Metalenz is a Boston-based deep-tech company that replaces stacks of curved glass lenses with a single flat, nanostructured semiconductor chip called a metasurface. Spun out of Harvard's Capasso Lab, it is the first company to mass-produce meta-optics, shrinking cameras and sensors for smartphones, biometrics, and 3D sensing. Its flagship Polar ID brings polarization-based, payment-grade face authentication to devices at a fraction of the size and cost of existing systems.
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.
John Martin co-founded Level Home in 2016 with the idea that the best technology is invisible - literally. After a snowstorm stranded him and his family at Lake Tahoe without keys, he set out to reinvent the deadbolt from scratch. The result: Level Lock, a smart lock engineered to hide entirely inside the door, preserving home aesthetics while adding full smartphone control. Martin spent decades across Microsoft, Starbucks, Apple, and Nokia before building Level into a $171M-funded company that was ultimately acquired by ASSA ABLOY in 2024 - a hardware giant recognizing that the future of the lock is invisible.
Reggie Chan is a Hong Kong-based serial entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Nex (nex.inc), the motion-gaming company behind the Nex Playground console - a $249 camera-based gaming device that outsold Xbox in the US during Black Friday 2025 and hit $150M+ in annual revenue. Before Nex, Chan co-founded EditGrid, an online spreadsheet startup acquired by Apple in 2008, then spent nearly a decade at Apple as a Software Engineering Manager before betting everything on body-motion entertainment. At Nex, his team has built technology that tracks 18 body points per player, enabling real physical movement as the controller - no wires, no wearables, just your body and a TV.
PCH International is a product development and supply-chain orchestration company founded in 1996 by Cork-born entrepreneur Liam Casey. With operations spanning Cork, San Francisco, Shenzhen and Cape Town, PCH helps consumer-electronics brands and startups design, engineer, manufacture, package and fulfill hardware products at global scale.
Joe Weil is the CEO of Unplugged, a privacy-first smartphone company that makes the UP Phone - an open-source Android device stripped of Google services, built with a hardware battery disconnect switch, on-device firewall, and a no-surveillance business model. Before leading Unplugged, Weil spent roughly a decade at Apple leading zero-to-one special projects for Apple Services, and before that built Psycho Films LLC, directing music videos for Kendrick Lamar, 21 Savage, A$AP Ferg, and Big Sean. He left Apple, by his account, after watching the company shift into political activism, soft censorship, and deep integration with China.
Joseph Bousaba is the CEO of InvenSense and General Manager of TDK Corporation's MEMS Sensors Business Group, leading a global powerhouse in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) sensing solutions. With over 18 years of senior leadership in the semiconductor industry - spanning Philips Semiconductors, Qualcomm Atheros, and Qualcomm - he stepped into the top role at InvenSense in October 2024, bringing a track record of building multi-hundred-million-dollar businesses at the intersection of motion, sound, and AI-driven sensing.
Barmak Heshmat is an optical physicist and entrepreneur who founded Brelyon, a San Mateo-based startup creating Ultra Reality displays that generate immersive panoramic virtual screens without any headset. A former MIT Media Lab research scientist and onetime head of optics at Meta's AR division, Heshmat ranked in the top 1% of Iran's national university entrance exam, earned a PhD in optoelectronics from the University of Victoria, filed 8 patents, published 20 journal papers, and now leads a company backed by Lockheed Martin Ventures, LG Technology Ventures, and Corning after raising $18.8M total - solving the fundamental problem of why no one wants to wear a computer on their face.
Bingrui Yang is the Founder and CEO of Pebble, a Fremont-based startup building the Pebble Flow - an all-electric, semi-autonomous travel trailer that raised $13.6M in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. A veteran hardware engineer with roughly nine years at Apple leading iPhone development, followed by stints at Zoox (Director of Advanced Hardware Engineering) and Cruise (Head of AV Hardware Systems), Yang founded Pebble in 2022 after a pandemic-era RV trip convinced him the category needed a complete reinvention. His mission: make RVing as intuitive as using an iPhone. The Pebble Flow - a 25-foot, 45 kWh battery-powered trailer with Magic Hitch autonomous attachment, NVIDIA DRIVE Orin-powered automation, and Scandinavian-minimal interiors - earned a spot on TIME Magazine's Best Inventions of 2024 list and began delivering to its first customers in early 2025.
Tanay Kothari is the co-founder and CEO of Wispr Flow, a San Francisco-based AI company building the voice interface for the AI era. A four-time founder who taught himself to code at age nine in New Delhi, Kothari holds BS and MS degrees from Stanford in Computer Science and AI, taught Deep Learning alongside Andrew Ng, and published medical AI research. After selling his first startup FeatherX to Cerebra Technologies straight out of college, he co-founded Wispr in 2021 with Stanford batchmate Sahaj Garg. The company's flagship product, Wispr Flow, transforms spoken ramblings into polished writing across 100+ languages with sub-second latency, achieving 50% month-over-month growth and a 20% paid conversion rate - five times the industry standard. Wispr has raised $81 million total, including a $30 million Series A led by Menlo Ventures and a $25 million extension led by Notable Capital, at a $700 million valuation. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2023, Kothari is betting that keyboards will be vintage store items within five years.
Nick Weaver is the co-founder and CEO of eero, the company that reimagined home Wi-Fi with the world's first whole-home mesh networking system. A Stanford-trained engineer turned McKinsey consultant turned venture capitalist, Weaver quit Menlo Ventures in 2014 to fix the router - a problem he'd been wrestling with since he was a kid setting up networks for neighbors in Chicago. He sold $2.5 million of product in two weeks, landed in 600 Best Buy stores within two years, and delivered eero to Amazon in a $97 million acquisition in 2019. He now leads eero as VP of Devices & Services under Amazon, where the mission is unchanged: make the technology in homes just work.
Nick Woodman is the founder and CEO of GoPro, the action camera company he built from a rubber band and a wrist-mounted 35mm film camera during a 2002 surf trip in Australia. After two failed dot-com startups, he turned a frustrated attempt to photograph himself surfing into one of the world's most recognized camera brands. GoPro went public in 2014 at a $2.25B valuation, making Woodman briefly the highest-paid CEO in America. Despite a severe post-2015 downturn, he remains at the helm, having waived his salary, personally invested $2M in company stock, and launched the Mission 1 camera line in 2026.
Tony Fadell is the inventor of the iPod, co-creator of the iPhone, and founder of Nest Labs - the company Google bought for $3.2 billion. Known as the 'Father of the iPod,' he holds 300+ patents and now runs Build Collective from Paris, coaching 200+ deep-tech startups focused on climate, energy, food, and robotics. He also wrote the bestselling book 'Build' (2022) and designs hardware for companies like Ledger.