ces-innovation-award
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The Robot That Ate the Pool Boy
A cable-free pool robot turned into a global category leader, a Fluidra check, and a plan to automate the entire backyard. Here is how Aiper got the pool boy out of the pool.
Apollon
Apollon is a Korean-American medtech company building MOGLU, a needle-free continuous glucose monitor that reads blood sugar through the skin using Raman spectroscopy instead of a subcutaneous filament. Founded in Seoul in 2021 by Aram Hong and researchers tied to MIT and Asan Medical Center, the company is developing a compact wearable that reported accuracy comparable to leading CGMs in early MIT clinical testing, has been granted FDA Breakthrough Device designation, and won a 2025 CES Innovation Award.
Alex Westner
Alex Westner is the co-founder and CEO of Xander, a Raleigh-based startup building AR smart glasses that print live captions of in-person conversations directly into the wearer's field of view. An MIT Media Lab-trained audio engineer who spent nearly two decades shipping sound software (including the Emmy-winning iZotope RX, nicknamed the Photoshop for Sound), Westner now turns his obsession with the cocktail party problem into a self-contained, no-cloud, no-phone device that helps people follow conversations they can no longer fully hear.
lululab Inc.
lululab Inc. is a South Korean beauty-and-healthcare AI company spun off from Samsung Electronics' C-Lab incubator in 2017. Its Lumini platform uses deep-learning computer vision to analyze a person's facial skin across seven categories - wrinkles, pores, acne, sebum, melasma, redness, and oil/moisture balance - from a single photo in about ten seconds, then recommends tailored products and routines. Built on a database of more than five million skin data points with claimed accuracy above 90%, lululab sells AI kiosks (Lumini Kiosk), a home device (Lumini Home), and an embeddable mobile SDK (Lumini SDK) to retailers, clinics, and brands worldwide.
Yongjoon Choe
Yongjoon Choe is the founder and CEO of lululab, the Seoul-based AI skincare company that spun out of Samsung's C-Lab in 2017. He turned a genome-sequencing detour at Harvard into Lumini, a system that reads ten-plus skin conditions from a single face photo in about ten seconds and recommends products to match. Under Choe, lululab has won CES Innovation Awards four years running and built its diagnostics on a deep-learning model trained on millions of skin-data points.
Satoshi Sugie
Satoshi Sugie is the Co-founder and CEO of WHILL, a San Mateo-based personal mobility company that has reimagined the electric wheelchair as a design-forward consumer product. Drawing on his automotive design background at Nissan, Sugie co-founded WHILL in 2012 with a mission to redefine how people perceive and use mobility devices. Under his leadership, WHILL has grown to 350 employees, expanded to 30+ countries, raised over $153 million in funding, and deployed nearly one million autonomous rides at airports worldwide including Tokyo's Haneda, Rome Fiumicino, and Narita. Named to Silicon Valley Business Journal's 40 Under 40 in 2017 and recognized by TIME Magazine's 50 Best Inventions, Sugie's approach treats mobility not as a medical necessity but as an aspirational lifestyle product.
WHILL
WHILL designs and manufactures intelligent personal electric vehicles - sleek power chairs and an autonomous mobility service - that reframe the wheelchair as a piece of consumer technology. Founded in 2012 by three Japanese engineers from Nissan, Sony and Olympus, the company sells the Model C2 and Model F directly to consumers and operates an autonomous fleet service at airports including Haneda, Narita and Winnipeg.