TaoTao USA, Inc. is the United States distribution arm of Tao Motor, one of the world's largest makers of affordable powersports vehicles. From its Carrollton, Texas headquarters it supplies a coast-to-coast dealer network with ATVs, dirt bikes, scooters, go-karts, UTVs, golf carts, mini bikes and electric vehicles built by parent company Taotao Vehicles Company, Ltd., a Chinese manufacturer operating since 1985. The pitch is simple: get families onto trails, tracks and back yards on dependable machines that don't cost a fortune.
Adden Energy is a Harvard spinout building dynamically-stable, self-healing solid-state lithium-metal batteries designed to make electric vehicles charge in minutes, last a million miles, and never catch fire. Headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, the company is scaling its lab breakthrough into commercial pouch cells on a roll-to-roll pilot line and shipping samples to automakers for validation.
Uber is a global technology platform that connects riders, drivers, eaters, couriers, and shippers through a single app. What began in 2009 as a way to summon a black car in San Francisco has grown into a multi-sided marketplace spanning ride-hailing, food and grocery delivery (Uber Eats), and freight logistics (Uber Freight). It operates in roughly 70 countries and 10,000+ cities, serving more than 200 million monthly active users and completing over 13 billion trips a year.
Bill Lin is the Deputy CEO and Board Member of One Mobility GmbH, the automotive arm of Foxconn Interconnect Technology (FIT), headquartered in Reutlingen, Germany. With a career spanning supply chain management, management consulting, and EV business leadership at Foxconn, Lin bridges Taiwan's electronics manufacturing powerhouse with Germany's century-old automotive precision engineering heritage. He also serves as Chief Integration Officer at FIT, steering the integration of One Mobility's 11,000-person global workforce across 40+ locations in 17 countries following the 2024 acquisition of Auto-Kabel Group.
Derek Maunus is the President and CEO of GILLIG LLC, America's oldest surviving bus manufacturer, founded in 1890 and now headquartered in Livermore, California. He joined GILLIG in 2011 and rose through roles in aftermarket parts and manufacturing before being appointed CEO in 2018. Under his leadership, GILLIG has expanded its clean-energy portfolio - including battery electric, hybrid, CNG, and hydrogen fuel cell buses - and executed a complex relocation from Hayward to a new 600,000 sq ft solar-powered facility in Livermore. With roughly 1,100 employees and annual revenue near $325M, GILLIG holds significant market share in North American heavy-duty transit bus manufacturing.
Hamish McKenzie is the New Zealand-born co-founder and Chief Writing Officer of Substack, the subscription newsletter platform that has fundamentally reshaped how writers monetize their work. A former journalist and Tesla lead writer who wrote a book about Elon Musk's EV revolution, McKenzie pivoted from covering disruption to causing it - co-founding Substack in 2017 with Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi. Today the platform hosts over 50,000 earning creators and has raised $213 million total funding including a $100M Series C. McKenzie hosts The Active Voice podcast, delivered a TED2025 talk on the future of media, and is writing a book called 'How to Save the Media' due in 2026.
Raef Sully is the CEO of Lilac Solutions, an Oakland-based company pioneering direct lithium extraction (DLE) technology using ceramic ion exchange beads. A structural engineer turned management consultant turned industrial executive, Sully brings 30+ years spanning tall buildings, the Australian Army Reserve, Bain & Company, and a decade running Nutrien's $10 billion nitrogen and phosphate division. He joined Lilac as COO in mid-2023 and ascended to CEO in February 2024 - the same month the company closed a $145 million Series C. Under his leadership, Lilac has achieved 87% lithium recovery at the Great Salt Lake, unveiled Gen 5 technology with 20x higher production rates, and signed a binding 10-year offtake agreement with Traxys North America targeting 50,000 tonnes of lithium product.
Andre Haddad is the CEO and All Star Host of Turo, the world's largest peer-to-peer car-sharing marketplace. A Lebanese-born, HEC Paris-educated entrepreneur who survived Beirut's civil war, co-founded and sold iBazar to eBay for $140 million, and then spent a decade inside eBay before taking the helm of Turo in 2011. Under his leadership, Turo has grown from a niche car-sharing startup into a global platform operating in the US, UK, Canada, France, and Australia, generating nearly $1 billion in annual revenue and empowering hundreds of thousands of hosts worldwide.
Dean Drako is a serial entrepreneur and engineer who has founded more than six companies across cybersecurity, cloud video surveillance, physical access control, and electric vehicles. He invented the IT industry's first spam filter appliance at Barracuda Networks, took the company to a NYSE IPO, then turned his restless attention to cloud video security at Eagle Eye Networks and physical access control at Brivo. In December 2025 he merged both into the world's largest AI cloud-native physical security company, assuming the CEO chair at Brivo. He holds 53+ patents and has won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award twice - a feat as rare as his other hobby: co-founding an electric supercar company.
Frank Ferrante is the CEO of ForwardEdge ASIC, a Lockheed Martin subsidiary dedicated to advancing U.S. domestic semiconductor chip design. A 30-year veteran of the semiconductor industry, Ferrante has held leadership roles at Intel (Senior Director of Military, Aerospace and Government), Wolfspeed (VP of Worldwide Automotive Sales and Marketing), and Altera. He is a vocal advocate for U.S. advanced manufacturing policy, having advised policymakers on the CHIPS Act, SHIP, and RAMP-C initiatives. Under his leadership, ForwardEdge ASIC achieved U.S. Government Trusted IC Vendor Status in February 2026 and selected the MIPS S8200 for mission-critical autonomous platform ASICs.
Patrick Sullivan is the Co-Founder and CEO of EV Realty, a San Francisco-based company building grid-scale private charging hubs for commercial electric truck fleets. Drawing on 15+ years developing nearly 9 GW of renewable energy projects at firms including Clearway Energy Group, NRG Energy, and BrightSource Energy, Sullivan identified that the real barrier to fleet electrification wasn't the trucks - it was the real estate and grid access. EV Realty's 'Powered Properties' model acquires strategically located industrial sites near freight corridors, locks in large grid capacity, and offers fleets reserved or on-route DC fast charging up to 1.2 MW. The company has raised over $103 million, including a $75M growth equity commitment from NGP in September 2025, and operates or has in development five charging hubs across California.
Steve Kelley is a serial clean-energy entrepreneur and CEO of L-Charge, the Sunnyvale-based pioneer of off-grid ultra-fast EV charging for commercial fleets. With six successful startup exits and over two decades building energy and mobility ventures, Kelley co-founded Green Charge Networks (acquired by Engie), scaled InCharge Energy's revenues nearly tenfold, and in October 2025 took the helm at L-Charge to push its grid-free Charging-as-a-Service model nationwide. Under his leadership, L-Charge closed a $10 million funding round in January 2026, enabling fleet operators to electrify in weeks rather than months by bypassing grid bottlenecks entirely.
Anthony 'Tony' Stratakos is the co-founder and CEO of Element Energy, a West Menlo Park, California-based company pioneering adaptive battery management systems (BMS) that extend battery lifetimes by up to 50% and enable second-life repurposing of retired EV batteries for grid storage. A PhD electrical engineer from UC Berkeley, he previously co-founded Volterra Semiconductor in 1996 - a fabless power management IC company that went public in 2004 and was acquired by Maxim Integrated, where he rose to CTO before starting Element Energy in 2019. With $181.9M in total funding raised and a commissioned 53 MWh second-life battery storage project in Texas, Stratakos is building the infrastructure to make battery recycling obsolete.
Kurt Zenz House is the Co-Founder and CEO of KoBold Metals, an AI-driven mineral exploration company backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Andreessen Horowitz. A Harvard-trained earth scientist and serial energy entrepreneur, he built KoBold from the ground up to solve one of the most consequential problems of the energy transition: finding enough copper, cobalt, lithium, and nickel to power a decarbonized world. Under his leadership, the company discovered the Mingomba deposit in Zambia - potentially the most significant copper find in a century - and raised over $1 billion to develop it. Before KoBold, he founded C12 Energy (CO2-based enhanced oil recovery) and Phase Change Resources (natural gas asset acquisition), and held research and teaching roles at MIT and Stanford.
Nikhil Naikal is the CEO and co-founder of Kinetic, the automotive infrastructure startup using AI, computer vision, and robotics to automate the calibration and digital repair of modern vehicles. A roboticist with a PhD from UC Berkeley and an MS from Carnegie Mellon — where he was part of the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge-winning Tartan Racing team — Naikal previously founded Mapper.ai (acquired by Velodyne Lidar) and engineered AR software at Flyby Media (acquired by Apple). At Kinetic, he is building a national network of high-throughput digital repair hubs that slash ADAS calibration time from hours to under 15 minutes, backed by $31M in total funding including a $21M Series B led by Menlo Ventures.
Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in recorded history and the founder or co-founder of nine major companies including SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, and Neuralink. Born in Pretoria, South Africa, he taught himself to code at 10, sold his first game at 12, and dropped out of a Stanford PhD after two days to chase the internet gold rush. His companies collectively own 65% of all operational Earth satellites, produce the world's best-selling electric vehicles, and are actively building brain-computer interfaces and rockets to colonize Mars. As of May 2026, his net worth stands at approximately $809 billion.