Steve Xie is the founder and CEO of Lightwheel, a physical AI infrastructure company building simulation and synthetic data systems that teach robots to learn and operate in the real world. A physicist by training with a Columbia PhD, he led autonomous driving simulation at Cruise, NVIDIA, and NIO before starting Lightwheel in 2023. The company supplies SimReady 3D assets, egocentric human data, and robot evaluation tools to labs including NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, and Figure, and raised roughly $137.5 million in 2026 to expand its data and evaluation infrastructure.

Nabeel Hyatt is a General Partner at Spark Capital, the Boston-born venture firm behind Discord, Coinbase, Affirm, and Warby Parker. A repeat founder-turned-investor, he opened Spark's San Francisco office in 2012 after selling his social gaming startup Conduit Labs to Zynga and riding Zynga's IPO. His portfolio reads like a cultural highlight reel: he backed Cruise before GM paid $1B+, Postmates before Uber, and Discord before it became the connective tissue of the internet. He deliberately makes only about two bets per year, applies a 'Japanese toilet' product lens to AI, co-hosts the Hallway Chat podcast, and recently co-founded a physical board game library in Berkeley with Groupon's Andrew Mason.

Kyle Vogt is a Kansas-born serial entrepreneur and robotics pioneer who has founded three billion-dollar companies before age 40. He co-founded Twitch (acquired by Amazon for $970M), founded Cruise Automation (acquired by GM for $1B+), and currently leads The Bot Company, developing AI-powered household robots. Starting as a teenage BattleBots competitor who built his first self-driving car at 14, Vogt left MIT to pursue entrepreneurship, becoming one of the rare founders to create multiple unicorns across live-streaming, autonomous vehicles, and consumer robotics.