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.
Paul Le Floch is the co-founder and CEO of Axoft, a Cambridge neurotechnology company building brain implants out of a material so soft it behaves like brain tissue. A Harvard-trained materials scientist and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he bet that the way to read the brain better was not to borrow chips from the semiconductor industry but to invent a new material from scratch. The result, Fleuron, is up to thousands of times softer than conventional probes yet can carry over 1,000 sensors. Axoft has now implanted its device in 11 patients and raised a $55M Series A to push toward FDA trials.
Albert Invent builds an AI-native operating system for chemists and materials scientists, unifying electronic lab notebooks, LIMS, regulatory compliance and predictive AI into one cloud platform that aims to compress decades-long R&D cycles into weeks.
Ceremorphic is a San Jose-based fabless semiconductor startup building energy-efficient AI supercomputing silicon. Founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneur Venkat Mattela, the company taped out a first-of-its-kind 5nm HPC/AI chip on TSMC's most advanced node and is applying the same Hierarchical Learning Processor architecture to data center AI, robotics, automotive, and analog-AI-driven drug discovery.
Daedalus is an AI-driven precision manufacturing company building software-defined factories that produce high-precision parts for defense, medtech, semiconductors and industrial customers. Founded by former OpenAI Robotics technical lead Jonas Schneider, the company pairs off-the-shelf CNC hardware with its proprietary Manufacturing AI Platform to automate the work that traditionally requires veteran machinists - quoting, process planning, machine control and quality inspection - and runs it all out of a 50,000-square-foot factory in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Heirloom Carbon Technologies is a San Francisco-based direct air capture company that uses limestone's natural CO2-absorbing properties to pull carbon dioxide permanently out of the atmosphere. Their process accelerates a geological phenomenon that normally takes thousands of years into a 3-day cycle: calcium oxide powder absorbs CO2 from ambient air, becomes limestone, gets heated in a renewable-energy-powered electric kiln to release the captured CO2, and repeats. The captured CO2 is then stored permanently underground or embedded in concrete. Founded in 2020, Heirloom opened America's first commercial DAC facility in Tracy, California in November 2023 and has raised over $354 million to expand capacity toward their goal of removing 1 billion tons of CO2 by 2035.
Chris Walti is co-founder and CEO of Mytra, the Brisbane, CA-based robotics company rebuilding industrial material flow from the software up. Before founding Mytra in 2022, he spent 7.5 years at Tesla leading Model 3 material flow engineering, building the company's internal mobile robotics team, and becoming the first lead of what would become the Optimus humanoid robot program. Mytra has since raised $198M in total funding including a $120M Series C in January 2026, and its 3D robotic storage systems are deployed at Albertsons distribution centers, delivering up to 88% labor hour savings versus conventional solutions.
Hadi Solh is the Co-Founder of Flex, an AI-native finance super app for mid-market business owners, and Managing Partner at Atmos Ventures, a deep-technology venture capital firm. Drawing on 20+ years across Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and Credit Suisse, he co-built Flex from a construction-industry credit card into a $490M+ funded platform processing $3B+ in annualized payments, serving business owners who power 40% of US payroll. Based in Dubai, he also sits on the boards of Oxford Ionics (quantum computing) and Nethone (cybersecurity).
Jeremy Suard is the Co-Founder and CEO of Exodigo, a Palo Alto-based deep tech company applying AI and multi-sensor fusion to solve one of infrastructure's oldest problems: accurately mapping what's underground before drilling through it. Born in France and raised partly in Israel, Suard served nearly eight years in Israeli Military Intelligence Unit 81, directing AI and signal processing R&D teams and becoming the most decorated technology major in the IDF. He co-founded Exodigo in 2021 with fellow IDF alumni Ido Gonen and Yogev Shifman, channeling classified sensor-fusion expertise into a commercial platform that scans the ground non-intrusively, locates 20-30% more utility lines than premium competitors, and has raised over $271 million in funding to date.
Matthew Rosenthal is CEO and Co-Founder of SewerAI, the AI-powered platform transforming how cities inspect and manage underground sewer infrastructure. A Carnegie Mellon-trained engineer who worked at Fitbit and founded Centosette (acquired 2010), Rosenthal pivoted into sewer tech after recognizing that one million miles of U.S. pipes were being assessed with 20-year-old software. SewerAI's Pioneer platform and AutoCode AI have now processed over 135 million feet of sewer inspection footage, slashing inspection costs by 40-70% and saving municipalities tens of millions of dollars. In June 2024, Rosenthal closed a $15M Series B led by Innovius Capital, bringing total funding to $18.5M.
Nicholas Flanders is the Co-Founder and CEO of Twelve, a carbon transformation company that converts CO2, water, and renewable electricity into sustainable aviation fuel and carbon-neutral chemicals. A Stanford MBA and former McKinsey consultant, Flanders co-founded Twelve (originally Opus 12) in 2015 alongside scientists Dr. Etosha Cave and Dr. Kendra Kuhl to commercialize breakthrough electrochemical CO2 conversion technology developed at Stanford. The company has raised over $790 million, including a $645 million financing round in 2024 led by TPG Rise Climate, and is building AirPlant One - the world's first commercial-scale e-fuels facility - in Moses Lake, Washington.
Otto Marroquin is the Founder of Celera Corporation (operating as Celera Incorporated / Celera Semiconductor), an AI-powered analog semiconductor company headquartered in Alameda, California. Celera has built a patented platform - Nestos - that uses digital twins and behavioral modeling to automate analog IC design, cutting development cycles by up to 10x compared to traditional workflows. Backed by $23 million in funding including a $20 million Series A from Maverick Silicon in August 2025, Marroquin's venture targets the $70 billion analog semiconductor market with a platform that delivers custom analog ICs at a pace the industry has never seen before.
Patrick Naulleau is the CEO of EUV Tech Inc., a Martinez, California-based company leading the development of at-wavelength extreme ultraviolet (EUV) metrology tools for semiconductor manufacturing. With over 25 years of pioneering work in EUV lithography — including helping build the world's first EUV scanner at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and co-developing the SHARP EUV mask microscope — Naulleau transitioned from world-class researcher to industry CEO in 2022. He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, is a Fellow of both Optica and SPIE, and has authored over 400 publications. EUV Tech raised a $36M Series A led by Intel Capital in 2023.
Pierre-Damien Vaujour is the co-founder and CEO of Loft Orbital, the San Francisco-based company that turned satellite deployment from a multi-year aerospace engineering odyssey into something closer to provisioning a cloud server. A French aerospace engineer by training — ISAE-SUPAERO class of 2008, master's from University of Michigan — he cut his teeth at ESA, NASA, the Google Lunar X PRIZE, and was among the first hires at Spire Global before co-founding Loft Orbital in 2017 with Alex Greenberg and Antoine de Chassy. Under his leadership, the company reached unicorn status in January 2025 with a $170M Series C, surpassed $500M in cumulative bookings, and is now building the default AI execution layer for orbital infrastructure.
Ryan McLinko is the co-founder and CTO of Astranis Space Technologies, a San Francisco-based company building compact, software-defined geostationary satellites to bring affordable broadband to underserved regions worldwide. An MIT-trained aerospace engineer who cut his teeth on cubesats at Planet Labs and the Dream Chaser spaceplane at Sierra Nevada, McLinko co-founded Astranis in 2015 with CEO John Gedmark. The company has since launched five satellites, secured over $1.2 billion in funding including a $450M Series E in May 2026, and been named Prime Contractor for multiple U.S. Space Force programs — all while being valued at $2.8 billion.
Stämm is a deep-tech biomanufacturing company building a desktop-scale, 3D-printed, bubble-free bioprocessor that replaces the giant stainless-steel tanks of conventional pharma. Founded in Buenos Aires and headquartered in San Francisco, the company is pursuing a vision of decentralized, AI-driven production of biologics and cell therapies.
Shashank Samala is the CEO and Co-Founder of Heirloom, the company operating America's first commercial direct air capture facility. A serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded Tempo Automation (raising $100M+ for aerospace-grade electronics manufacturing), he pivoted to carbon removal after a stint as Entrepreneur in Residence at Carbon180. At Heirloom, he's building limestone-based DAC technology to remove one billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere by 2035, targeting a cost of $50 per ton. The company has raised $354M total, including a $150M Series B in December 2024, and is building two new DAC facilities in Louisiana with combined annual capacity of nearly 320,000 tons.
Dr. Venkat Mattela is the Founder and CEO of Ceremorphic, Inc., a San Jose-based deep-tech company designing ultra-low-power AI supercomputing chips built on TSMC's 5nm process. A serial entrepreneur with a PhD in Electrical Engineering, he previously founded Redpine Signals and sold its wireless connectivity division to Silicon Labs for $308 million in 2020. With over 100 patents and four decades in semiconductor engineering, Mattela is now betting Ceremorphic's proprietary ThreadArch architecture can reshape AI computing for data centers, drug discovery, and next-generation HPC workloads.
Akash Systems is a San Francisco deep-tech company building chips and systems cooled by lab-grown diamond. Its patented GaN-on-Diamond technology pulls heat away from transistors at the nanometer scale, powering everything from CubeSat radios that beam data at 5 Gbps to AI servers that run cooler at higher density. Backed by Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund and the U.S. CHIPS Act, the company is building a 40,000 sq ft diamond-semiconductor fab in West Oakland.
ARRIS Composites is a Berkeley-based advanced manufacturing company that invented Additive Molding, a patented process for mass-producing continuous-fiber thermoplastic composite parts. The technology lets brands replace metal and plastic with lighter, stronger, more sustainable parts - and do it at consumer-electronics volumes.
Xscape Photonics is a Santa Clara-based deep-tech startup building next-generation silicon photonic solutions to solve the escape bandwidth crisis inside AI data centers. Founded in 2022 by a team of Columbia University researchers and industry veterans, the company's proprietary ChromX platform and FalconX laser module deliver multi-wavelength optical connectivity that can increase data throughput by 10x while cutting power by 10x compared to conventional solutions. Backed by $95 million in total funding from NVIDIA, Cisco, and others, Xscape is building the photonic fabric that will underpin the next generation of agentic AI infrastructure.
Michael Fanfant is a General Partner at Runa Capital, a $200M+ early-stage VC firm, where he backs B2B SaaS and regulated-industry startups in fintech, edtech, and digital health. Before turning investor, he co-founded Octane Lending — a point-of-sale financing platform for powersports vehicles that hit a $900M+ valuation in 2021. A Stanford economics graduate, Kauffman Fellow (Class 27), and Events & Community Chair at BLCK VC, Fanfant brings the operational credibility of a builder and the pattern-recognition of an investor to every check he writes.
Ian Glow is the co-founder and CEO of Zeromatter, a Mountain View-based simulation platform that lets robotics, aerospace, and autonomy teams build, test, and train anything in virtual environments. He previously helped pioneer Tesla's Autopilot simulation infrastructure - working as Manager of Autopilot Simulation - before striking out to democratize simulation tooling for the broader industry. Zeromatter has raised $45M and assembled a 75+ person team of engineers from Tesla, Cruise, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Activision, and id Software.
Julian Zheren Ma is the founder and CEO of Inceptio Technology, the company behind what is arguably the world's most deployed autonomous trucking network. Based in Santa Clara and Shanghai, Inceptio has put over 4,000 Level 3 autonomous heavy-duty trucks on real freight routes, logging 500+ million commercial kilometers with zero fatal accidents. Before building Inceptio, Julian was a Corporate VP at Tencent overseeing LBS, search, and early autonomous driving initiatives, then president of G7, China's leading logistics big data firm. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and an MBA from IMD Switzerland, and is a Fellow of the Aspen Institute China Fellowship Program.
Thomas C. Holst is a Norwegian-American business architect, investor, and entrepreneur who built Huddly - a Norwegian deep tech computer vision company - from a four-person startup into a publicly listed global enterprise with offices in Oslo, Palo Alto, London, Austin, Washington, and Bangalore. With a career spanning management consulting (A.T. Kearney), private equity (Reiten & Co, Orkla Finance), and deep tech venture building, he has collaborated with Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, Google, and Zoom. After departing Huddly, he co-founded Northscaler - a B2B tech venture firm connecting Nordic startups with global corporations - and became a Partner at ICON Asset Management AG in 2024.
Aaron Sisto is the Co-Founder & CEO of Chronicle Studios, a content intelligence platform that uses proprietary agentic AI to help creators launch and scale global IP franchises. A PhD quantum chemist turned deep-tech investor turned entertainment entrepreneur, Sisto blends hard science and pop culture instincts in a company that raised an oversubscribed $11.6M seed round in 2025 backed by Patron and Point72 Ventures. Previously a partner at First Spark Ventures and Director of Engineering at Schmidt Futures, he co-founded Chronicle alongside entertainment veteran Chris deFaria, former president of DreamWorks Animation.
Amit Narayan is the Co-Founder and CEO of GridCARE, a Redwood City-based generative AI company that unlocks hidden power grid capacity to slash data center connection timelines from 5-7 years to 6-12 months. A serial entrepreneur with a PhD from UC Berkeley and a B.Tech from IIT Kanpur, he previously founded AutoGrid (acquired by Schneider Electric in 2022) and Berkeley Design Automation (acquired by Mentor Graphics in 2014), and holds 7 U.S. patents across semiconductor design and energy software. GridCARE emerged from stealth in May 2025 with a $13.5M seed round led by Xora and backed by Tom Steyer, Ram Shriram, and Breakthrough Energy, targeting what Narayan calls the defining constraint on AI: immediate access to power.
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.
Francisco Leport is the co-founder and CEO of Gordian Biotechnology, a South San Francisco-based company pioneering high-throughput in vivo drug discovery for age-related diseases. Trained as a physicist at Stanford, Leport pivoted from particle physics and energy tech into biotech, driven by a lifelong fascination with longevity sparked by his mother's fruit fly research. Gordian's signature 'mosaic screening' platform uses gene therapy vectors and single-cell RNA sequencing to test hundreds of therapies simultaneously in single animal models, with an AI system called Pythia scoring results against human disease signatures - achieving 80% accuracy in predicting clinical outcomes. The company raised a $60M Series A in April 2024, backed by Founders Fund, Gigafund, and The Longevity Fund, and in early 2026 announced a research collaboration with Pfizer to accelerate obesity drug discovery.
Hardik Kabaria is Co-Founder and CEO of Vinci4D.ai (now getvinci.ai), a Palo Alto-based AI company building a physics foundation model that makes hardware simulation 1000x faster than traditional finite element analysis. A Stanford PhD in Mechanics and Computation, he spent eight years at Carbon - the 3D printing unicorn - rising from software engineer to CXO before founding Vinci in 2023. His company emerged from stealth in December 2025 with $46M raised from Xora Innovation, Khosla Ventures, and Eclipse, already deployed with three leading semiconductor manufacturers and validated by over half the world's top 20 chip companies.