WaveAerospace builds unmanned aircraft that fly when nothing else can. Based in Stratford, Connecticut, the company designs heavy-weather drones, UAVs and hybrid VTOL aircraft for police, emergency services, offshore operators and the military - machines rated to operate in wind, rain and snow that ground conventional drones. Its lineup includes the all-weather Falcon II multicopter, the GPS-contested Nyx, the heavy-lift Mule, and the Huntress Turbojet, a hybrid jet that reaches roughly Mach 0.4.
Vasiliki 'Vicky' Demas, PhD, is the CEO and founder of identifeye HEALTH, an AI-enabled retinal imaging company that brings specialized eye screening to primary care settings. A chemical engineer by training with a PhD from UC Berkeley and a postdoc at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, she cut her teeth as a founding member of Google Life Sciences (which became Verily) and helped build foundational technology for GRAIL's Galleri multi-cancer early detection test. At identifeye HEALTH — which she joined in 2021 and rebranded from Tesseract Health — she leads a 38-person team developing a portable, FDA-registered AI retinal camera that lets minimally trained staff detect diabetic retinopathy and systemic disease markers in the same visit patients already make to their primary care doctor.
Shangda Xu is an Investing Partner on the Growth team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms. Focused on enterprise technology companies - from AI infrastructure to enterprise SaaS - he brings a dual lens: the analytical rigor of a Harvard summa cum laude economist-mathematician and the operator pattern-recognition of someone who has worked across private equity (Warburg Pincus), investment banking (PJT Partners), and corporate strategy (Disney, Warner Bros.). At a16z, he co-authors influential research on enterprise AI adoption, including how Fortune 500 CIOs are actually deploying generative AI - making him one of the more data-grounded voices in an arena full of hype.