Willy Halim is a chemical engineer and the founder of BANIQL, a San Jose climate-tech startup he started in his backyard in 2021 to refine nickel and cobalt without the heat, pressure, and toxic waste of conventional mining. Trained at UC Berkeley and Cornell and seasoned as a battery engineer in Silicon Valley, he built a low-temperature, atmospheric-pressure chemical process that BANIQL says uses about 80% less energy than industry-standard high-pressure acid leaching, produces net-zero toxic waste, and turns leftovers into fertilizer and construction material. The company raised a $1.6M seed round led by BEENEXT in 2024 and added 500 Global and Genesia Ventures in 2025, aiming first at Indonesia, which holds roughly a quarter of the world's nickel.
Sonali Shah is the CEO of Cobalt, the leading Pentest as a Service (PtaaS) platform, where she took the helm in August 2024 after serving on its board. A product visionary and operator with 20+ years in cybersecurity, she pioneered the first cybersecurity risk rating platform at Bitsight, helped shepherd Veracode through its $950 million sale to Thoma Bravo, and drove Invicti's $625 million acquisition before stepping up to run Cobalt. Educated at Wharton (MBA) and the London School of Economics (MS Economics), she brings a rare mix of Wall Street discipline and deep security product expertise to a company at the intersection of human-led and AI-powered offensive security.
KoBold Metals is a Berkeley-based mineral exploration company that uses artificial intelligence, data science, and geophysics to find the copper, lithium, cobalt, and nickel deposits the energy transition will require. Founded in 2018, it has raised roughly $1 billion from investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, T. Rowe Price, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, and is developing the Mingomba copper project in Zambia, called the country's largest copper discovery in a century.
Kurt Zenz House is the Co-Founder and CEO of KoBold Metals, an AI-driven mineral exploration company backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Andreessen Horowitz. A Harvard-trained earth scientist and serial energy entrepreneur, he built KoBold from the ground up to solve one of the most consequential problems of the energy transition: finding enough copper, cobalt, lithium, and nickel to power a decarbonized world. Under his leadership, the company discovered the Mingomba deposit in Zambia - potentially the most significant copper find in a century - and raised over $1 billion to develop it. Before KoBold, he founded C12 Energy (CO2-based enhanced oil recovery) and Phase Change Resources (natural gas asset acquisition), and held research and teaching roles at MIT and Stanford.