from deep tech to venture capital through a cold email that landed her an internship at Khosla Ventures. An NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship recipient with 35+ peer-reviewed publications, three co-authored books, and an Erdős number of 3, she now leads investments in companies like Waabi, Genesis AI, and PolyAI.