Steve Hoover is the CEO of Impossible Objects, the Northbrook, Illinois company commercializing CBAM (composite-based additive manufacturing), a from-the-ground-up 3D printing process that bonds carbon fiber and other composites into parts that are stronger, lighter and more heat-tolerant than conventional prints. A mechanical engineer with a Carnegie Mellon doctorate, he spent roughly two decades at Xerox, rising to corporate CTO and running PARC as CEO, before a stint leading RIT's Global Cybersecurity Institute and co-founding the art-recognition startup Artify.ai. He took the Impossible Objects helm in March 2023 to push composite 3D printing from prototypes into high-volume manufacturing.
Patrick Brown is SVP of Global Marketing at Adobe, leading growth, analytics, media, and marketing engineering across the company's global B2B and B2C operations. He oversees Adobe's Digital Economy Index — a research engine that tracks a trillion e-commerce transactions across 100 million SKUs — and has emerged as one of the most data-forward voices in enterprise marketing. Based in San Jose, California, Brown combines an MBA from Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business with deep experience in technology, finance, and consumer goods sectors.
Albert Wang is the co-founder and CEO of PatPat, a direct-to-consumer children's and family apparel brand he built from a mobile app in 2014 into a global platform serving 21 million customers across 140 countries. A Carnegie Mellon-trained engineer and former Oracle founding member, Wang spotted the gap in affordable, stylish kids' clothing when he and his co-founder Ken Gao both became fathers the same year. PatPat has raised over $465 million in funding, including a $160 million Series D2 from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in 2021, and has pioneered innovations like Go-Glow light-up apparel technology.
Coco Mao is the CEO and co-founder of OpenArt AI, the creative platform that grew from a viral Hacker News post about AI image prompts to $70M+ ARR with just 20 people. A Carnegie Mellon computer scientist who spent seven years at Google building search products and the Tangi short-form video app, she left in 2022 to co-found OpenArt with CTO John Qiao. Under her leadership, OpenArt scaled 7x in 2025, reached 8 million monthly active users, raised a $30M Series A from Canaan Partners, and launched One-Click Story — a feature that lets anyone turn a single sentence into a complete video with persistent characters.
Matthew Rosenthal is CEO and Co-Founder of SewerAI, the AI-powered platform transforming how cities inspect and manage underground sewer infrastructure. A Carnegie Mellon-trained engineer who worked at Fitbit and founded Centosette (acquired 2010), Rosenthal pivoted into sewer tech after recognizing that one million miles of U.S. pipes were being assessed with 20-year-old software. SewerAI's Pioneer platform and AutoCode AI have now processed over 135 million feet of sewer inspection footage, slashing inspection costs by 40-70% and saving municipalities tens of millions of dollars. In June 2024, Rosenthal closed a $15M Series B led by Innovius Capital, bringing total funding to $18.5M.
Stellic is a centralized degree-progression platform used by universities to handle degree audits, academic advising, planning, registration, and analytics. Founded by Carnegie Mellon undergrads who hated the experience of mapping their own degrees, it now serves 80+ institutions and over a million students across the world.
Shiv Rao is the CEO and co-founder of Abridge, the AI platform transforming clinical conversations into structured medical documentation. A practicing cardiologist at UPMC and history-major-turned-physician, Rao founded Abridge in 2018 out of personal frustration with nightly dictation sessions. The company, now valued at $5.3 billion after raising $300M in Series E in 2025, deploys across 150+ U.S. health systems including Mayo Clinic, Duke Health, and Johns Hopkins, supports 28 languages and 55 medical specialties, and is used by over 50,000 clinicians. Rao is equal parts cardiologist, technologist, and artist — a former DJ, skateboarder, and avant-garde music producer whose unconventional path runs straight through the operating room.
Sophie Novati is the CEO and co-founder of Formation, an A16Z-backed engineering fellowship that helps underrepresented software engineers break into top-tier tech companies. A Carnegie Mellon computer science graduate who rose to staff engineer at Facebook and Nextdoor, she founded Formation in 2019 after recognizing that talented engineers from non-traditional backgrounds were being systematically excluded from elite tech roles. Formation pairs adaptive AI-driven learning with mentorship from senior engineers, and its graduates have landed roles at Meta, Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Dropbox, with an average first-year compensation increase of over $100,000. The company has raised $9 million in funding and Novati credits a 2am chess game with Mark Zuckerberg as one early spark for thinking about business models.
Christa Quarles is the CEO of Parallels, a KKR-backed desktop virtualization and remote-work software company spun out of Corel Corporation in 2026. A former Wall Street analyst who helped take Google public, she pivoted to operating roles at Playdom, Disney Interactive, Nextdoor, and OpenTable before becoming CEO of Corel Corporation in 2020. Known for her 'leadership by haiku' philosophy and a track record of driving subscription transformation, she grew Parallels Workspace to 49% net new ARR in 2025 and scaled Parallels Desktop to over one million customers. She also serves as Lead Independent Director at Affirm Holdings.
João Diogo 'JD' Falcão is the CEO and co-founder of AiFi Inc., the San Francisco-based company building the world's largest autonomous retail network. A PhD from Carnegie Mellon and Master's from Cornell in Robotics, JD spent years shaping AiFi's core technology as CTO before stepping up as Chief Executive in September 2025. Under his and the team's leadership, AiFi has deployed 300+ camera-only autonomous stores globally, processes over 90 petabytes of spatial data annually, and counts Microsoft, ALDI, and 7-Eleven among its partners. His central thesis: the physical world deserves to be as queryable as the internet.
John Kibarian is the co-founder, President, and CEO of PDF Solutions (NASDAQ: PDFS), a Santa Clara-based semiconductor analytics company he has helmed for over 35 years. Armed with a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon, Kibarian started building yield-improvement algorithms while still a researcher at SEMATECH - then turned those algorithms into a company. Today PDF Solutions generates $219 million in annual revenue helping chipmakers, test facilities, and battery manufacturers squeeze more quality out of every wafer, with flagship products like the Exensio Analytics Platform and the Sapience Manufacturing Hub driving AI-powered collaboration across global semiconductor supply chains.
Neno Duplan is the founder and CEO of Locus Technologies, a Mountain View-based company he bootstrapped in 1997 to become one of the world's first cloud-based environmental, health, and safety (EHS) software providers. Born in Croatia and trained as a civil engineer, Duplan earned his Ph.D. at the University of Zagreb, an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon, and advanced management training at Stanford. He pioneered the commercial SaaS model for environmental data management - deploying the world's first such product in 1999 - and has spent nearly three decades helping governments, utilities, and corporations track, manage, and report their environmental footprints. With more than 30 technical papers published, 11,000+ active users, and a 98% customer renewal rate, Duplan has built Locus into a durable, self-funded software company at the intersection of environmental science and enterprise technology.
Gabriel Bayomi Tinoco Kalejaiye is a Brazilian-born engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Openlayer, a San Francisco-based AI governance and observability platform. After earning his MS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon and working as a Machine Learning Engineer at Apple - where he contributed to both Siri and the secretive Vision Pro project - he left with two colleagues to solve the problem that haunted every AI team: models that look great in testing but fail in the real world. Openlayer provides enterprises with evaluation, monitoring, and compliance tooling across the full AI lifecycle, from prototype to production. The company raised a $14.5M Series A in May 2025, grew nearly 5x in 2024, and is now a recognized vendor in Gartner's 2026 Market Guide for AI Evaluation and Observability Platforms.
Kun Gao is a serial entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and original CEO of Crunchyroll, the platform that turned anime from a niche US curiosity into a billion-dollar streaming giant (acquired by Sony/AT&T WarnerMedia for $1.2 billion). Now he's doing it again as Co-Founder and CEO of Forge (forge.gg), a San Francisco-based game marketing and loyalty platform that hit 1 million users within its first year. Alongside co-founders Dennis 'Thresh' Fong (the world's first professional esports player) and George Ng, Gao is building the infrastructure layer that indie game developers desperately need: no-code loyalty programs, player analytics, and direct community channels - without the walled gardens.
Xing Xin is the CEO and Co-Founder of Upfort (formerly Paladin Cyber), a San Francisco-based platform that unifies cybersecurity and cyber insurance into a single solution for small and medium-sized businesses. With a background in management consulting, AI startups, and a childhood spent building computers for neighbors, Xin co-founded Upfort after watching a close friend's accounting firm get destroyed by ransomware in 2017. Under his leadership, Upfort now serves over 25,000 companies, has processed more than $100M in cyber insurance premiums annually, and has been shown to reduce the likelihood of security incidents by 81%.
Nikhil Naikal is the CEO and co-founder of Kinetic, the automotive infrastructure startup using AI, computer vision, and robotics to automate the calibration and digital repair of modern vehicles. A roboticist with a PhD from UC Berkeley and an MS from Carnegie Mellon — where he was part of the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge-winning Tartan Racing team — Naikal previously founded Mapper.ai (acquired by Velodyne Lidar) and engineered AR software at Flyby Media (acquired by Apple). At Kinetic, he is building a national network of high-throughput digital repair hubs that slash ADAS calibration time from hours to under 15 minutes, backed by $31M in total funding including a $21M Series B led by Menlo Ventures.
Simon Kalouche is the founder and CEO of Nimble, a San Francisco-based robotics company that builds fully autonomous AI-powered fulfillment centers. A mechanical engineering graduate of Ohio State and robotics master's graduate of Carnegie Mellon, Kalouche invented the first low-cost quasi-direct-drive actuators in 2016 - a breakthrough that catalyzed robots from MIT's Mini Cheetah to Tesla Optimus. He left his Stanford PhD under Fei-Fei Li to commercialize the technology and has since built Nimble into a billion-dollar company with $231M in total funding, a landmark FedEx partnership, and a board that includes Marc Raibert (Boston Dynamics founder) and Sebastian Thrun (Google X founder).
Diana Hu is a General Partner at Y Combinator, where she has conducted over 1,700 office hours advising portfolio companies now worth a combined $1.7 billion. A Chilean-born engineer of Chinese descent, she co-founded Escher Reality in 2016, built the infrastructure for cross-platform multi-user AR experiences through YC's S17 batch, and sold the company to Niantic (makers of Pokemon GO) in 2018. She then led Niantic's AR Platform engineering before transitioning to investing, becoming one of the rare founders-turned-top-tier-VCs with deep technical chops in augmented reality, computer vision, and machine learning.
Dr. Manu Kumar is the founder and Chief Firestarter of K9 Ventures, the firm credited with coining the term 'pre-seed' and pioneering institutional pre-seed investing in Silicon Valley. A serial entrepreneur who bootstrapped his first company with $5,000 and sold it for $100M+ before age 25, Manu holds a PhD from Stanford and has backed companies like Lyft, Twilio, and Carta from their earliest days. He is also co-founder and CEO of HiHello, reimagining professional identity for the digital age.