berkeley-skydeck
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Kaon (prev. FlowGPT)
Kaon (formerly FlowGPT) is a San Francisco AI-native content lab building consumer AI experiences. After scaling FlowGPT into a 4M+ monthly user prompt marketplace, the team shifted gravity to Emochi - an AI character roleplay app that has climbed into the top tier of consumer AI with millions of monthly users. Founded in 2023 by UC Berkeley dropout Jay Dang and co-founder Lifan Wang, the company raised $10M led by Goodwater Capital and DCM in early 2024 and added a strategic round backed by B Capital and Redpoint in 2025.
Maria Szandrach
Maria Szandrach is the co-founder and CEO of Mentalyc, a San Francisco clinical-intelligence platform that turns recorded therapy sessions into insurance-ready notes, treatment plans, and progress insights for psychotherapists. A McKinsey strategy alum with an MSc from London Business School, she has co-founded three startups across the mental health and insurance worlds. She built Mentalyc with engineer Georgi Urumov during the COVID pandemic after the two met through Entrepreneur First, later going through Berkeley SkyDeck. Maria has become a recognizable voice on what AI should and should not do inside the therapy room, arguing for slow, careful building in a field where over-promising is dangerous.
Tomohiro Takano
Tomohiro Takano is the co-founder and CEO of Genomelink (operated by AWAKENS, Inc.), a Berkeley-based consumer genomics company building what he calls a 'DNA App Store.' The platform lets people who have taken tests from services like 23andMe or AncestryDNA upload their raw DNA data to unlock ancestry breakdowns, ancient-DNA comparisons, hundreds of trait analyses, and DNA matching. Takano started the company in 2016 as a weekend project in Japan with co-founders he met at university, moved to the Bay Area with no visa and little funding, and won a spot at Berkeley SkyDeck one day before the team was set to fly home and shut down. He frames himself as a 'risk manager' rather than a risk taker, and credits a liberal arts education for teaching him to ask the right questions.
Felix Fink
Felix Fink is the co-founder and CEO of RIIICO, a German deeptech startup building AI-powered 3D factory digital twins using LiDAR point cloud data. Founded in 2021 out of RWTH Aachen University, RIIICO transforms physical factory floors into collaborative, predictive digital environments in a fraction of the time traditional modeling takes. The company raised a $5M seed round in 2025 led by Pi Labs, won the Siemens Inventors of the Year 2024 award in the Open Innovation category, and counts Volvo, Porsche, Volkswagen, and Schaeffler among its customers. Fink drives product strategy with a philosophy of combining startup agility with deep industrial knowledge.
Karan Kanwar
Karan Kanwar is the co-founder and CEO of Wing Assistant, a managed virtual assistant marketplace that grew from his UC Irvine dorm room to over 1,000 employees across 8 countries and $20 million in annual revenue. Born in Mumbai and raised in Hong Kong, Kanwar speaks five languages, started coding at age 8, and previously consulted for Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and the United Nations before building Wing into one of the fastest-growing B2B staffing platforms in the US.
Itzik Gilboa
Itzik Gilboa is the CEO of minds.ai, a Santa Cruz-based AI company applying multi-agent reinforcement learning to semiconductor fabrication. With aerospace and materials science degrees from the Technion and decades of experience at Cypress, SanDisk, and Western Digital, he bridges the gap between chip-floor pragmatism and cutting-edge AI research. Under his leadership, minds.ai secured a multi-year partnership with GlobalFoundries to deploy its Maestro(R) platform across global fab operations, aiming to reduce cycle times, improve on-time delivery, and help fabs run at peak efficiency in a world where every nanosecond of lost throughput costs millions.