SkyGrid builds high-assurance, third-party software services that safely fold autonomous aircraft, drones, and eVTOL air taxis into shared airspace. Born as a 2018 Boeing and SparkCognition joint venture and now a subsidiary of Wisk Aero, the Austin-based company delivers a real-time digital twin of the low-altitude sky - weather, obstacles, traffic, and vertiport status - plus automation and decision-support tools that route, synchronize, and deconflict flights at scale.
Mitch Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Arc, the Los Angeles marine-technology company trying to make everything that floats electric. A Bay Area kid raised on the California Delta, he trained as a mechanical engineer at Northwestern, analyzed Apache helicopter rotor blades at Boeing, then spent years in software - founding Penny, which was acquired by Credit Karma - before reuniting with his old Boeing and Northwestern classmate Ryan Cook, a former SpaceX lead engineer, to build electric boats in 2021. Arc has raised more than $150 million, ships its Arc Sport wake boat and Arc Coast center console from a 150,000-square-foot LA factory, and in 2026 pushed into commercial and defense propulsion with a $50M Series C and a $160M tugboat contract for the Port of Los Angeles.
Jia Xu is CEO of SkyGrid, the Austin, Texas company building high-assurance airspace integration software for autonomous and unmanned flight. With a PhD from Stanford, dual master's degrees from Imperial College London and the London School of Economics, and career stints at the RAND Corporation, Airbus, General Atomics, and Honeywell Aerospace, Xu brings rare cross-disciplinary depth to one of aviation's hardest problems: teaching machines to share the sky. Under his leadership since August 2023, SkyGrid pivoted from generic airspace software to become a specialized third-party services provider for advanced air mobility - and was acquired by Wisk Aero (a Boeing subsidiary) in June 2025.
James Crean is the co-founder and Chief Visionary Officer (also serving as President/CTO) of CREAN Inc, an Austin, Texas aerospace engineering and smart factory firm he started in 2002 with his wife Jennifer. A former satellite systems engineer and program manager at Hughes Space & Communications and Boeing - where he worked on DirecTV, NASA's TDRSS and other communications and weather satellites, and built the Lean Six Sigma group for Boeing Satellites - Crean now leads a team of 600-plus aerospace and defense engineers and champions CREAN's AI-enabled Smart Factory Operating System (SFOS), which aims to make American high-mix manufacturing fast, flexible and competitive enough to bring production home from overseas.

Matt Stone is the Chief Business Officer of Corvic AI, the Mountain View startup building an Intelligence Composition Platform that sits between raw enterprise data and production AI. A Stanford-trained engineer who once walked on as a quarterback at the University of Arizona, Stone has spent more than a decade turning hard enterprise technology into revenue - first at Boeing, then as an operating partner at Intel Capital, and most recently leading strategic partnerships at the cybersecurity firm SecurityScorecard. He joined Corvic AI in March 2026 to scale its enterprise go-to-market across pharma, manufacturing, and logistics.
Marc Allen is the CEO of Electra.aero, a Manassas, Virginia startup building the EL9, a nine-seat hybrid-electric ultra-short takeoff and landing (eSTOL) aircraft that can lift off in roughly 150 feet of runway. A Yale Law graduate and former U.S. Supreme Court clerk who spent 17 years at Boeing - including stints as Chief Strategy Officer, President of Boeing International, and Chairman of Wisk Aero - Allen left the world's largest aerospace company in August 2024 to run a startup chasing what he calls 'Direct Aviation': air travel without airports, emissions, or noise. Under his watch Electra has stacked up roughly 2,200 pre-orders worth nearly $9 billion and closed a $115 million Series B.
Nathan Mintz is the co-founder and CEO of CX2, an El Segundo defense-tech startup building AI-enabled hardware and software to detect, disrupt, and destroy threats in the electromagnetic spectrum. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who spent 14 years designing radar and electronic-warfare systems at Raytheon and Boeing, he went on to co-found directed-energy unicorn Epirus and automotive-radar company Spartan Radar before launching CX2 in 2024. He argues modern warfare has reached 'consumer scale,' where multimillion-dollar missiles are wasted on cheap drones, and that control of the spectrum now matters as much as supply lines did in the 20th century. CX2 raised a $31M Series A led by Point72 Ventures in May 2025, part of $46M total funding.
Frank Mycroft is the co-founder and CEO of Booster, the tech-driven mobile energy delivery platform that dispatches custom mini-tankers directly to fleet and consumer vehicles - eliminating the gas station entirely. A Princeton-trained aerospace engineer who worked at NASA, Boeing, and an asteroid-mining startup before parenthood inspired him to reinvent how America fuels its cars, Mycroft has raised over $242 million and built Booster into a platform serving Amazon, UPS, PepsiCo, and hundreds of fleets across the U.S.
Joris Poort is the co-founder and CEO of Rescale, the cloud high-performance computing platform that became the world's first unicorn in cloud HPC. Born in Nijmegen, Netherlands, and educated at the University of Michigan, University of Washington, and Harvard Business School, Poort spent years at Boeing engineering the 787 Dreamliner before co-founding Rescale in 2011 through Y Combinator. Under his leadership Rescale has raised over $284 million—including a $115M Series D in April 2025—and now serves the world's leading aerospace, automotive, energy, and life sciences enterprises with 1,250+ simulation applications across 500+ global cloud datacenters.