deep-learning
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Jay Dawani and the art of changing the machine
He set out to make autonomous robots possible, then designed chips, then walked away from the chips. At Lemurian Labs, Jay Dawani keeps following the same question: what is actually stopping the idea from working?
Karim Beguir and the case for starting at home
He left a finance career in London to build an AI company in Tunisia with Zohra Slim. Years later, Karim Beguir is still working on the same question: who gets to build the future?
Francois Chaubard and the cost of an empty shelf
An expensive train ride gave Francois Chaubard his first business idea. After nine years building Focal Systems, he returned to Stanford to ask a larger question: how much should intelligence cost?
Bongjin Jun and the surprising afterlife of smart glasses
Before STRADVISION put vision software into cars, Bongjin Jun helped computers read the world through smart glasses. His story follows a research team, a promise to start again, and an idea that found another place to work.
Jeremy Howard and the Problem of Making AI Too Easy
He helped make machines better at language, then spent a decade teaching people to understand the machines. Jeremy Howard's latest project asks a harder question: can AI make us more capable without doing our thinking for us?
Yann LeCun and the Bet Beyond Words
He taught machines to read handwritten digits, then helped turn deep learning into a working science. At AMI Labs, Yann LeCun is asking a harder question: can a machine learn how the physical world works?
Jimmy Ba and the Algorithms That Learned to Learn
Before he helped build xAI, Jimmy Ba helped solve two quieter problems inside modern AI: how a network takes its next step, and how it stays steady along the way.
Prathamesh Juvatkar and the Long Apprenticeship of Making AI Useful
Before Nanonets learned to read the world's paperwork, its co-founder learned to value patient iteration, old friendships and the unglamorous work behind useful technology.
Lei Xu Is Teaching Cars to See - Then Asking What Sight Is For
The former Tesla Vision engineer built Nullmax around a stubbornly practical idea: autonomous driving only matters when the software can leave the demo, fit the car and survive the road.
Jeremy Fain Learned to Read the Internet. Then He Taught It to Bid.
The Cognitiv co-founder spent two decades learning how digital advertising actually works. His more revealing operating system was built earlier - in code, competition and the company of two childhood friends.
Tri Vu
Tri Vu is the co-founder and CEO of Lumius, a Durham, North Carolina medical imaging startup building fast, smart, accessible 3D ultrasound - what the team calls a 3D camera for the body. A Duke-trained biomedical engineer with a doctorate in ultrasound and photoacoustic imaging and more than 1,900 research citations, Vu left an academic track to turn a decade of imaging research into a device clinicians actually want to pick up. Lumius went through Y Combinator's Spring 2026 batch and is starting with vascular access, where roughly half of first attempts fail.
Shawn Guan
Shawn Guan is the CEO and co-founder of Umbo Computer Vision, an AI company building autonomous video security systems that watch camera feeds and flag real threats instead of stray animals and swaying trees. After roughly 2,000 client meetings in the traditional surveillance business taught him how badly false alarms wear people down, he co-founded Umbo in 2014 with Ping-Lin Chang and Tingfan Wu to put deep learning behind the lens. The company raised about $17.6 million, won a Best Startup nod at NVIDIA's 2016 deep learning conference and SIA's Best in Video Analytics in 2017, and ran offices in San Francisco, Taipei and London.
Dylan Fox
Dylan Fox is the founder and CEO of AssemblyAI, an AI research company building Speech AI models that transcribe and understand human speech through a developer-facing API. A former machine learning engineer at Cisco, he started AssemblyAI as a solo founder in 2017, went through Y Combinator, and grew it into a platform used by companies like Spotify, Zoom, and Fireflies.ai. The company processes tens of millions of API calls a day and has raised roughly $115M, including a $50M Series C led by Accel in December 2023.
Ilsu Park
Ilsu Park is the co-founder and CEO of Mars Auto, a Seoul-based startup building camera-based, map-free self-driving software for heavy trucks. A KAIST computer science graduate and self-taught deep-learning engineer, he started with a hobby project that used a driving-game simulator to train a neural network, then turned that idea into a company that runs paid autonomous freight in Korea and the United States. Mars Auto takes a Tesla-style vision-first approach, skipping LiDAR and HD maps to cut the cost of automating a Class 8 truck to roughly $7,000 per unit. Park has raised about $12 million, graduated from Y Combinator, and made the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list. He is targeting fully driverless long-haul freight by 2028.
Gilad Shainer
Gilad Shainer is Senior Vice President of Networking at NVIDIA, where he leads the strategy, marketing, and ecosystem development for the company's networking portfolio — including InfiniBand, Ethernet, DPUs, and interconnect technologies that power more than half the world's top 500 supercomputers. A Technion-trained electrical engineer who graduated Cum Laude at both B.Sc. and M.Sc. levels, Shainer spent nearly two decades at Mellanox Technologies before joining NVIDIA via the $6.9 billion acquisition in 2020. He founded the HPC-AI Advisory Council in 2008, which now spans 400+ organizations globally, co-founded the ISC Student Cluster Competition, holds two R&D 100 Awards (2015 and 2019), and has authored or co-authored dozens of papers across IEEE, ACM, and Springer venues. At a moment when AI factories are rewriting the rules of data center design, Shainer is the person making sure the wires — and the protocols running through them — are ready.
Rajesh Narasimha
Rajesh Narasimha is CEO and co-founder of Edgetensor, a Dallas-based startup building a multi-camera, edge-AI video telematics platform for fleets, insurance, and automotive OEMs. A Georgia Tech ECE PhD with 16+ years in computer vision and machine learning, he previously worked at Texas Instruments, Samsung Research America, and helped stand up US R&D at metaio (later acquired by Apple).
Tullie Murrell
Tullie Murrell is the CEO and co-founder of Shaped, a New York startup building a real-time retrieval engine for search, feeds, and agents. Before Shaped, Murrell spent about five years at Facebook AI Research, where he created PyTorchVideo, the leading open-source library for video understanding, and was an early core contributor to PyTorch Lightning, a training framework now used by millions of developers. The video models he led powered Facebook newsfeed ranking and Instagram Reels. In 2021 he left big-tech research to package that same personalization machinery into a self-serve product for companies without armies of ML engineers. Shaped went through Y Combinator's W22 batch and raised an $8M Series A led by Madrona Ventures in July 2024.
Haojun Jia
Haojun Jia is the co-founder and CEO of Deep Principle, an AI-for-science startup building AI scientists that discover new materials and chemical reactions. He hatched the idea while finishing a physical chemistry PhD at MIT, where his research paired high-throughput quantum chemistry with machine learning to design catalysts. Deep Principle's platform - marketed as ReactiveAI and now the agentic tool Agent Mira - fuses deep learning with first-principles physics to compress the time and cost of materials R&D. The company has raised roughly $28 million across two rounds from investors including GL Ventures, Linear Capital, Vertex Ventures, and funds backed by Lenovo and Baidu. Jia was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2025 list in Healthcare & Science.
Kelvin Lwin
Kelvin Lwin is an AI architect and educator who came to the United States from Burma at twelve and turned a monk's charge to fix education into a life's work. After nearly a decade at UC Berkeley and seven years building the computer science curriculum at UC Merced, he designed courses at NVIDIA's Deep Learning Institute that reached more than 100,000 developers worldwide. He now serves as a Field CTO and AI leader at Centific, the enterprise AI and data-foundry company that closed a $60M Series A, where he focuses on responsible, human-in-the-loop AI and the idea that teaching machines when not to act matters as much as teaching them how.
Julius Adebayo
Julius Adebayo is the co-founder and CEO of Guide Labs, a San Francisco startup building inherently interpretable foundation models. An MIT-trained computer scientist whose 2018 NeurIPS paper showed that popular deep-learning explanations were not reliable, Adebayo now leads a team shipping Steerling-8B, an open-source 8-billion parameter LLM whose every token can be traced back to its training data.
Lawrence Chen
Lawrence Chen (Chen Haoliang) is the founder and CEO of SpeakIn Technologies, a Shenzhen-based voiceprint recognition company he started in 2015. An MIT dropout who previously worked on Google Glass's human-machine interaction program, Chen built SpeakIn to verify identities through voice rather than passwords, claiming 99.5% accuracy and selling into Chinese banks and public security bureaus. He was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in 2018.
Gil Akos
Gil Akos is the co-founder and CEO of Astra, a payments infrastructure company that lets developers move money bank-to-bank in real time. Trained as an architect with graduate work at Columbia, he taught himself programming, then earned a stack of Udacity nanodegrees in machine learning and AI to build the company he imagined. Under his leadership Astra crossed $1 billion in lifetime payments processed and pushed past a $2 billion annualized run rate, positioning the company as connective tissue for instant payouts across vertical SaaS, marketplaces, and earned wage access.
Lubomir Bourdev
Lubomir Bourdev is a computer-vision scientist turned serial founder. He was the first person hired at Facebook for computer vision and a founding member of Facebook AI Research, where he built the object-recognition engine that runs on every photo and video across Facebook and Instagram. He co-founded WaveOne, a deep-learning video-compression company acquired by Apple in 2023, and earlier shipped the face detector inside Adobe Photoshop Elements. Today he is co-founder and CEO of Primepoint, a San Mateo startup building AI that reads and understands construction drawings, which closed a $10M seed round in April 2026. He holds a PhD from UC Berkeley, more than 175 patents, and over 100,000 research citations.
Adam Yala
Adam Yala is a UC Berkeley and UCSF assistant professor of Computational Precision Health turned founder, now CEO of Voio, a Berkeley AI startup building frontier radiology models. At MIT he created Mirai and Sybil, open-source AI tools that flag breast and lung cancer risk years early and are now studied at more than 90 hospitals across 30 countries. In late 2025 Voio emerged from stealth with $8.6M in seed funding and Pillar-0, billed as the most accurate open AI model for radiology, with a mission to make being a radiologist more empowering rather than to replace the profession.
Alexandre Pasquiou
Alexandre Pasquiou is the CEO and co-founder of Neuralk-AI, a Paris deeptech building tabular foundation models - AI designed natively for the spreadsheets, SQL tables and product catalogs that run real businesses. A CentraleSupelec engineer with a PhD in computational neuroscience from Inria, he spent his doctorate measuring how well language models like GPT-2 and BERT predict human brain activity, then turned that obsession with structured signal into a company. Founded in 2023 with Antoine Moissenot, Neuralk raised a $4M seed in early 2025 led by Fly Ventures, backed by angels including Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf and Mirakl's Philippe Corrot, and works with retailers like E.Leclerc and Auchan.
Arash Jafari
Arash Jafari is the CEO and co-founder of Clearpol, a San Francisco healthtech company that builds AI to help post-acute and long-term care providers manage regulatory compliance and clinical risk. A former NASA JPL and Langley engineer, he traded interplanetary robotics simulations and severe-weather prediction for one of healthcare's least glamorous frontiers: the survey deficiency. Clearpol's AI now acts as a 'co-pilot' for skilled nursing facilities, drafting Plans of Correction, monitoring clinical data, and flagging regulatory risk before it escalates - trusted by 900+ facilities, with 3,000+ Plans of Correction written.
Bhairav Mehta
Bhairav Mehta is the co-founder and CEO of CharacterQuilt, a San Francisco AI company that builds computer-use agents to run enterprise marketing campaigns. A 2x Y Combinator founder, he traded a near-finished MIT PhD in deep learning and robotics - and a research resume spanning NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NVIDIA, and Mila - for the messier business of getting software to do real marketing work. CharacterQuilt interviews real buyers, distills them into AI personas that predict pain points, and then lets agents operate the existing marketing stack. His pitch: campaigns that once took three agencies, ten tools, and six weeks now ship in an hour.
Clayton Rabideau
Clayton Rabideau is the founder and CEO of Syntensor, a San Francisco startup building foundation models and mechanistic simulations of human cell biology to predict drug efficacy, toxicity, and the hidden causes of clinical-trial failure. A Cambridge PhD in chemical engineering and biotechnology, he works at the seam between dynamical-systems mathematics and genomics - a co-author on HyenaDNA, the NeurIPS 2023 spotlight that stretched genomic language models to a million bases of context. He is trying to make biology as fast, iterative, and programmable as software.
David Lehrer
David Lehrer is the founder and CEO of Conatix and its flagship product Cysana, an AI cybersecurity venture that turns executable files into pictures so neural networks can spot malware before it ever runs. A Harvard-trained policy researcher turned deep-tech operator, he built the company across Virginia, New York, Montreal, London and Berlin, in partnership with the University of Luxembourg's SnT research center. His unusual path runs from criminology at Oxford and economics at the Bank of Finland to a patented anti-ransomware engine trained on a European supercomputer.
Felix Wong
Felix Wong is the co-founder and CEO of Integrated Biosciences, a Redwood City biotech using synthetic biology, optogenetics and explainable AI to discover small-molecule drugs for age-related disease. A physicist and mathematician by training with a Harvard PhD in applied physics, he led the team that reported the first new structural class of antibiotics discovered with explainable deep learning - published in Nature in 2023 - and pioneered the AI-driven discovery of senolytics. He was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Healthcare and has authored more than 30 papers in journals including Nature, Science and Cell.