True Anomaly is a Colorado-based space defense company building the hardware and software to operate, defend, and win in contested orbit. Its flagship Jackal autonomous orbital vehicle - a highly maneuverable, refrigerator-sized spacecraft - is paired with Mosaic, a full-stack mission autonomy and command-and-control platform. Founded in 2022 by Air Force and Space Force veterans, the company sells primarily to the U.S. Space Force and Department of the Air Force, has raised more than $1 billion across four rounds, and is valued at $2.2 billion after its April 2026 Series D.
Mark Primeau is a San Francisco based healthcare executive currently associated with the San Francisco Department of Public Health and operating as CEO of P B Strategies, a consulting practice focused on healthcare strategy and operations.
Astranis builds small, software-defined geostationary communications satellites - about the size of a washing machine - that deliver dedicated broadband to underserved regions and governments. Founded in 2015 in San Francisco, the company designs, manufactures and operates its MicroGEO platform entirely in-house at Historic Pier 70.
Incode is an AI-powered identity verification platform that lets businesses confirm who is really on the other side of a screen — in under two seconds. Founded in San Francisco in 2015, the company has built a modular biometric platform used by banks, hotels, hospitals, and gaming companies across more than 190 countries. Its flagship product, Incode Omni, handles everything from document verification and facial recognition to AML screening and liveness detection, processing more than 100 million user verifications per year. Backed by General Atlantic, SoftBank, J.P. Morgan, and Capital One Ventures at a $1.25 billion valuation, Incode has been named a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for Identity Verification two consecutive years running.
Instabase is an enterprise agentic automation platform that transforms complex, unstructured document workflows into reliable, verifiable AI-driven outcomes. Founded in 2015 by MIT PhD student Anant Bhardwaj, the company's AI Hub platform enables organizations across financial services, insurance, healthcare, and government to automate document-heavy processes — from loan origination to KYC compliance — using packet-aware AI agents with deep document understanding and full auditability. With $322M in total funding, a $1.24B valuation, and customers like NatWest, Rocket Mortgage, AXA, and MetLife, Instabase has positioned itself as the backbone infrastructure for enterprise document intelligence.
Joe Gebbia co-founded Airbnb in 2008 out of a San Francisco living room - air mattresses, breakfast included - and turned a half-crazy idea into an $85B company. His current venture, Samara, builds factory-assembled, solar-ready backyard homes (ADUs) that go from permit to move-in in under seven months. In early 2025 he became America's first Chief Design Officer, tasked with redesigning the federal government's 27,000 websites. A Rhode Island School of Design graduate with dual majors in graphic and industrial design, Gebbia approaches every problem - housing affordability, government UX, refugee shelter - through the lens of democratic, empathetic design.
Jon 'Irish' Hawkins is an Australian Defence Force veteran of 25 years, SAS-trained officer, and the founder of Omni Executive - one of Australia's fastest-growing sovereign defence companies. Starting from an idea at his kitchen table in 2012, he built Omni into a 400+ person operation spanning aerospace, consulting, security, maritime and vetting, with around $100 million in annual turnover. A fierce advocate for truly Australian-owned defence capability, he stepped back from the CEO role in February 2026 to serve as Chair of Omni's Board.
Primer.ai builds mission-ready AI for defense, intelligence, and national security teams. Its platform turns oceans of unstructured text - news, documents, intercepts, social posts - into traceable, decision-ready intelligence, deployable in air-gapped and cloud environments.
DataWalk is a graph- and AI-enabled analysis and investigation platform that unifies disparate data sources so analysts at banks, insurers, and government agencies can spot hidden relationships, run no-code queries, and pursue fraud, money laundering, and threat investigations at scale.
TwelveLabs is a San Francisco-based AI company building video-native multimodal foundation models that give machines the ability to see, hear, and understand video the way humans do. Its flagship models - Marengo for embedding and retrieval and Pegasus for video-to-text generation - power enterprise applications in media, government, sports, and security, enabling precise semantic search, summarization, and insight extraction from video at scale. With 30,000+ developers on its platform and backing from NVIDIA, Databricks, Snowflake, and In-Q-Tel, TwelveLabs is becoming the standard infrastructure layer for video intelligence.
WindBorne Systems is building a planetary nervous system for Earth's atmosphere. The Redwood City company operates a constellation of autonomous long-duration balloons that gather high-resolution atmospheric data from remote and ocean regions previously invisible to weather models - then feeds that data into WeatherMesh, its in-house AI forecasting model that has surpassed Google DeepMind's GraphCast as the world's most accurate medium-range global weather forecast. With backing from Khosla Ventures, the Gates Foundation, and U.S. military contracts, WindBorne is making a credible run at replacing century-old weather infrastructure.
Woodard & Curran is a 100% employee-owned environmental engineering and consulting firm founded in 1979 and headquartered in Portland, Maine. With roughly 1,300 employees across 30+ offices in 14 states, the firm integrates engineering, science, design-build, and operations to solve complex water and environmental challenges for municipal, industrial, and government clients. From treating 11.7 billion gallons of drinking water annually to cleaning up Superfund contamination sites, Woodard & Curran positions itself as the firm that takes on the hard problems in water infrastructure and environmental health — not as a contractor but as a long-term partner.
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.
Rob Reis is the founder and President/CEO of Higher Ground LLC, a Palo Alto-based satellite telecommunications company building the world's most compact, affordable, and secure satellite communicator. With roots at Stanford and a career spanning pioneering ventures in laser turntables (Finial Technology), RFID tracking (Savi Technology), and innovation leadership at Texas Instruments, Reis brings decades of deep-tech entrepreneurship to a mission-critical problem: keeping people connected and safe anywhere on Earth, from the backcountry to the battlefield. His flagship product, the SatPaq, uses geostationary satellites with AES-256 encryption and spread spectrum signaling to deliver two-way messaging, voice, and GPS-backup - independent of cellular infrastructure.
Jack Cable is the CEO and co-founder of Corridor, a San Francisco-based AI security startup that raised a $25M Series A at a $200M valuation in March 2026. Before founding Corridor, Cable spent years at CISA architecting the Secure by Design initiative, helped run the Pentagon's bug bounty programs at Defense Digital Service, and ranked in HackerOne's all-time top 100 hackers. Named to TIME's 25 Most Influential Teens in 2018 at age 17, he started identifying software vulnerabilities at 15 and hasn't stopped since.
Margo de Naray is the Chief Executive Officer of Solestial, Inc., a Tempe, Arizona-based space solar power startup pioneering radiation-hardened, ultrathin silicon solar cells that self-cure radiation damage at low operating temperatures. Appointed CEO in May 2025 following the company's $17M Series A funding round, she brings 20 years of cross-industry leadership spanning aerospace (Astra Space), agribusiness (Cargill), and semiconductor manufacturing (Intel). Solestial's technology promises to slash the cost of spacecraft solar arrays by roughly 90% compared to incumbent III-V multijunction technology, using automated manufacturing and widely available silicon to make reliable space-grade solar power accessible at scale.
Eric Paley is a serial entrepreneur turned seed-stage venture capitalist who co-founded Founder Collective in 2008, building it into one of the world's highest-performing seed funds with investments in Uber, The Trade Desk, Airtable, and 20+ unicorns. Before VC, he co-founded Brontes Technologies — a 3D dental imaging startup spun out of MIT — and sold it to 3M for $95 million in 2006. A perennial Forbes Midas List honoree (ranked as high as #9 globally and the world's top-ranked seed investor), he became known for his unusually candid critiques of venture capital excess. In June 2025, he left Founder Collective to serve as Massachusetts Secretary of Economic Development under Governor Maura Healey, overseeing a 700-person agency focused on housing affordability, business competitiveness, and the AI innovation economy.
Sam Corcos is a four-time founder and the co-founder and former CEO of Levels Health, a $300M metabolic health company that pairs continuous glucose monitors with a software layer to help people understand how food affects their blood sugar. He co-founded CarDash (Y Combinator S17, acquired 2020), Sightline Maps, and LearnPhoenix before building Levels into a category-defining health company with $67M raised from a16z and a community of 1,400+ member-investors. In 2025, he joined the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and was appointed U.S. Treasury Chief Information Officer. He is also known for extreme minimalism (one pair of pants, one backpack), tracking time in 15-minute increments, and hosting 100+ intellectual salon dinners in New York and San Francisco.
Sharon McMahon is 'America's Government Teacher' - a former public school educator turned media force who built a nonpartisan civics empire from Duluth, Minnesota. Known for breaking down complex government topics with facts and zero spin, she went viral in 2020 with a kitchen-table explanation of the Electoral College, and never looked back. Today she hosts the top-1% podcast 'Here's Where It Gets Interesting,' writes The Preamble newsletter on Substack, authored the #1 NYT bestseller 'The Small and the Mighty,' and has raised nearly $14 million for charitable causes through her community of 'Governerds.'
Waypoint Transit is an AI-powered urban planning platform that automates the creation of civil infrastructure studies for city governments and transit agencies. Founded in 2024 by Stanford graduates Varun Tandon and Ryan Johnston, the company replaces months of repetitive consultant work with AI-driven analysis - cutting costs by 70% and timelines from years to months. In a market where U.S. cities spend $50B annually on planning, Waypoint is already working with 10+ municipalities across the country.
Scale AI is a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure company founded in 2016 by Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo. It provides the data engine, evaluation tools, and AI deployment platforms that power the world's leading AI labs, Fortune 500 enterprises, and US government agencies. By combining a massive distributed workforce with proprietary tooling, Scale accelerates AI development through high-quality data labeling, RLHF, model evaluation, and agentic platforms — making it one of the most consequential picks-and-shovels companies in the modern AI boom, with a $29B valuation as of mid-2025.