Dr. Debbie Marr is the co-founder, CEO and President of AheadComputing, a Beaverton, Oregon startup building high-performance 64-bit RISC-V CPU cores. A former Intel Fellow and Chief Architect of Intel's Advanced Architecture Development Group, she spent 33 years shaping processors from the i386 era to modern Core and Xeon chips, served as server architect of the Pentium Pro, turned Hyper-Threading from concept into shipping product on the Pentium 4, and was chief architect of the 4th Gen Core (Haswell). She holds a PhD from the University of Michigan, more than 40 patents and 30+ published papers, and in 2024 left Intel with three fellow architects to prove that open architectures can deliver top-tier performance because, in her words, everybody deserves better compute.
Artis, LLC (Advanced Real-Time Information Systems) is a Herndon, Virginia defense and technology developer that builds systems for problems measured in microseconds. Founded in 1999 by Keith Brendley, the company is best known for active protection systems for military vehicles - Iron Curtain and its third-generation successor, Sentinel - that detect and defeat incoming rockets, missiles and drone-borne threats in fractions of a second. Beyond defense, Artis applies its high-speed sensing and parallel-processing work to highway worker safety, 3D imaging and pedestrian monitoring.
Positron AI designs purpose-built inference hardware for transformer models, aiming to make Nvidia GPUs optional for running large language models at production scale. Its first product, Atlas, ships from US fabs and claims roughly 3x lower latency and 4x better performance-per-watt versus an H100 system.
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.
Peter Morales is the CEO and co-founder of Code Metal, a Boston-based AI company that hit unicorn status in February 2026 after raising a $125M Series B led by Salesforce Ventures. With a background spanning BAE Systems (F-35 ML optimization), MIT Lincoln Laboratory (counter-drone AI), and Microsoft (HoloLens computer vision), Morales built Code Metal to solve a gap he discovered firsthand: AI can generate code fast, but mission-critical industries — defense, automotive, semiconductors — need proof that code is correct before it ships. Code Metal's verifiable AI platform translates high-level code into hardware-optimized, mathematically verified production code for edge devices, drones, FPGAs, and autonomous systems. Customers include the U.S. Air Force, L3Harris, Raytheon, Toshiba, and Bosch.