Alan Zhang (Rongyu Zhang) is a San Francisco-based founder, aerospace engineer, and YouTube creator who built the first human-carrying eVTOL drone assembled by a high schooler — a 280kg-thrust electric aircraft completed in 327 days with 17 classmates in a Diamond Bar garage. Now at UC Berkeley's MET program (Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology), he is building Prototype 3 of his passenger drone and running a stealth startup, while his YouTube channel @alanzeekk documents his journey building interesting machines.
Michael Norcia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pyka, the world's first FAA-certified autonomous electric aviation company. Based in Alameda, California, Pyka builds large-scale autonomous electric aircraft for agricultural crop protection and cargo logistics. Norcia — a UC Davis applied physics grad who cut his teeth engineering firmware and power systems at Zee Aero, Joby Aviation, and Kittyhawk — founded Pyka in 2017 (Y Combinator S17) with a pragmatic thesis: skip the flying cars, solve the problems aviation already has. Today Pyka's Pelican aircraft spray hundreds of acres per hour across the US, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Brazil, and the company is expanding into defense with a new platform called DropShip.
John Keh is the Founder and CEO of Valtec, a San Diego-based maritime AI and drone company that deploys autonomous VTOL systems on commercial fishing vessels to detect tuna schools in real time. A UC Berkeley alumnus and former US Air Force geospatial intelligence analyst with 250+ missions across South Korea and the Middle East, Keh pivoted from food delivery (3rd employee at Caviar, Uber Eats courier intelligence lead) to maritime defense after four years building startups in Taiwan. Valtec raised a $2M pre-seed round in March 2025 backed by SparkLabs Taiwan, Wavemaker VC, DRONE FUND, Guitar Hero founder Kai Huang, and Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, with the company's Larus VTOL drone and Fulcan AI platform now deployed on 40+ fishing vessels across Taiwan and the Philippines.