eth-zurich
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Julian Senoner and the factory’s unanswered question
A table-football game at ETH Zurich helped set Julian Senoner on the road from researcher to founder. At EthonAI, now branded Ethon, he is building software for the people who need to know why production goes wrong.
Martin Tschopp and the shop that escaped its walls
From eBay’s Berlin pop-up shop to Kiva and Prosus Ventures, Martin Tschopp has worked on the same practical problem: turning new technology into something people can use.
Ce Zhang and the Long Road from Available AI to Usable AI
At ETH Zürich, Ce Zhang asked why useful machine learning stayed out of reach for so many people. As Together AI’s founder and CTO, he is still working on the same problem - now at cloud scale.
Yannic Kilcher and the Art of Reading the Machine
From a Swiss computer science student reading papers aloud to a legal AI founder organizing open research, Yannic Kilcher has made a career of asking what the technology actually does.
Bernhard Kratzwald Wants Factories to Answer the Hard Question: Why?
The Austrian computer scientist spent years teaching AI to cope when the world changes. Now he is applying that instinct to factory floors - where one unexplained defect can become an expensive habit.
Sunflower Labs
Sunflower Labs builds the Beehive - a fully autonomous, AI-powered drone security system for large outdoor properties. Its 'Bee' drone lives inside a weatherproof 'Hive' base station, launches within seconds of a triggered sensor, patrols a property while avoiding obstacles in nearly any weather, streams HD and thermal video, then returns to recharge on its own. Founded in 2016 and based in Zurich and San Francisco, the company pitches drones as a lower-cost, faster-responding alternative to human security patrols for industrial sites, commercial campuses, and high-value residential properties.
Patrick Bowen
Patrick Bowen is co-founder and CEO of Neurophos, an Austin-based startup building optical AI accelerator chips around metamaterial-based photonic tensor cores. A Duke PhD in electrical engineering and ETH Zurich master's grad, he previously co-founded Metacept with his Duke advisor David Smith. In January 2026 Neurophos closed a $110M Series A led by Gates Frontier with Microsoft's M12, Aramco, Bosch and others.
Elio Assaf
Elio Assaf is the Lebanese co-founder and CEO of Optiverse AG, a Zurich-based AI startup building a meeting assistant that turns everyday conversations into structured, operational intelligence - automating notes, summaries, transcriptions and CRM updates. A computer-vision and machine-learning researcher who worked across ETH Zurich, MIT and EPFL and previously engineered AI at Thales, he incorporated Optiverse in June 2024, won a CHF 150,000 Venture Kick award, and grew the platform to serve over 1,000 businesses worldwide while users report saving an average of 6.8 hours a week.
Lukas Hackl
Lukas Hackl is the co-founder and CEO of Aepnus Technology, an Emeryville, California startup building electrolyzers that turn sodium sulfate waste - a salty byproduct piling up across the EV battery supply chain - back into the sulfuric acid and caustic soda that battery makers have to buy. The technology grew out of his UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory PhD work on electrochemical water desalination. After hearing the same waste complaint on road trips from California to Canada, he and co-founder Bilen Akuzum turned a laboratory curiosity into a company that emerged from stealth in 2024 with $8 million in seed funding led by Clean Energy Ventures.
Nida Farid
MIT and ETH Zürich-trained aerospace engineer who worked on Airbus programs before pivoting to children's literature and energy policy consulting. She is the author of 'The Extraordinary Life of Riz' and the founder of savejoules.com.