drones
(15)
Alex Fink
He watched his parents tune into Voice of America at 4 a.m. Decades later he is building the software brain for drone swarms - and an app to clean up the news. The through-line is simpler than it looks.
Sam Dai
Sam Dai is the co-founder and CEO of Enpower Greentech, a battery cell maker building semi-solid-state, lithium-metal, and silicon-rich cells. Trained as a physicist at Tsinghua and a materials scientist at UT Austin under Nobel laureate John B. Goodenough, he started the company in 2012 with fellow post-doc Che Yong. The company has shipped over 3 million solid-state cells, holds more than 100 patents, and runs facilities across the US, China, Japan, and Germany. Dai was selected for Unreasonable Impact Asia Pacific 2024.
Jason Steinberg
Jason Steinberg is the CEO of Scanifly, a drone-based software platform that lets solar companies survey rooftops, build 3D models, run shading analysis, and produce permit-ready designs without repeated site visits or dangerous roof climbs. A CFA charterholder who once installed solar panels on New Jersey rooftops, he spent years financing renewable energy projects at Bloomberg New Energy Finance and CohnReznick Capital before taking the helm at Scanifly in 2018. He hosts the podcast 'When Life Gives You Lumens,' where he digs into how the solar industry can scale through better technology, safety, and workforce development.
Ivan Lvov
Ivan Lvov is the CEO of TraceAir Technologies, a Seattle-founded construction site intelligence platform that uses drone data and AI to help homebuilders and land developers measure, verify, and manage grading and earthwork from land acquisition through finished lots. He joined TraceAir in 2016 as Chief Strategy Officer and stepped into the CEO role in September 2025, succeeding co-founder Maria Khokhlova. Before TraceAir he spent years scaling a digital mapping and navigation franchise (2GIS) to 16 offices and 450 employees, and he holds an MSx degree from Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Todd Graetz
Todd Graetz is the co-founder and CEO of Aerolane, a Texas aviation startup building autonomous towed cargo gliders called Aerocarts, which let ordinary planes tow extra payload for only a marginal increase in fuel burn. Before Aerolane he spent his career at BNSF Railway, where he co-founded the railroad's uncrewed aircraft systems program and helped launch some of the first long-range beyond-visual-line-of-sight commercial drone flights in the U.S. under the FAA Pathfinder program. He is an active private pilot, an AUVSI board member, and a veteran of multiple FAA advisory and rulemaking committees.
James Paterson
James Paterson is the co-founder and CEO of Aerobotics, a Cape Town-based precision agriculture company that turns drone and satellite imagery into AI-powered, tree-by-tree insights for fruit and nut growers. Raised on a family citrus farm and trained as a mechatronics engineer at the University of Cape Town before a masters at MIT, Paterson pairs first-hand farming instinct with aerospace-grade robotics. Since founding Aerobotics with Benji Meltzer in 2014, he has grown it into a global player that now analyzes a large share of the Florida citrus crop and has raised roughly $30 million, insisting the company is 'a farming company, enabled by technology' rather than a tech company that dabbles in farming.
Jia Xu
Jia Xu is CEO of SkyGrid, the Austin, Texas company building high-assurance airspace integration software for autonomous and unmanned flight. With a PhD from Stanford, dual master's degrees from Imperial College London and the London School of Economics, and career stints at the RAND Corporation, Airbus, General Atomics, and Honeywell Aerospace, Xu brings rare cross-disciplinary depth to one of aviation's hardest problems: teaching machines to share the sky. Under his leadership since August 2023, SkyGrid pivoted from generic airspace software to become a specialized third-party services provider for advanced air mobility - and was acquired by Wisk Aero (a Boeing subsidiary) in June 2025.
David Zagaynov
David Zagaynov is the CEO and co-founder of Poseidon Aerospace, a San Francisco aerospace startup building unmanned, runway-independent cargo aircraft. A UC Berkeley computer science graduate and former Amazon software engineer, he co-founded the company in 2023 with Parker Tenney and Isaac Baumstark around a shared obsession with the ekranoplan, a Soviet Cold War boat-plane that skimmed just above the water. Poseidon is developing the Heron seaplane and the Egret short-takeoff aircraft, each designed to haul up to two tons of cargo over 1,500 miles. The company raised an $11 million seed round in November 2025 led by Tamarack Global, after a $1.4 million pre-seed led by Starship Ventures.
Mike Horton
Mike Horton is an American engineer and serial deep-tech founder who turns physics into products. He co-founded Crossbow Technology in 1995 out of UC Berkeley, commercialized MEMS motion sensors, and sold the company for about $50 million. He later built GEODNET, a blockchain-incentivized network of roughly 21,000 ground stations that has become the world's largest decentralized GNSS reference network, and now leads HYFIX Spatial Intelligence, a Santa Clara startup that raised a $15M seed led by Craft Ventures to build American-made positioning-and-autonomy chips for drones and robots.
Nathan Schuett
Nathan Schuett is the founder and CEO of PreNav, a Redwood City company that builds drones guided by computer vision to inspect the infrastructure most people never look at - cell towers, wind turbines, bridges, smokestacks. The idea started as a half-serious plan to fly coffee across a cafe and grew into a navigation system precise enough to fly a robot within centimeters of a steel structure without a GPS signal or an expert pilot. A Stanford computer-music graduate who detoured through video games and robotics, Schuett now also lists himself as founder of Forming AI, the next chapter of turning the physical world into analyzable 3D data.
Mark Strauss
Mark Strauss is the co-founder and CEO of WaveAerospace, a Stratford, Connecticut drone manufacturer building unmanned aircraft engineered to fly in the wind, rain and snow that ground everyone else. A Yale chemistry graduate, airplane racer and pilot who flew before he could legally drive, Strauss teamed with aerospace engineer Steve Bofill to design a new class of all-weather UAS - from the wind-beating Falcon II to the 300-mph Huntress turbojet - sold to police, emergency services, militaries and foreign governments including Ecuador. The company closed an oversubscribed Series A in 2023 at a $40 million pre-money valuation.
Ian Glow
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.
Tim Jenks
Tim Jenks is the Interim CEO of PowerLight Technologies, a Kent, Washington-based company pioneering laser-based wireless power beaming for drones, defense systems, and space infrastructure. A U.S. Naval Academy graduate with a nuclear engineering master's from MIT and an MBA from Stanford, Jenks spent over two decades building NeoPhotonics from a venture-backed startup into a NYSE-listed company before selling it to Lumentum Holdings for approximately $918 million in 2022. Now he's steering PowerLight through a pivotal moment: in April 2026, the company achieved the world's first wireless power beaming to a fielded military drone in flight, delivering kilowatt-class laser energy to a Kraus Hamdani Aerospace K1000ULE at 5,000 feet altitude - a breakthrough that could redefine how unmanned aircraft operate in contested environments.
Adam Bry
Adam Bry is co-founder and CEO of Skydio, the leading U.S. drone manufacturer and world leader in autonomous flight. A childhood R/C aerobatics national champion turned MIT robotics researcher, he turned down a DJI acquisition in 2014 to bet everything on autonomy — and won. Today Skydio has deployed over 60,000 drones to every branch of the U.S. military, 1,200+ public safety agencies, and 45 of 51 state transportation departments, with a $4.4 billion valuation and $3.5 billion U.S. manufacturing expansion underway.
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.