Dmitry Turbiner is the founder and CEO of General Radar Corp., a Silicon Valley deep-tech company building what it calls the world's first 100% commercial AESA phased-array radar with defense-grade performance. An MIT-trained electrical engineer who designed flight-grade satellite antennas at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Turbiner left a Stanford master's program to start the company in 2016. General Radar has raised more than $47 million across seed and Series A rounds from backers including Kleiner Perkins and Octave Ventures, and pioneered a 'Radar-as-a-Service' model that aims to deliver high-resolution, long-range threat detection in a fraction of the usual time and cost.
Matthias Wagner is the German-born co-founder and CEO of Flux, the San Francisco-based AI hardware design platform that turns text prompts into production-ready circuit boards in a single browser tab. Before Flux, he produced the Crazy Frog 'Axel F' ringtone that accumulated nearly 3.8 billion YouTube views, led product teams at Facebook for Moments, AR ads, and Oculus VR, and built digital signage company 42 media group out of a friend's garage at age 24. He founded Flux in 2019 out of frustration that hardware tooling had not evolved in decades, and by 2026 had grown the platform to over 1 million sign-ups and raised $37 million in funding led by 8VC.
Yuyo Llamazares Vegh is the CEO and Co-Founder of Stämm, a San Francisco-based biotech company reinventing biomanufacturing through miniaturized 3D-printed microfluidic bioreactors. A native of Argentina with a background in agricultural engineering and bioprocesses from the University of Buenos Aires, Yuyo co-founded Stämm in 2016 alongside his cousin Federico D'Alvia Vegh after spotting a fundamental gap between biology's potential and the outdated tools available to harness it. Stämm's platform - desktop-sized, modular, and scalable - is designed to make the production of biologics, cell therapies, and gene therapies accessible and repeatable at any scale. The company has raised over $17 million including a Series A led by Varana Capital with participation from Draper Associates and SOSV's IndieBio, and has attracted former Merck KGaA CEO Stefan Oschmann to its board. Yuyo was selected as an Endeavor Entrepreneur in 2023.
Alex Hartz is a General Partner at Shine Capital, a New York seed-stage venture firm with about $435M across three funds. He came up at SciFi VC over eight years, trained as an applied physicist at Caltech, and writes checks into ambitious founders working at the intersection of hard sciences, financial infrastructure, and applied AI.
Aymerik Renard is a General Partner at HCVC (formerly Hardware Club), a community-driven venture firm investing in hardtech startups out of San Francisco and Paris. With more than two decades in venture capital - including stints at Innovacom, Orange, PCH International, SanDisk and Western Digital Capital - he backs founders working on robotics, space, biotech, defense and climate technology in Europe and North America.
Charlotte He is a General Partner at Cardinal Ventures, the student-led accelerator at Stanford backing early-stage tech and bio startups. She studies Biology and Data Science at Stanford and fences saber for the Cardinal varsity team. Foster City native; National Merit Scholar; Pan American Cadet silver medalist.
Enrico Carbone is a Brazilian-born General Partner at Reaction, a Palo Alto-based impact venture fund co-founded by 150+ Stanford alumni across 45 countries, focused on improving one billion lives within a decade through health technology and climate innovation. After a 22-year career in global investment banking at firms including Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch, and BR Partners, he transitioned to venture capital and now also serves as Founding Managing Partner of Irukandji Capital (IKJ Capital), an early-stage healthcare technology fund. He is a Stanford Executive Program (SEP '18) graduate, a recognized GSB Centennial Alumni Catalyst, and a board member of Health in Harmony, an NGO serving indigenous communities in Indonesia, Madagascar, and Brazil.
Jake Storm is a General Partner at Felicis, the early-stage venture firm behind companies like Shopify, Fitbit, and Canva. He focuses on AI, DevTools, cybersecurity, and deeptech — investing from pre-seed through Series B — and brought to Felicis a track record from IVP where he backed Lyra Health, Whoop, and CircleCI. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Venture Capital (2023), Storm grew up across multiple U.S. regions and Brazil, giving him a cross-cultural perspective he credits as foundational to how he evaluates founders and markets.
Raj Shekhar Singh is the Founder and General Partner of z21 Ventures, a community-first, operator-led early-stage VC firm investing at the pre-seed and seed stages across AI, fintech, enterprise software, and healthcare. An IIT Kharagpur BTech graduate with a PhD from UC Berkeley, Singh built his career from McKinsey to founding executive roles at Innovaccer (now a $3.5B healthtech unicorn) before launching z21 in 2022. The firm's $5M Fund I backed 26 startups and has already achieved two exits; Fund II closed its first $20M tranche with WestBridge Capital as anchor investor and is targeting $40M total.
Spencer H. Greene is a General Partner at TSVC (清谷资本), a certified women- and minority-owned seed-stage venture firm in Los Altos, California built on the Tsinghua Entrepreneur and Executive Club network. He leads the firm's healthtech practice after three decades as an operator, M&A executive, and two-time founder in Silicon Valley. Greene holds patents across graphics, networking, and encryption; ran M&A at Juniper Networks (buying the kinds of startups he now backs); and developed the 'Design for Exit' framework to help founders understand what makes them genuinely acquirable - not just successful.
Fred Parietti (Federico) is the Co-Founder and CEO of Multiply Labs, a San Francisco-based robotics company building automated biomanufacturing infrastructure for next-generation pharmaceuticals. Armed with a PhD in robotics from MIT and a childhood passion for Legos, he bet his career on a contrarian thesis: that the highest-value application for advanced robotics wasn't pizza delivery or self-driving cars, but cell therapy manufacturing — where a single batch is worth $400K to $2 million and still made by hand. Multiply Labs has raised over $25 million and announced an $85 million partnership with Retro Biosciences, positioning itself to slash cell therapy costs by 70% and bring life-saving treatments to millions instead of thousands.
Joel Jean is Co-Founder and CEO of Swift Solar, the San Carlos, California-based company turning a decade of perovskite research into commercial solar panels that generate up to 30% more power than conventional silicon. A Taiwanese-American from Beavercreek, Ohio who went through Stanford (BS EE, with distinction) and MIT (SM and PhD EE, NSF Graduate Research Fellow), Jean co-authored the landmark MIT Future of Solar Energy study in 2015, then realized the only logical next step was to build the company the study described. Swift Solar, founded in 2017 with five other perovskite PhDs drawn from MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, and NREL, has raised over $60M, deployed its panels in a live US Department of Defense exercise, earned TIME Top GreenTech recognition three consecutive years, and in March 2026 acquired Meyer Burger's HJT manufacturing assets to plant a full US solar supply chain.
Riley Reese is the CEO and co-founder of ARRIS Composites, a Berkeley-based advanced manufacturing company that invented Additive Molding - a patented process combining 3D printing and compression molding to produce continuous carbon-fiber composite parts at commercial scale. A materials scientist who once built biodegradable heart tissue scaffolds at UC Berkeley, Reese pivoted that same obsession with fiber architecture into a $157M-funded company whose technology now shows up in Brooks running shoes, Skydio drones, and bicycle spokes. He previously co-founded AREVO, worked at medical device giant Stryker, and led additive manufacturing programs in Amsterdam at TNO - before returning to Berkeley to tackle what he calls 'a new manufacturing category.'
Alice Brooks is a Partner at Khosla Ventures investing in deep tech and sustainability - agtech, climate tech, robotics, food & beverage, manufacturing, and education from seed through Series B. Before venture, she co-founded Roominate, the STEM construction toy that landed Time's #1 toy of 2014 and a $500K Shark Tank deal from Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner. A mechanical engineer turned investor, she holds degrees from MIT, Stanford, and Harvard and has led hardware teams at Nest and startup operations across the US and Asia.
Jeff (Jiajun) Lu is the founder and CEO of AKOOL, the generative AI video platform that ranked #1 on the Inc. 5000 list in 2025 with 37,364% revenue growth in three years. A PhD computer scientist who worked on Face ID at Apple and video processing at Google Cloud before building AKOOL on just 8 GPUs in 2020, Lu has turned a side project generating $100K into a $40M-revenue company powering AI avatars and real-time video translation for Coca-Cola, Amazon, Google, and Nvidia.
Hermann Tribukait is the co-founder and CEO of Atinary Technologies, a Lausanne- and Silicon Valley-based deeptech startup that built SDLabs — a no-code AI/ML platform compressing years of R&D into days. A Harvard-trained economist who helped coin the term 'Self-Driving Labs®' in 2017, Tribukait has channeled a career spent brokering $200M+ in global R&D partnerships into software that lets machines design experiments, learn from results, and iterate without human bias getting in the way. Atinary's tools are now used in pharma, biotech, chemicals, and climate tech, with a physical self-driving lab open in Boston since early 2026.
Marcus Zimmerman dropped out of Stanford two quarters shy of graduation to co-found Candor (YC W25), an AI platform that helps defense, biotech, and energy startups win U.S. government funding. Before building Candor, he led Stanford's DEFCON Tech and National Security Network, served as a Defense Innovation Scholar at Stanford's Gordian Knot Center, and sourced deals as a Venture Partner at GoAhead Ventures in Menlo Park. He sits at the rare intersection of venture capital, national security, and applied AI.
Julian Shapiro is a Canadian-born entrepreneur, deeptech seed investor, and prolific writer who built a career that spans open-source animation engines, growth marketing agencies, and a Y Combinator-backed startup. He founded Demand Curve, the largest growth marketing education platform for startups, and now runs Julian.capital, a deeptech seed fund writing $500K-$2M checks into robotics, chips, energy, medtech, and biotech. His free handbooks at julian.com - covering writing, startups, fitness, and audio - are read by over a million people annually. He co-hosts the Brains Podcast with Courtland Allen and was previously VP of Marketing at Webflow.