digital-twins
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Shirin Hameed Turns Engineering Detail Into a Reason to Care
At Detroit Engineered Products, the CMO works in the narrow gap between simulation data and human judgment. Her playbook favors useful questions, specific outcomes and trust that survives the sale.
Marianna Kantor Is Making the Case That Every Business Problem Has a Geography
The Esri CMO has spent a career translating technical systems into business language. Her current argument is disarmingly simple: AI can know what, but decisions still happen somewhere.
Niklas Panten Is Teaching Heavy Industry to Stop Guessing
A sailing fan turned control engineer, he learned inside a working research factory that the costliest machines are often run by habit. Now his company is taking that lesson from Darmstadt to San Francisco.
Phillip Li Is Building a Practice World for AI Agents
The former Team Canada épée fencer left UBC in his final year. Now he and a calculus-class friend are giving software agents somewhere safe to make expensive mistakes.
Justin Scott Wants to Retire the Product Photo
After helping sell homes, creator culture, and policy intelligence, Justin Scott arrived at a stubborn idea: online shopping should feel less like reading a catalog and more like meeting the product.
Swarup Mavanoor Is Building Solar's Memory
A cost overrun exposed a simple problem: solar projects forget too much. Swarup Mavanoor has spent the years since turning scattered images, field notes, and handoffs into a living record of the asset.
Anne Zink Wants Every Cell Tower to Tell the Truth
The 5x5 Technologies founder spent years helping disruptive products find a market. Then she found a stubborn problem hiding inside thousands of polished drone photographs: infrastructure owners could see their assets, but they still could not reliably act on them.
Cate Lochead Is Turning Engineering Precision Into a Story People Can Use
After a career marketing databases, cybersecurity, cloud directories, and enterprise AI, Cate Lochead has arrived at infrastructure software with a clear brief: make complex engineering matter to the people who depend on it.
Kshitij Jaggi Is Turning Oncology’s Back Office Into a System of Action
The RISA co-founder has spent a decade learning that software only matters when it moves work. His latest bet is an AI operating layer built for the forms, portals, policies, and handoffs that decide how quickly oncology operations can run.
Christian Sanz Built a Map That Could Keep Up With the Ground
He began with homemade drones, free construction-site maps, and a question about what a flying camera could make newly visible. Thirteen years later, Skycatch became part of Caterpillar - proof that the useful product was never the aircraft, but a faster version of reality.
Apurva Shah Builds Worlds Where Robots Can Fail First
After two decades making digital worlds believable, the former Pixar technical leader is using simulation to make machines more dependable in the real one.
Mathew Elenjickal
Mathew (Matt) Elenjickal is the founder and CEO of FourKites, the Chicago-based supply chain visibility company he started in 2014 after realizing he could track a pair of Amazon shoes to the doorstep but not a $100,000 shipment of industrial equipment. A mechanical engineer from Kerala turned logistics-software operator, he spent seven years at i2 Technologies and Oracle before building FourKites into a platform that now tracks more than 3.2 million supply chain events a day for 1,600+ global brands. He has raised roughly $247 million across four rounds and is now pushing the company past dashboards into AI-native orchestration with products like the Intelligent Control Tower and Loft.
Alexander Lavin
Alexander Lavin is an AI researcher and former rocket scientist who founded Pasteur Labs and the Institute for Simulation Intelligence (ISI) in New York. He is building what he calls 'the IDE for reality' - simulation engines fused with AI that let scientists and engineers run experiments in software before touching the physical world. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and lead author of the landmark 'Simulation Intelligence' paper, Lavin's path runs from lunar rovers and Blue Origin rocket structures through Numenta, Vicarious, and a probabilistic-medicine startup acquired by Johnson & Johnson, to a focused-research mission aimed at Nobel-Turing breakthroughs in energy, climate, and fusion.
Ali Merchant
Ali Merchant is the founder and CEO of iQ3Connect, a Woburn, Massachusetts company building a web-based, ultrafast XR platform that lets enterprise teams step into shared 3D spaces for design review and training straight from a browser - no heavy installs, no specialized hardware required. An MIT-trained aeronautical engineer with a Ph.D. in turbomachinery, he spent two decades building high-performance 3D design and simulation software for aerospace before turning a decade-plus of MIT research into a platform that aims to make immersive 3D as easy to build as a slide deck and as collaborative as a video call.
Dorian Pieracci
Dorian Pieracci is the Co-Founder and CEO of MOVRS, a Los Angeles sports-technology company that turns ordinary video into structured, labeled 3D data about how humans move. Founded in 2020, MOVRS builds AI-powered biomechanics and digital-twin tools for sports and entertainment partners, from baseball pitching analysis to immersive broadcast experiences. A Georgetown-trained sports industry executive and UC Berkeley graduate, Pieracci is a Comcast NBCUniversal SportsTech accelerator alum who pivoted MOVRS from direct sales to a partner-led model and assembled a team drawn from MLB and major sports media.
Frank Pica
Frank Pica is the CEO and co-founder of Native AI, a New York market-intelligence platform that builds AI-powered digital twins - synthetic consumer personas drawn from billions of real data points - so brands can interrogate their customers in real time instead of waiting weeks for surveys and panels. A repeat operator who helped scale Decide from three people to over a hundred and launched Adyoulike in North America, Pica is betting that consumer research is going through a renaissance, and that generative AI is leading it.
Brendan Madden
Brendan Madden is the founder and CEO of Tom Sawyer Software, a Berkeley-based pioneer in graph visualization and analysis technology that he has led since 1992. With four decades of experience in the graph field - starting at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center - Madden built one of the world's foremost graph visualization platforms, serving industries from finance and government to manufacturing and cybersecurity. Under his leadership, Tom Sawyer Software has become a go-to platform for building scalable graph-powered applications, digital twins, and systems modeling tools, with the company's latest push into AI-powered graph technologies and SysML v2 viewer capabilities.
Michael DeLacey
Michael DeLacey is the US CEO of Symetri, the global AECO and manufacturing technology consultancy he helped build from a two-person New England Autodesk reseller in 1994 into a 500-person organization spanning the US and Europe. As co-founder of Microdesk — which Symetri acquired in 2022 and rebranded in 2023 — DeLacey has spent three decades embedding building information modeling, enterprise asset management, and cloud-based digital workflows into the design, construction, and operations practices of architects, engineers, and manufacturers. His conviction: teach people to fish, not fish for them.
Steve Herne
Steve Herne is the CEO of Unlearn.AI, a San Francisco-based company building AI-powered digital twin technology to transform how clinical trials are designed and run. With over 25 years of experience across pharmaceutical R&D companies including WCG, Bioclinica, and Covance, Herne joined Unlearn in May 2024 as Chief Commercial Officer before ascending to CEO in September 2024. Under his leadership, Unlearn — backed by $130M+ in venture funding including a $50M Series C led by Altimeter Capital — is pivoting from research-led to commercially-driven product delivery, with its digital twin models now EMA-qualified and adopted by major biopharma companies to reduce placebo arm sizes by up to 38% in pivotal trials.
Joon Sung Park
Joon Sung Park is the CEO and Co-founder of Simile, a Stanford-spinout AI company that raised $100M Series A in February 2026 to build digital twins that simulate human behavior and predict consumer decisions. A PhD in Computer Science from Stanford (2025), Park pioneered the concept of 'generative agents' - AI actors with memory, reflection, and planning capabilities - through a landmark 2023 paper that earned a Best Paper Award at UIST and became one of the most-cited works in HCI. Before launching Simile, he was an oil painter trained in hyper-realism, a background that infuses his research with a rare sensitivity to what makes humans human. His digital-twin platform has already signed CVS Health and Telstra as customers, and his model correctly forecast 8 out of 10 questions asked at a real earnings call.
Kevin McNamara
Kevin McNamara is the Founder and CEO of Parallel Domain, a San Francisco-based synthetic data and simulation platform that has raised $43.9M to power the next generation of AI perception systems. With a rare career arc spanning Pixar's animation pipeline, Microsoft's Xbox game studios, and Apple's secretive autonomous systems group, McNamara distilled a career of building virtual worlds into a platform that lets autonomous vehicle, drone, and robotics companies train their AI on infinite synthetic scenarios - accelerating ML development cycles by over 180x compared to real-world data collection.
Arman Assadi
Arman Assadi is a serial entrepreneur, AI founder, and copywriter who left Google in 2014 with a one-way ticket to Cuba and never looked back. He co-created the EVO Planner (the most-funded planner in crowdfunding history), built 13 different seven-figure product launches for clients like Neil Patel and Jeff Walker, and now leads Steno.ai — an AI digital twins platform backed by Tony Robbins that lets experts scale their voice and personality across web, mobile, and SDK. He co-hosts the Alfalfa Podcast and has spent a decade on a mission to democratize wisdom.
Adam Jacob
Adam Jacob is the co-founder of Chef (the infrastructure automation company acquired for $220M) and current CEO of System Initiative, a next-generation DevOps platform using digital twins to visually model and simulate infrastructure. A self-taught systems engineer who ran ISPs as a teenager and built automated infrastructure for 15 startups before co-founding Opscode/Chef in 2008, Jacob created the Chef, InSpec, and Habitat open-source tools that helped define the DevOps movement. Today he advocates for rebuilding DevOps from the ground up, arguing that tooling and culture must evolve together - and that Infrastructure as Code, as practiced, is still broken.