
Yili Wu is the founder and CEO of SandStar (formerly YI Tunnel), a computer-vision company that turns ordinary shops, shelves and vending machines into checkout-free, self-analyzing retail. A first-generation graduate of Tsinghua University's School of Software, he spent roughly eight years selling enterprise software at Oracle and IBM before betting that brick-and-mortar retail could be digitized the way e-commerce already had been. He founded the company in 2016, sold his first big contracts top-down to Fortune 500 headquarters in the US and Europe, and grew SandStar into a business operating across a dozen countries with dual bases in Beijing and Charlotte, North Carolina.

Krishna Motukuri is the CEO and Co-Founder of Zippin, a San Francisco-based AI startup powering checkout-free retail stores across four continents. After seven years at Amazon and stints building e-commerce businesses in India and South Africa under Naspers Group, he co-founded Zippin in 2018 after a personal frustration with grocery checkout lines sparked the idea. Zippin uses computer vision, sensor fusion, and machine learning to let shoppers grab items and walk out without stopping to pay — technology now deployed in sports stadiums, airport terminals, college campuses, and hospital cafeterias worldwide, including Super Bowl venues and the French Open.
Zippin builds the AI brain that lets shoppers walk into a store, grab what they want, and walk out — no lines, no scanners, no cashiers. Its computer-vision and sensor-fusion platform powers checkout-free stores in stadiums, airports, hotels, hospitals and workplaces around the world.