Paul Eremenko is the co-founder and CEO of P-1 AI, a startup building 'engineering AGI' for the physical world through an AI agent named Archie. Born in Lviv, Ukraine and trained at MIT, Caltech and Georgetown Law, he ran X-plane and spacecraft programs at DARPA, created Google's modular-phone Project Ara, became the youngest CTO of Airbus at 35, served as CTO of United Technologies, and co-founded hydrogen-aviation company Universal Hydrogen. P-1 AI emerged from stealth in April 2025 with $23M in seed funding led by Radical Ventures.
Armon Sharei is the founder and CEO of Portal Biotechnologies, a cell-engineering platform company in Watertown, Massachusetts that builds devices to push genetic and molecular cargo into living cells without killing them. He earned a chemical engineering PhD at MIT, where he invented the membrane-squeezing CellSqueeze technique, then founded SQZ Biotechnologies, raised more than $300M, struck a billion-dollar Roche partnership, and took the company public on the NYSE in 2020 before being ousted and watching it liquidate in 2024. After a sabbatical spent drawing comics about immune cells, he returned with Portal, choosing this time to sell tools rather than develop drugs, and has built a network of 100+ customers including most of the top 10 global pharma companies plus an $8M DARPA contract.
DUST Identity authenticates physical objects with a thin coat of engineered diamond dust. Each randomly oriented constellation of microscopic diamonds forms a fingerprint that cannot be copied, and that fingerprint is bound to a tamper-evident digital record. The result is an unbroken chain of trust from raw material to final delivery, used across aerospace, defense, electronics, luxury goods, and sports memorabilia.
Umaimah Khan is the co-founder and CEO of Opal Security, a San Francisco identity security company building the controls that decide who - and increasingly what - can access an organization's systems. A homeschooled math kid who entered MIT at 16 and fell for cryptography, she did research embedded with government agencies including DARPA, then engineered infrastructure and security at two startups that became unicorns. She founded Opal in 2020 to treat authorization as the hard technical problem she believes it is, and has raised roughly $32M, including a $22M Series B in December 2023. Opal's customers include Cloudflare, Figma, Databricks, Scale AI, Grammarly and Perplexity.
Ophir Gaathon is the co-founder and CEO of DUST Identity, a Massachusetts deep-tech company that sprinkles microscopic, industrial diamond dust onto physical objects to give them an unclonable fingerprint. A Columbia-trained applied physicist who once chased the quantum properties of diamonds for computing, he turned that research into an identity layer for the physical world, used across defense, aerospace, automotive and luxury supply chains. Backed by Kleiner Perkins, Airbus Ventures, Lockheed Martin and Castle Island Ventures, his company has raised more than $50M and works on problems originally posed by DARPA.
Artis, LLC (Advanced Real-Time Information Systems) is a Herndon, Virginia defense and technology developer that builds systems for problems measured in microseconds. Founded in 1999 by Keith Brendley, the company is best known for active protection systems for military vehicles - Iron Curtain and its third-generation successor, Sentinel - that detect and defeat incoming rockets, missiles and drone-borne threats in fractions of a second. Beyond defense, Artis applies its high-speed sensing and parallel-processing work to highway worker safety, 3D imaging and pedestrian monitoring.
EnCharge AI is a Santa Clara semiconductor startup, spun out of Princeton University, building AI accelerator chips based on analog in-memory computing. Its charge-based architecture runs heavy AI workloads on laptops, workstations and edge devices at roughly 20x the energy efficiency of conventional GPUs. Its first product, the EN100 accelerator, delivers 200+ TOPS within an 8.25W power budget, aiming to move generative AI out of the data center and onto the devices people actually hold.
Alec Nielsen is the co-founder and CEO of Asimov, a Boston synthetic biology company building computer-aided design tools for living cells. His MIT PhD work in the Voigt Lab produced Cello, a programming language that compiles plain-text logic instructions into thousands of DNA letters. Asimov turned that academic breakthrough into a commercial platform for designing and manufacturing biologics, cell therapies, and gene therapies, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, DARPA, and a $175M Series B led by CPP Investments.
Ben Reinhardt is the founder and CEO of Speculative Technologies, a nonprofit industrial research lab built on the ARPA model to unlock materials and manufacturing breakthroughs that have no natural home in startups, academia, or government. A space-robotics PhD who once built tractor beams at Cornell and taught machines to see at Magic Leap, he became one of the most-read writers on how DARPA actually works, then set out to build a privately funded version of it. He hosts the Idea Machines podcast, where he interviews people who design the systems that produce innovation.
Tim Jenks is the Interim CEO of PowerLight Technologies, a Kent, Washington-based company pioneering laser-based wireless power beaming for drones, defense systems, and space infrastructure. A U.S. Naval Academy graduate with a nuclear engineering master's from MIT and an MBA from Stanford, Jenks spent over two decades building NeoPhotonics from a venture-backed startup into a NYSE-listed company before selling it to Lumentum Holdings for approximately $918 million in 2022. Now he's steering PowerLight through a pivotal moment: in April 2026, the company achieved the world's first wireless power beaming to a fielded military drone in flight, delivering kilowatt-class laser energy to a Kraus Hamdani Aerospace K1000ULE at 5,000 feet altitude - a breakthrough that could redefine how unmanned aircraft operate in contested environments.
Aaron Nathan is the CEO and co-founder of Point One Navigation, a San Francisco-based precision location company building the infrastructure layer for Physical AI. A Cornell-trained engineer who helped lead the university's DARPA Urban Challenge team, he went on to serve as Chief Architect at Coherent Navigation (acquired by Apple) before co-founding adeptCloud (acquired by Hightail). At Point One, he is turning centimeter-level GPS accuracy from a specialist tool into a universal platform — raising a $35M oversubscribed Series C from Khosla Ventures in 2025 to accelerate a mission: making precise location as ubiquitous as GPS itself.