deep-tech-founder
(28)
Stefan Pastine
Stefan Pastine is an American chemist, inventor and deep-tech founder who builds materials most people never think about but every device depends on. After earning a PhD in organic chemistry from Columbia and doing postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley, he founded Connora Technologies to make recyclable epoxy resins, which was acquired by Aditya Birla Chemicals in 2019. That same year he founded Thintronics, a Bay Area startup developing next-generation dielectric insulator films for printed circuit boards and semiconductor packaging. His pitch is deceptively simple: the insulator, long ignored while engineers obsessed over transistors, is the overlooked bottleneck for faster, cooler AI data centers - and Thintronics wants to unseat a Japanese giant that has held 90% of the market for three decades.
David Arreaga
David Arreaga is the co-founder and CEO of Ares Materials, a Plano, Texas deep-tech company building AI-designed optical polymers for flexible and foldable electronics. A materials scientist with a Ph.D. from UT Dallas, he turned doctoral research on polymer substrates into a company whose Pylux cover-window and adhesive materials target the next generation of foldable displays. Ares pairs high-throughput experimentation with machine learning to shorten materials development from decades to years, and closed the first trench of a $12M Series B round in 2025.
James Hedrick
James Hedrick is the co-founder and CEO of Azul 3D, a Skokie, Illinois deep-tech company commercializing HARP (High Area Rapid Printing), a resin 3D-printing technology he helped invent during his PhD at Northwestern University in Chad Mirkin's lab. HARP uses a flowing, non-stick liquid interface to carry away heat, letting large parts print continuously up to 100 times faster than layer-by-layer machines - fast enough and strong enough to challenge injection molding. Hedrick started his first company at 16 to pay his way through MIT, where he was an NCAA athlete, and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Manufacturing & Industry list in 2020.
Jordan Bramble
Jordan Bramble is the co-founder and CEO of Antares Nuclear (Antares Industries), a Torrance, California company building factory-produced, transportable fission microreactors of up to 1 MW for defense, remote industrial, and space applications. A systems engineer and physicist who did a stint in federal policy at the White House Office of Management and Budget, Bramble started Antares in 2023 on a contrarian bet: instead of chasing the commercial grid on price, sell nuclear's unique capability to customers who need power where the grid and diesel can't reach. Under his leadership Antares raised more than $130 million, built out a 145,000-square-foot factory, and in June 2026 became the first private company to bring an advanced reactor - its Mark-0 - to criticality under the U.S. Department of Energy's Reactor Pilot Program. His stated ambition is to make energy abundant 'from Earth to the Asteroid Belt.'
Naveen Verma
Naveen Verma is the co-founder and CEO of EnCharge AI and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton University. He spent roughly six years de-risking a single, stubborn idea - computing with electric charge stored in metal capacitors instead of noisy transistors - before spinning it out of his lab in 2022. The result is analog in-memory computing hardware that his company says runs AI inference at roughly 20 times less energy than a typical GPU, aimed squarely at putting powerful AI on laptops and edge devices rather than in power-hungry data centers. EnCharge has raised more than $144 million, including an oversubscribed $100M+ Series B led by Tiger Global in early 2025, and shipped its first commercial accelerator, the EN100.
Prakash Govindan
Prakash Govindan is the co-founder and CEO of Gradiant, the water industry's first unicorn, valued above $1 billion. Raised in Chennai during monsoon failures that dried up his family's taps, he turned a childhood of hauling buckets into a PhD at MIT and a company that now renews billions of liters of industrial water a day for clients in semiconductors, pharma, food and beverage, and mining. He co-invented Gradiant's flagship Carrier Gas Extraction technology, holds more than 100 patents, and helped bring the TIME Best Invention 'ForeverGone' PFAS-destruction system to market. A devoted bhakti yogi who has read the Bhagavad Gita some fifty times, he runs one of the fastest-growing water companies on earth while preaching egoless leadership.
Ali Khaloo
Ali Khaloo is a structural engineer turned AI founder who builds software that reads the health of bridges, dams, runways and cooling towers the way a doctor reads an X-ray. As CEO and founder of Aren, the New York company he spun out of Cornell Tech's Runway Startup program, he fuses computer vision, machine learning and civil engineering into an AI-powered digital twin platform that turns drone images, laser scans and sensor data into 3D condition maps and predictive maintenance plans. He holds a PhD in structural engineering, has authored more than 20 peer-reviewed papers cited over 1,000 times, and owns several patents for AI analysis of large infrastructure systems.
Eldrick Millares
Eldrick Millares is the co-founder and co-CEO of Illuminant Surgical, a Los Angeles deep-tech company building Skylight, the first real-time anatomical projection system. It paints a patient's internal anatomy directly onto their skin so surgeons get a kind of live X-ray vision, no headset required. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who immigrated from the Philippines to West Virginia, he built sensing systems at Apple and a lidar startup before teaming up with Stanford classmate Dr. James Hu. The pair went through Y Combinator, were named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Healthcare, and raised an $8.4M seed round in 2026.
Eric Januar
Eric Januar is a co-founder and CEO of BANIQL, a Silicon Valley deep-tech startup reinventing how the world pulls nickel and cobalt out of the ground for electric-vehicle batteries. With 12 years in electronics, battery and semiconductor R&D - including a stint at Merck and a prior startup exit - he helped build BEST (the Baniql Extraction SysTem), a low-temperature, low-pressure process that the company says cuts electricity use by roughly 98 percent and reaches 99.7 percent nickel sulfate purity with net-zero toxic waste. BANIQL closed a US$1.6M seed round in 2024 and completed a 100 kg/month pre-pilot plant by year-end.
Jake Taylor
Jake Taylor is a physicist turned founder and the CEO of Axiomatic AI, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup building 'Axiomatic Intelligence' - AI that combines frontier models with formal mathematical and physics-based verification so engineers can design and prove out hardware like semiconductors and photonic chips. Before Axiomatic, Taylor spent 16 years at NIST as a Fellow and ran the first U.S. effort to coordinate quantum science, serving as the inaugural Assistant Director for Quantum Information Science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he architected the National Quantum Initiative. He holds a PhD in physics from Harvard, has authored more than 200 publications, and his honors range from the Presidential Early Career Award to the Service to America Medal. In March 2026 he led Axiomatic to an $18M seed round.
Malur Narayan
Malur Narayan is the CEO and co-founder of XTRIUM, an Austin-based B2B AI startup building an intelligence layer for materials that matches materials to real-world applications, surfaces sourcing risk, and turns supply chains from fragile to resilient. A computer engineer who was running machine-learning research and self-managed software teams in the early 1990s, he spent three decades scaling technology businesses across five continents at Nortel and Tata Consultancy Services before co-founding two AI startups. He frames XTRIUM around a single idea: making the search for a new application for any material as fast and easy as an internet search, compressing what used to take a year into days.
Richard Givhan
Richard Givhan is the co-founder and CEO of Haiqu, a quantum software company building a hardware-aware operating system that squeezes useful results out of today's noisy, qubit-starved quantum computers. A Stanford-trained engineering physicist who once chased dark matter at the Kavli Institute, Givhan now bets on the unglamorous middleware layer - circuit optimization, error shielding, and orchestration - to make near-term quantum applications run at roughly 100x lower compute cost. Incubated in 2022 inside Toronto's Creative Destruction Lab Quantum stream, Haiqu has raised about $19 million to date, including an $11 million seed round in January 2026 led by Primary Venture Partners.
Saurav Shroff
Saurav Shroff is the co-founder and CEO of Starpath, a Hawthorne, California startup building industrial-scale infrastructure to mine and refine rocket propellant on the Moon and Mars. A UC Berkeley engineering grad and former SpaceX avionics engineer, he started Starpath in mid-2022 with the conviction that mining lunar water ice into liquid oxygen could cut the cost of deep-space transport by orders of magnitude. Starpath raised a $12M seed round in 2024, won NASA Break the Ice prize money, and in 2025 launched 'Starlight' space-rated solar panels priced roughly 90% below industry norms. Shroff has testified before Congress on space resource mining and frames his ambition bluntly: build the supply chain for a million-person city on Mars.
Thomas Sisto
Thomas Sisto is the CEO and co-founder of XL Batteries, a Marlborough, Massachusetts startup commercializing water-based organic flow batteries for long-duration, grid-scale energy storage. A synthetic organic chemist by training, Sisto discovered the company's core molecule during a Columbia University postdoc - a compound he originally designed for solar cells that turned out to be extraordinarily stable in pH-neutral saltwater. He spun XL out of Columbia in 2019 and has since steered it from a lab curiosity to its first commercial pilot, betting that cheap, abundant organic chemicals can break China's grip on the battery supply chain.
Willy Halim
Willy Halim is a chemical engineer and the founder of BANIQL, a San Jose climate-tech startup he started in his backyard in 2021 to refine nickel and cobalt without the heat, pressure, and toxic waste of conventional mining. Trained at UC Berkeley and Cornell and seasoned as a battery engineer in Silicon Valley, he built a low-temperature, atmospheric-pressure chemical process that BANIQL says uses about 80% less energy than industry-standard high-pressure acid leaching, produces net-zero toxic waste, and turns leftovers into fertilizer and construction material. The company raised a $1.6M seed round led by BEENEXT in 2024 and added 500 Global and Genesia Ventures in 2025, aiming first at Indonesia, which holds roughly a quarter of the world's nickel.
Shawn Murphy
Shawn Murphy is the co-founder, CEO and CTO of Titan Advanced Energy Solutions, a Salem, Massachusetts company using ultrasound to see inside lithium-ion batteries. After deploying instruments for NASA at Draper Laboratory and building Royal Dutch Shell's innovation engine, Shell TechWorks, Murphy spent the summer of 2016 painting wave-propagation equations on the walls of a Croatian guest room. The result is technology that reads a battery's true state of health and charge in real time, claimed to be about 100 times better than the industry standard - now deployed on cell-manufacturing lines to catch defects before they ship. Titan raised a $33M Series B led by HG Ventures in 2021.
Schuyler Cullen
Schuyler Cullen is the co-founder and CEO of Summer Robotics, a Campbell, California machine-vision company building Kortx, a camera-free perception system that uses lasers and event sensors to give robots animal-like sight at 100Hz, 100-micron precision, and 20ms reaction time. A theoretical physicist by training with a Caltech double major and a Stanford PhD in string theory, Cullen spent two decades turning hard math into shipping technology - co-founding the video-recognition startup Keystream and leading AI and Robotics at Samsung, where he built the autonomous-mobility stack for the company's robots and cars. In 2025 Summer Robotics raised a Series A led by Applied Ventures, the venture arm of Applied Materials.
Adnan Hamid
Adnan Hamid is the founder and core-technology inventor of Breker Verification Systems, a San Jose EDA company that pioneered graph-based, specification-driven chip verification and helped birth the industry's Portable Stimulus Standard. A Princeton-trained electrical engineer and computer scientist with an MBA from UT Austin, he earned the nickname 'The Breaker' for a simple reason: he breaks things for a living. After leading AMD's verification team to 100% coverage on an x86-class microprocessor and a stint at Cadence, he founded Breker in 2003 with his wife Maheen. He now serves as Executive President and CTO, holds more than 17 patents, and is regarded as one of the original visionaries behind teaching computers to verify the chips inside nearly every modern device.
Dave Welch
Dave Welch is the founder and CEO of AttoTude, a Menlo Park deep-tech startup building the world's first terahertz interconnect that runs over wire instead of fiber or photonics, aimed at unclogging the data-movement bottleneck inside AI and hyperscale data centers. A co-founder of Infinera, where he pioneered large-scale photonic integrated circuits, and former CTO at SDL, Welch holds more than 200 patents, has authored roughly 300 publications, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In April 2025 AttoTude raised a $50M Series B, pushing total funding past $90M.
Eugene Beh
Eugene Beh is the founder and CEO of Quino Energy, a clean-tech startup commercializing water-based redox flow batteries that store grid-scale renewable energy using quinones - organic molecules dissolved in water. A chemist trained at Harvard and Stanford, he spun the technology out of Harvard's Aziz and Gordon labs and built a single-step, zero-waste manufacturing process that turns coal-tar feedstock into non-flammable battery electrolyte. Before Quino, he was Xerox PARC's most prolific inventor two years running.
Mark Punyanitya
Mark Punyanitya is a New York biomedical engineer turned founder who spent more than fifteen years measuring the human body one MRI slice at a time, then set out to make that kind of imaging cheap and portable enough to put in the back of a truck. As Co-Founder, President and CEO of PhenoMx, Inc. and founder of the Image Reading Center, he turns advanced scanning into quantitative imaging biomarkers for global clinical trials and a 'digital physical exam' for precision medicine and longevity. With 44-plus published papers behind him, he is trying to liberate medical imaging from the basements of academic hospitals and disperse it anywhere, anytime.
Mian Zhang
Mian Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of HyperLight, the Cambridge-based deep-tech company commercializing thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) photonics. A Cornell-trained physicist who did his foundational work in Marko Loncar's lab at Harvard, Zhang took a notoriously hard-to-manufacture optical material and shrank it onto silicon-style chips - cutting signal loss roughly 100-fold in work published in Nature. HyperLight now runs the industry's first high-volume, qualified 6-inch TFLN production line and is pushing 400G-per-lane photonic circuits into hyperscale AI data centers through partnerships with UMC, Wavetek, and Jabil.
Ophir Gaathon
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.
Sarah Lamaison
Sarah Lamaison is the co-founder and CEO of Dioxycle, a Paris- and Bay Area-based climate-tech company building electrolyzers that turn industrial CO2 into ethylene and other chemicals using only water, electricity, and waste carbon. A chemist trained at Ecole Polytechnique, Cambridge, College de France, and Stanford, she turned her PhD on artificial photosynthesis into a company aiming to decarbonize one of the planet's dirtiest industries while staying cost-competitive with fossil feedstocks. She raised $17M in Series A funding led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Lowercarbon Capital, won the L'Oreal-UNESCO Young Talent award, and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30.
Siva Yellamraju
Siva Yellamraju is the co-founder and CEO of Fourier, a Palo Alto hydrogen startup building modular, software-controlled electrolyzers no bigger than two server racks. A four-time founder whose previous companies were acquired by Apple, Google, and Polycom, he spent a career in cameras and video before turning a 10-15% side exploration into a clean-energy company. Fourier treats hydrogen production as a data-optimization problem, aiming to deliver on-site hydrogen at $6-7/kg. The company raised an $18.5M Series A led by General Catalyst and Paramark Ventures in April 2025.
Tim Latimer
Tim Latimer is the co-founder and CEO of Fervo Energy, the company that took horizontal drilling and fiber optic sensing out of the shale fields and pointed them straight down into hot rock. A former oil-and-gas drilling engineer who grew up next to the last coal plant built in America, he left the industry, talked his way into Stanford, met a geothermal PhD named Jack Norbeck, and bet that geothermal could become 24/7 carbon-free power at utility scale. Fervo has since raised over a billion dollars, broken drilling records once thought decades away, signed Google as a customer, and gone public on the Nasdaq in 2026 while building Cape Station, the world's largest next-generation geothermal project.
Rob Devlin
Rob Devlin is the co-founder and CEO of Metalenz, the first company to take metasurface optics out of the lab and into mass-market consumer devices. A Harvard-trained applied physicist who studied under Federico Capasso, he turned a Science cover paper into a fabless optical-semiconductor company that prints flat lenses in standard chip foundries. Under his leadership Metalenz shipped the world's first metasurfaces in consumer products with STMicroelectronics in 2022 and launched Polar ID, a polarization-based face authentication system. He keeps the first wafer of 10,000 metasurface lenses on his desk as a reminder of how a single fabrication shot eclipsed an entire PhD's worth of handmade devices.
William Fitzhugh
William Fitzhugh is the co-founder and CEO of Adden Energy, a Harvard spin-out scaling a self-healing, solid-state lithium-metal battery that has charged in as little as three minutes and survived more than 10,000 cycles in lab cells. A Harvard PhD in applied physics, he is trying to turn a coin-cell breakthrough into a roll-to-roll pilot line and, eventually, batteries that let an EV recharge in the time it takes to fill a gas tank.