Eran Steinberg is a serial entrepreneur, prolific inventor, and IP strategist who co-founded FotoNation in 1997 - selling it, buying it back, and doing it again a third time. Best known for pioneering the automatic red-eye removal technology now standard in virtually every digital camera and smartphone on earth, he holds 300+ patents across imaging, medical devices, and drug development. A licensed USPTO patent agent with four graduate and undergraduate degrees - including both a B.F.A. in Fine Art Photography and an M.S. in Imaging Science - he bridges the worlds of deep technology and creative vision. Currently CEO and Chairman of Vaica Medical and Chairman of FotoNation following a third management buyout, he also lectures at Johns Hopkins University.
Beewise builds the BeeHome - a solar-powered, AI-driven robotic beehive that monitors and treats up to 24 honeybee colonies in real time. Founded in Israel in 2018 and now headquartered in San Ramon, California, the company is using computer vision, machine learning and precision robotics to cut annual colony losses from ~40% to under 10%, protecting the pollinators behind a third of the global food supply.
BrightAI is a Palo Alto-based physical AI company building Stateful OS, a platform that pairs edge sensors, robots, and multimodal AI models to monitor, inspect, and maintain critical infrastructure - pipes, power grids, HVAC systems, and more. Co-founded in 2019 by SmartThings creator Alex Hawkinson, the company crossed $80M in revenue while bootstrapped before raising a $51M Series A in July 2025.
Chef Robotics builds AI-powered robotic arms that assemble meals in food production plants. Its ChefOS platform powers Robotics-as-a-Service deployments at customers like Amy's Kitchen, Sunbasket, Chef Bombay, and Cafe Spice, having helped produce 70+ million servings across North America.
Focal Systems is a Burlingame, California computer-vision company building what it calls the Self-Driving Store. Its battery-powered shelf cameras digitize aisles every hour and feed FocalOS, a retail operating system that automates ordering, restocking, planogram compliance and labor scheduling for some of the world's largest grocers, including Walmart and Morrisons.
Glacier builds AI-powered robots that sort recyclables inside Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs). Their compact, conveyor-mounted robots use computer vision trained on billions of recycling images to identify and pick more than 70 material categories, while also generating real-time data on what flows through the waste stream - data that brands and recyclers use to prove and improve circularity.
Hover is a San Francisco-based AI and computer vision company that turns smartphone photos into accurate, interactive 3D models of properties — complete with measurements, material takeoffs, and design visualization. Serving 300,000+ construction and insurance professionals, and trusted by 9 of the top 10 U.S. insurance carriers, Hover has digitally reconstructed over 22 billion square feet of property. Its platform compresses what used to be hours of manual estimation into minutes, enabling faster insurance claims, more accurate contractor bids, and immersive homeowner design experiences.
Lily AI is a Mountain View-based retail AI company that translates the language of the customer into the language of the catalog. Its platform uses computer vision, NLP and large language models to enrich product data with thousands of consumer-centric attributes - powering site search, recommendations, SEO/SEM and demand forecasting for retailers like Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Gap and thredUP.
Akash Agarwal is the Founder and CEO of Pibit.AI, a Y Combinator-backed insurtech company revolutionizing commercial insurance underwriting through AI. Building on a childhood watching his father toil as an insurance agent buried in paperwork, Akash set out to automate the most labor-intensive parts of underwriting. Pibit.AI's CURE platform - Centralized Underwriting Risk Environment - processes loss runs, submission documents, and risk data at machine speed, helping insurers cut underwriting cycle times by up to 85% and improve loss ratios by up to 700 basis points. After raising a $7M Series A led by Stellaris Venture Partners in November 2025, with participation from Y Combinator and Arali Ventures, the company is scaling its AI models and data partnerships to reshape how the $1T+ P&C insurance industry makes risk decisions.
Alex Mashrabov is the CEO and co-founder of Higgsfield AI, a $1.3B AI video generation unicorn that went from $0 to $50M ARR in five months. A 2x ACM ICPC World Finals competitive programmer who began coding at 10, he previously co-founded AI Factory — acquired by Snap for $166M in 2020 — and later served as Snap's Head of Generative AI. Born in Andijan, Uzbekistan, and trained at Moscow's elite MIPT, he is now building Higgsfield into the infrastructure layer for AI video creation, targeting the moment when most social media video is AI-generated.
AJ Altman is the founder and CEO of Hover, a San Francisco-based proptech company that turns smartphone photos into precise 3D models of homes - used by contractors, insurers, and homeowners to measure, design, and estimate renovation projects. A U.S. Marine Corps veteran and computer engineer by training, Altman left Intel at 29 to serve as an infantry officer before channeling military-grade geospatial mapping technology into a commercial platform that has raised over $146M and reached a $490M post-money valuation. Hover's platform now replaces five separate contractor apps and is backed by some of the country's largest insurance carriers.
Amit Jain is the Co-Founder and CEO of Luma AI, the Palo Alto-based AI company behind Dream Machine - a text-to-video platform with over 25 million users - and Ray 3, the world's first reasoning video model. Before founding Luma AI in 2021, he spent four years at Apple leading development of the Passthrough feature for Apple Vision Pro and integrating the first LiDAR sensors into iPhones. Under his leadership, Luma AI has raised over $1 billion in funding including a $900M Series C led by HUMAIN at a $4 billion valuation, and is building unified multimodal intelligence systems that blur the line between reasoning and reality synthesis.
Avinash Misra is the CEO and co-founder of Skan AI, a Menlo Park-based enterprise AI company pioneering process intelligence and agentic automation. A serial entrepreneur who graduated from IIT Kanpur, he previously co-founded Endeavour Software Technologies — acquired by Genpact in 2015 — before launching Skan in 2018 with longtime partner Manish Garg. Skan has raised $54M in total funding, landed on the 2025 Deloitte Technology Fast 500, and launched the Agentic Ontology of Work (AOW) — a first-of-its-kind semantic framework for human-AI collaboration — positioning the company as the context infrastructure layer for the enterprise AI era.
Dan Calpin is a senior technology executive and founder who has spent his career at the intersection of AI, media, and enterprise strategy. As Founding Partner and General Manager of Bain Media Lab, he co-created Mensio, an AI-powered analytics platform measuring TV advertising and sponsorships. He went on to serve as President of Hive, the enterprise AI company specializing in content understanding, and later as EVP North America at Incode Technologies. He is currently launching a new stealth AI venture.
Dan Ryan is the CEO and Co-Founder of VergeSense, the leading occupancy intelligence platform transforming how global enterprises manage their real estate. A serial entrepreneur with a track record in hardware-software integration, Ryan previously co-founded ByteLight (LED-based indoor positioning, acquired by Acuity Brands in 2015) before launching VergeSense in 2017 through Y Combinator. Under his leadership, VergeSense has grown to serve 200+ Fortune 500 companies across 140 million square feet in 50+ countries, raising $82.6 million including a $60M Series C in 2021. Ryan is based in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area and is recognized as a pioneer at the intersection of physical and digital worlds, building AI-powered tools that help companies make data-driven decisions about office space, sustainability, and hybrid work strategy.
Gopalakrishna Kuppuswamy is Co-Founder and CTO of Cognida.ai, an enterprise AI company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, that raised a $15M Series A from Nexus Venture Partners in February 2025. With 30+ years in technology - starting at CMC Limited in 1994 and spending a decade as VP at Hitachi Vantara - he now leads the engineering behind Zunō, Cognida's agentic AI platform that cuts enterprise AI deployment timelines from 6-8 months down to 10-12 weeks. Based in Hyderabad, he holds master's degrees from both the University of Hyderabad and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and has helped grow Cognida.ai to 250+ employees and $37.7M ARR.
Kevin H. Johnson is the CEO of Focal Systems, an AI-powered retail operations company deploying shelf-scanning cameras across brick-and-mortar stores worldwide. A 30-year veteran of building and scaling tech businesses, he grew Ebates forty-fold before selling it to Rakuten for $1 billion, then led Udemy as a publicly-traded company, and now applies that commercial track record to the frontier problem of putting real-time AI intelligence into every grocery aisle.
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.
Luis Paarup is the Co-Founder and CTO of HappyRobot, the AI voice agent platform transforming how logistics enterprises automate operations. A robotics engineer by training with a Masters from the Technical University of Munich, Luis met his co-founder Pablo Palafox on a competitive underwater robotics team and went on to build one of the fastest-growing AI companies in the supply chain space. HappyRobot, a Y Combinator S23 company backed by a16z and Base10 Partners, has raised over $100M and deployed AI workers at 70+ enterprise customers including DHL, Ryder, and U.S. Xpress.
Manu Sharma is the CEO and Co-founder of Labelbox, the leading AI data infrastructure platform that powers training data pipelines for frontier AI models. Born in Roorkee, India, he studied aerospace engineering at Embry-Riddle and Stanford before building CoPilot at DroneDeploy and leading data analytics at Planet Labs. In 2018, he co-founded Labelbox with former colleagues Brian Rieger and Daniel Rasmuson, raising $188.9M through a Series D led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Labelbox now serves as the command center for AI teams building and scaling production machine learning systems, from annotation and RLHF to evals and synthetic data generation.
Mehran Farimani is the co-founder and CEO of RapidFort, a Sunnyvale-based software supply chain security company that raised a $42M Series A in February 2026. A 25-year technology veteran, Mehran previously led the Fiery division at Electronics for Imaging (EFI) as SVP & GM, then founded Percipo—a computer vision AI company whose technology reached 40,000+ retail locations. At RapidFort, he is pioneering the category of Software Attack Surface Management (SASM), helping organizations automatically harden container images and eliminate up to 80% of CVEs through runtime-aware profiling, without touching a single line of application code.
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.
Moawia Eldeeb is the CEO and Co-Founder of Tempo, a San Francisco-based AI-powered home fitness company that raised $316M and uses 3D sensors and computer vision to deliver real-time form correction and personalized training. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, he immigrated to the US at age 9, dropped out of school in 6th grade to work 12-hour shifts at a pizza restaurant, survived homelessness in a Harlem shelter, and put himself through Columbia University by working as a personal trainer - before building one of the most-funded fitness tech startups in history.
Navin Thadani is the Founder and CEO of Evinced, the leading AI-powered digital accessibility testing company based in Palo Alto, California. A serial entrepreneur with two prior successful exits (Qumranet to Red Hat and Ravello Systems to Oracle), he co-founded Evinced in 2018 with a mission to make the web and mobile apps accessible to the 1.3 billion people worldwide living with disabilities. Under his leadership, Evinced has raised $112 million across three funding rounds, built a 130-person team, and become the only pure technology play in the enterprise accessibility market, serving clients including five of the ten largest media companies in the US and UK, and financial institutions collectively managing $26 trillion in assets.
Pablo Palafox is the Co-Founder and CEO of HappyRobot, a San Francisco-based AI workforce platform that deploys autonomous voice agents for logistics and freight operations. A Spanish-born roboticist who left a PhD program at the Technical University of Munich in 2022, he has built HappyRobot from a YC S23 startup into a company serving 70+ enterprise clients including DHL, Ryder, Schneider, and Werner - raising $103M across three funding rounds, most recently a $44M Series B led by Base10 Partners with participation from Andreessen Horowitz.
Rajat Bhageria is the founder and CEO of Chef Robotics, a San Francisco-based company building AI-enabled robotic systems for flexible food assembly automation. After founding accessibility tech startup ThirdEye (acquired 2017) and co-founding pre-seed VC fund Prototype Capital, Bhageria launched Chef Robotics in 2019 to tackle the labor crisis in food manufacturing. The company has deployed robots across 12+ facilities in the US, Canada, and Europe, completing over 100 million food servings as of April 2026, backed by $72.7M in total funding. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree (2022), Bhageria is also a published scientist, author, and prolific writer with bylines in Forbes, TechCrunch, and HuffPost.
Rebecca Hu-Thrams is the co-founder and CEO of Glacier, a San Francisco-based company building AI-powered robotic arms that sort recyclables in material recovery facilities. Raised by Chinese immigrant parents who instilled a 'reduce, reuse, recycle' ethos, she channeled her Bain consulting background and Thumbtack operating experience into tackling what she calls 'the most demented form of manufacturing on the planet.' Glacier's robots, trained on 3.8 billion images of waste, sort 70+ material categories at 60 picks per minute - preventing roughly 10 million items per robot from reaching landfill annually. Named Fast Company's #1 Most Innovative Company in Robotics & Engineering for 2026, Glacier has raised $33.2 million including a $16M Series A extension in April 2025 backed by Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund and New Enterprise Associates.
Amir Sadeghian is the Co-Founder and CEO of Astrocade, the world's first agentic AI game creation platform that lets anyone build fully playable games from a text prompt. A Stanford PhD in Computer Vision and AI, Sadeghian previously co-founded Aibee Inc. - a Sequoia-backed AI unicorn - before teaming up with his brother Ali Sadeghian and AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li to build Astrocade. The platform has amassed 20 million users and 140 million monthly game plays across 80 countries within 8 months of launch, backed by $68M from Sequoia Capital, Sea, NVIDIA, Google, and Eric Schmidt.
Rick Song is the Co-Founder and CEO of Persona, the identity verification platform trusted by OpenAI, Instacart, LinkedIn, and 3,000+ others. A self-described reluctant founder, he left Square in 2018 after five years working on fraud and identity products, convinced there was a better way to build identity infrastructure. By 2025, Persona had completed 300+ million verifications, crossed $100M ARR, raised a $200M Series D at a $2B valuation, and was named a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for Identity Verification for the second consecutive year.
Rish Gupta is the Co-founder and CEO of Spot AI, a San Francisco-based video intelligence company turning passive security cameras into AI-powered teammates for the physical economy. A Stanford GSB alum originally from Delhi, Rish built his first company—LetsIntern.com—to 4 million users and sold it before moving to Silicon Valley. At Spot AI, he leads a team that processes more daily video than YouTube receives in uploads, serving 1,000+ customers across 17 industries with an AI platform that has driven 40% injury reductions in manufacturing and 8X ROI in auto services. The company has raised $93M from Redpoint, Bessemer, Scale Venture Partners, and Qualcomm Ventures.