Allen Control Systems (ACS) is an Austin-based defense technology company building Bullfrog, an AI-powered autonomous robotic weapon station designed to detect, track and shoot down hostile drones. Founded in 2022 by three engineer-entrepreneurs, ACS uses passive machine vision and custom fire-control software to turn standard machine guns into precision counter-drone turrets, aiming to cut the cost-per-kill of a drone from expensive missiles down to a few dollars of ammunition. The company raised a $200M Series B in 2026 at a $2.2B valuation to scale manufacturing for the U.S. military and allied forces.
Nexar is a New York-based mobility technology company that turns connected dashcams into a real-time sensing network for the physical world. Founded in 2015 by Eran Shir and Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, it sells LTE-connected 4K dashcams to consumers while aggregating anonymized road imagery into CityStream, a platform that gives cities, mapmakers, insurers and autonomous-vehicle developers a minute-by-minute, ground-level view of streets. In July 2026 Nexar agreed to merge with Nauto to form an independent infrastructure platform for physical AI, backed by more than 10 billion historic miles of driving data across 50+ countries.
ModelCat AI, formerly the low-power chip pioneer Eta Compute, builds an agentic, hardware-aware platform that automatically designs, trains, optimizes and validates machine-learning models for embedded, edge and IoT devices. Its patented AI-in-the-Loop workflow, backed by a physical hardware farm that calibrates results against real silicon, compresses a model-development cycle that once took 12 to 24 months down to a matter of days. The Sunnyvale company works with chipmakers including NXP and Alif Semiconductor to hand developers ready-to-run models tuned to the exact constraints of the hardware they will run on.
HarvestAi is a Potsdam-based agritech company that builds AI software for high-tech greenhouses. Its web platform combines computer vision, machine learning and plant-physiology modeling to predict crop growth, harvest dates and yields, giving greenhouse operators forecasts that its team says exceed 90% accuracy. Growers use it to negotiate sales earlier, plan labor and logistics, and cut waste and energy costs. Founded in 2020 and led by CEO Dr. Georg Caspary, the company has raised roughly EUR 2.97M in seed funding and won first prize in Food/Agritech at Slush.
Joe Chin is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sparrow, a New York-based sports AI startup using edge AI and computer vision to analyze athletic motion in real time. A 4x serial entrepreneur with 22+ years of leadership experience and three prior exits, Joe built Sparrow around a simple observation: golfers forget lessons the moment they leave the range. Sparrow's flagship golf app has helped 250,000+ golfers analyze their swing against a dataset of 1 million pro golf data points, delivering instant, personalized feedback via smartphone. The company has raised $8.27M in total funding and is expanding into soccer, basketball, and other major sports.
Jorge Heraud is a Peruvian-born engineer and serial agtech founder who co-founded Blue River Technology — sold to John Deere for $305 million in 2017 — and is now CEO of TerraBlaster, a Redwood City startup using NASA-pioneered laser spectroscopy to give farmers real-time soil nutrient data, aiming to cut fertilizer waste and transform how agriculture feeds the world.
Bifrost AI builds simulation and evaluation infrastructure for physical AI. Its platform generates photorealistic 3D synthetic data and stress-tests robotics and computer-vision systems across thousands of simulated scenarios - weather, sensor noise, rare edge cases - so teams can train and validate models in minutes instead of months. Used across maritime, geospatial, aerial, off-road, industrial, and off-world domains, with collaborators including NASA JPL and the U.S. Air Force. Founded in 2020 and backed by an $8M Series A led by Carbide Ventures with participation from Airbus Ventures and Peak XV's Surge.
Kolena is a San Francisco-based AI company building software that automates document-heavy workflows for regulated industries - real estate, insurance, banking, and financial services. Founded in 2021 by Mohamed Elgendy, Andrew Shi, and Gordon Hart, the company began as a rigorous ML model testing platform and has since extended that quality-first DNA into agentic document workflow automation, with an emphasis on transparency, citations, and auditability.
Mindee is a Paris- and San Francisco-based AI company building an API-first platform that turns any document - invoices, receipts, passports, bank statements - into clean structured JSON. Founded in 2018 and backed by GGV Capital, Alven and Y Combinator, it gives developers pre-trained OCR endpoints plus a no-training-required custom builder called docTI.
RIOS Intelligent Machines was a Menlo Park robotics company building AI-powered dexterous robots for factories, warehouses, and supply chains. Founded in 2018 by former Xerox PARC engineers, RIOS pioneered haptic intelligence and tactile sensing for industrial robots, deploying systems across e-commerce, manufacturing, food processing, and wood products before archiving the company in 2026.
Quartermaster is an Arlington, Virginia maritime intelligence company turning ordinary working ships into a distributed sensing network. Its weather-hardened SmartMast hardware - cameras, radios, satellite links and onboard AI - mounts to vessel masts and streams real-time HD video, geolocation and threat alerts back to a central analytics platform. The result is a live, continuously updated picture of global ocean activity that does not depend on the easily spoofed AIS transponders ships can simply switch off. Backed by a $43M Series A co-led by First Round Capital and Quiet Capital, Quartermaster already runs on more than 600 vessels across 25 countries.
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.