Maor Farid is the co-founder and CEO of Leo AI, the first AI copilot purpose-built for mechanical engineers. A former Captain in Israel's Unit 8200 intelligence corps and the youngest-ever PhD graduate from the Technion at age 24, he went on to do postdoctoral research at MIT as a Fulbright fellow, studying how to predict catastrophic failures in complex physical systems. He founded Leo AI in 2023 to build what he calls 'the most boring, unsexy AI' - a tool trained on more than a million vetted engineering sources that handles documentation, part searches and calculations so engineers can focus on design. Leo AI raised $9.7M and is used by teams at Toyota, HP, Mobileye, Philips and Scania.
Physna is a geometric deep-learning company that does for 3D models and physical objects what Google did for text: it lets machines actually understand shape. Its proprietary technology codifies the geometry of any 3D model into searchable, comparable data, powering both an enterprise platform used by Fortune 500 manufacturers and government agencies, and Thangs, a free public 3D search engine and creator community that has grown to tens of millions of monthly users. Founded in 2015 in Ohio and backed by Sequoia, Tiger Global, GV and Drive Capital with more than $86M raised, Physna turns the physical world into something a computer can search, match and protect.
Backflip AI is a San Francisco-based generative AI company building 3D design tools for the physical world. Founded by the Markforged co-founders Greg Mark and David Benhaim, it turns text prompts, sketches and photos into editable 3D meshes (Idea to Mesh) and converts 3D scan data into fully parametric CAD models in one click (Scan-to-CAD / Mesh-to-CAD), with native Onshape and SOLIDWORKS integration. The company raised a $30M Series A co-led by NEA and Andreessen Horowitz and trained its model on a synthetic dataset of over 100 million 3D geometries.
Flux is a browser-based, AI-native hardware design platform that turns text prompts into manufacturable printed circuit boards. The San Francisco company calls its product an 'AI Hardware Engineer' and is rewriting how electronics get designed by combining an electronic CAD environment with an agentic copilot that researches parts, draws schematics, lays out boards, and prepares files for fabrication.

Andrew Anagnost is the President and CEO of Autodesk, the $41+ billion design and engineering software giant behind AutoCAD, Revit, Maya, and Fusion 360. A PhD aeronautical engineer who once simulated Mars rovers at NASA Ames, he joined Autodesk as a product manager in 1997 and spent two decades reshaping it from the inside - architecting the company's landmark pivot from perpetual licenses to cloud subscriptions before taking the top job in 2017. Under his tenure, revenue has grown from ~$2B to over $6B and the company entered the Fortune 500. Off the clock, he is CSUN's largest-ever alumni donor, having committed $22.1 million to the public university that he credits with saving him from falling through the cracks.