electrical-engineering
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Prathitha Iyengar Took the Scenic Route from Network Faults to AI Narratives
An electrical engineer became a copywriter, then learned to market deeply technical products. At Cognida.ai, that zigzag career has become a practical advantage.
Rob Lamkin Put Solar in a Balloon. Then Came the Harder Work.
He spent decades learning how power plants get financed, built and operated. Then Rob Lamkin bet on inflatable solar collectors - and learned that durable persistence means knowing what to keep, what to stop and what to build next.
Rob Palfreyman Keeps Building for the Places Technology Cannot Quite Reach
First he helped software find people when GPS disappeared indoors. Then he took on a more tactile problem: helping powered clothing understand how a body moves at work.
Leo Kankkunen Wants to Make the Scuba Tank Optional
A Finnish electrical engineer surfaced from a dive with an inconvenient question: if the oxygen is already in the water, why carry it down in a steel tank? DAIVIN! is his attempt to turn that question into working hardware.
Noah Levy Put the RF Test Bench on Notice
After years building radios and test systems at SpaceX, Noah Levy decided the laboratory gear around them deserved a modern interface. Nine Fives is his compact, hardware-first answer.
Tim Klein Built a 38-Year Company in the Space Between the Machines
ATTO does not make the computer or the storage. Tim Klein built a durable business in the vital space between them - one careful connection at a time.
Bobby Reddy Bet a Decade on the Data Hospitals Were Missing
An all-access hospital badge helped an electrical engineer discover that his clever device was solving the wrong problem. What followed was a ten-year lesson in listening, clinical rigor and the unglamorous patience required to make AI useful.
The Engineer Who Learned to Sell the Invisible
He built the guts of phones nobody could see inside, then spent 25 years learning to explain the chips that quietly run everything. Now he sells Marvell's silicon to the companies building the AI cloud.
The Engineer Running Zebra's Marketing Playbook
An electrical engineer runs marketing for the company behind every barcode you have ever scanned. His pitch: stop trying to do more with less.
Saied Tehrani
Saied Tehrani is a semiconductor executive and engineer who has served as President and CEO of ESS Technology, the San Jose maker of the SABRE audio DAC and ADC chips, since 2019. With a PhD in electrical engineering and more than 30 years in the industry, he spent two decades at Motorola, helped pioneer commercial MRAM as a founder and COO of Everspin, ran a $500M microcontroller business as CTO of Spansion, and holds more than 75 US patents. In 2008 he received the IEEE Daniel Noble Award for the development of MRAM technology.
Stephen Koza
Stephen Koza is the CEO of EverOps, a San Francisco DevOps and IT operations partner that embeds engineering teams inside high-growth companies. A Texas-raised electrical engineer who traded the lab bench for the sales floor, he spent 17 years building go-to-market functions in Silicon Valley, most notably growing Cisco Meraki's global service provider business from zero to $400M and leading industrial sales at Samsara. As Managing Partner at Blue Ono Capital he led the investment in EverOps in 2022, then stepped in to run it, pairing an inner-nerd love of technology with a people-first, no-jerks approach to building teams.
Davide Asnaghi
Davide Asnaghi is the co-founder and CEO of Diode Computers, a startup rebuilding how printed circuit boards are designed and manufactured. An Italian-born engineer trained at UC Berkeley, he spent years building hardware at Apple's Special Projects Group and medical-device companies before starting Diode to replace legacy EDA tools with open-source, AI-friendly software: a Python design language backed by a Rust compiler that turns requirements into manufacturable circuit boards in a fraction of the usual time. Diode raised an $11.4M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and partners with Anthropic to make Claude a more capable electrical engineer.
Debra Weidanz
Debra Wawro Weidanz is the co-founder, CEO and chief scientist of Resonant Sensors Incorporated, an Arlington, Texas biotech that builds label-free, high-throughput biosensor systems used to speed antibody discovery, drug screening and diagnostics. An electrical engineer turned inventor, she developed the company's guided-mode resonance sensor technology out of research at the University of Texas at Arlington, and later co-founded the cancer-immunotherapy startup Abexxa Biologics, which Boehringer Ingelheim acquired in 2021. With her husband Jon, she has become a notable UTA benefactor, funding a named tissue-engineering lab and research fellowships.
Ioannis Kymissis
Ioannis (John) Kymissis is the Kenneth Brayer Professor and Chair of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, where he directs the Laboratory for Unconventional Electronics (CLUE) and works on thin-film materials for displays and sensors. He is co-founder and acting CEO of Lumiode, a New York startup building high-brightness micro-LED microdisplays for augmented reality and wearables. A serial entrepreneur who has spun four companies out of his lab, he is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, IEEE, Optica, and the Society for Information Display, and helped launch the Makerspace @ Columbia.
Jim Johnson
Jim Johnson is the CEO of Gembah, an Austin-based product development and manufacturing platform that helps brands and entrepreneurs design, prototype, and source physical products from a vetted global network of factories and experts. A veteran hardware and technology operator, he earlier founded and ran uControl, a pioneer of interactive home security and smart-home platforms, then became a leader at iControl Networks after the two companies merged - scaling the business to more than 300 employees and deployments in over 3 million homes before its 2017 acquisition by Comcast and Alarm.com. An electrical engineer by training, Johnson pairs deep technical fluency with a track record of building, merging, and exiting technology companies.
Matthias Hofmann
Matthias Hofmann is the co-founder and CEO of Eyebot, a Boston-based company building self-serve vision-test kiosks that deliver a 90-second refractive exam and pair users with a tele-optometrist. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech, did postdoctoral optics work at Harvard Medical School, and was an early engineer at MIT spinout EyeNetra before starting Eyebot in 2021 with Jack Moldave. In August 2025 Eyebot raised a $20M Series A led by General Catalyst.
Nic Halverson
Nic Halverson is the co-founder and CEO of Occuspace, an occupancy intelligence company that reads Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals to tell buildings how busy they are without cameras. He started the company in 2017 with roommate Linus Grasel after failing to find a seat at UC San Diego's Geisel Library, and has since deployed the sensors across dozens of universities, Fortune 500 offices, and, most recently, 180 million square feet of federal real estate for the GSA.
Tim Attia
Tim Attia is the co-founder and CEO of Slice Labs, a New York insurtech he launched in 2015 to sell insurance the way the on-demand economy actually works - in bite-size, pay-per-use chunks bought the moment a homeshare host or rideshare driver needs it. Trained as an electrical engineer at McGill and shaped by three decades moving between consulting firms and insurance carriers, Attia built Slice into a cloud platform (Insurance Cloud Services) that lets incumbents like AXA XL, Progressive, Lenovo and Microsoft spin up digital insurance products, and more recently he has been pushing the company toward AI, machine learning and large language models to automate underwriting and claims.
Eduardo Abeliuk
Eduardo Abeliuk is the founder and CEO of TeselaGen Biotechnology, a Silicon Valley company building AI agents and enterprise software for biological R&D. A Chilean-born physicist and electrical engineer with a Stanford PhD, he sits at the intersection of biology, artificial intelligence, and software - treating DNA as data and lab work as something that ought to be automated. Before biotech he built a Facebook app that hit a million users in weeks and an edtech platform across Latin America. He holds multiple US patents in computational biology and synthetic biology and his academic work has been cited more than a thousand times.
Ron Faith
Ron Faith is the President and CEO of RBC Signals, a Redmond, Washington company that runs a global ground station network letting satellite operators downlink data on demand instead of building their own dishes. A serial entrepreneur who launched Apple's first standalone internet product in the mid-1990s, ran mobile commerce at Qpass, and led cloud data-protection startup Datacastle to an acquisition by Carbonite, he returned to his aerospace roots in 2019 and took the top job in January 2024. He pairs a Dartmouth engineering-and-philosophy double major with a University of Washington master's spent researching frequency selective surfaces for Boeing.
Sujay Suresh Kumar
Sujay Suresh Kumar is the cofounder and co-CEO of Lilu, a New York women's health hardware company building smart wearable tech for new mothers. An electrical engineer trained at the University of Pennsylvania, he designed circuits for CERN's ATLAS experiment, helped launch 4G in India at Reliance Jio, and spent two years on factory floors in Shenzhen turning a robotics-class side project into shipping products. He was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2022.
Amin Nikoozadeh
Amin Nikoozadeh is the founder and CEO of Vave Health, a San Jose company building affordable, wireless handheld ultrasound. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who spent years shrinking an entire imaging system onto the tip of a 3mm catheter, he started Vave in 2015 after confronting a stark fact: roughly two-thirds of the world's population has no access to medical imaging. The company's pocket-sized probe earned FDA 510(k) clearance in 2019 and now powers millions of scans across hospitals, medical schools, and underserved clinics.
Glen Stancil
Glen Stancil is the founder and CEO of Merge Electric Fleet Solutions, a Houston-based company that helps fleet operators go electric without the headaches. A co-founder of EVgo and founder of eMotive Solutions, he has spent a decade in vehicle electrification, with his teams deploying more than 1,500 charging sites across 40 states and roughly $300 million in EV infrastructure. He pairs an electrical engineering degree from UT Austin with a Stanford MBA, and earlier did stints at McKinsey, NRG Energy and Reliant Energy. Launched in 2021 with backing from Pickering Energy Partners, Merge raised a Series A in December 2021 to make fleet electrification simple, affordable and scalable.
Jennifer Aspell
Jennifer Aspell is the CEO of BrightView Technologies, a Durham, North Carolina optics company that engineers micro lens array films to shape and manage light for displays, AR/VR, automotive, LiDAR, sensing and LED lighting. An electrical engineer trained at Rensselaer, UC Berkeley and Purdue, she started out at Bell Laboratories building technology for long-haul optical networks before moving through Lucent, JDS Uniphase and Tyco Electronics. She took the helm of BrightView in 2010 after the recession gutted its original rear-projection-TV market, and rebuilt it into a global supplier serving more than 200 customers, capped by a $7M Series B in 2025 led by Forvia Hella and Technology Venture Partners.
Tim Heidel
Tim Heidel is the co-founder and CEO of VEIR, a Massachusetts startup building overhead superconducting transmission lines that can carry five to ten times the power of conventional lines on roughly the same footprint. An MIT-trained electrical engineer who ran the research behind MIT's Future of the Electric Grid study, then steered a portfolio of grid projects at ARPA-E and vetted climate bets at Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Heidel concluded that the grid's biggest bottleneck was transmission itself - too slow, too costly, too ugly to permit. VEIR is his answer: black pipes carrying superconducting tape bathed in liquid nitrogen at -321F, aimed squarely at AI data centers, utilities and renewable developers.
Peyman Kazemian
Peyman Kazemian is the co-founder of Forward Networks, a Santa Clara-based enterprise software company that builds mathematically accurate digital twins of complex networks. His PhD dissertation at Stanford - which became the foundational Header Space Analysis framework - won the NSDI 2024 Test-of-Time Award and directly spawned a company now trusted by Fortune 50 enterprises and U.S. government agencies. A graduate of Sharif University of Technology in Tehran and Stanford's electrical engineering department under Prof. Nick McKeown, Kazemian helped develop OpenFlow and SDN before turning his research into a business that has raised over $140 million to transform how enterprises understand, secure, and manage their networks.
Mohammad Noshad
Mohammad Noshad is Co-Founder and CEO of Shyld AI, the company behind the world's first AI-driven autonomous UV-C disinfection system for hospitals. A Harvard-trained researcher with a PhD from the University of Virginia, Noshad pivoted from academic work in signal processing and optical communications to building technology that attacks the $50+ billion annual problem of hospital-acquired infections. Shyld AI's ceiling-mounted devices use multimodal sensors and edge AI to autonomously identify contaminated surfaces and inactivate pathogens - killing MRSA in 10 seconds from 6.5 feet away - with pilots running at Stanford Health Care and Loma Linda University Medical Center. Noshad is also co-founder of Wodio.AI and a Strategic Advisor at Field AI.
Kevin Harvey
Kevin Harvey is a General Partner and co-founder of Benchmark Capital, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, which he helped launch in 1995 alongside Bob Kagle, Bruce Dunlevie, Andy Rachleff, and Val Vaden. Before turning to investing, Harvey built and sold two software companies - StyleWare (acquired by Apple's Claris in 1988, becoming ClarisWorks) and Approach Software (acquired by Lotus in 1993) - giving him rare operator credibility. At Benchmark, he has backed transformative companies including eBay, Twitter, Upwork, MySQL, OpenTable, and Proofpoint. Outside of venture capital, Harvey is the founder of Rhys Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a critically acclaimed winery focused on Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, where he applies the same data-driven rigor to terroir as he does to startup evaluation.
Spencer Greene
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.
Joseph Bousaba
Joseph Bousaba is the CEO of InvenSense and General Manager of TDK Corporation's MEMS Sensors Business Group, leading a global powerhouse in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) sensing solutions. With over 18 years of senior leadership in the semiconductor industry - spanning Philips Semiconductors, Qualcomm Atheros, and Qualcomm - he stepped into the top role at InvenSense in October 2024, bringing a track record of building multi-hundred-million-dollar businesses at the intersection of motion, sound, and AI-driven sensing.