ground-support-equipment
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Dan Piemont
Dan Piemont is the co-founder and CEO of Long Wall, the Long Beach defense company formerly known as ABL Space Systems. An MIT physics and economics graduate who came to rocketry through Wall Street trading and venture capital rather than an engineering bench, he spent seven years building low-cost, containerized launch vehicles before pivoting the company in 2024-2025 toward mass-producible missile defense. Long Wall now develops the Cyclops exoatmospheric interceptor, RSX liquid boosters for threat replication, and Ironwood mobile ground systems, repurposing the hard-won technology of a launch startup that survived two failed orbital attempts into a bet on American homeland defense.
Raymond Wang
Raymond Wang is the Co-Founder and CEO of AeroVect, a Silicon Valley startup building AI-powered autonomous driving systems for airport ground support equipment. A Harvard computer science graduate (Class of 2020) who grew up in Vancouver, Canada, Wang came to aviation obsession early - as a high school student he won the $75,000 Gordon E. Moore Award at the 2015 Intel ISEF for an invention that reduced pathogen transmission on aircraft by 55x, and later gave a TED Talk on the subject. At Harvard he co-founded Civology (YC W20) before pivoting to AeroVect, where he and co-founder Eugenio Donati built the world's largest airside driving dataset and deployed autonomous tractor systems at major hubs including Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson and Dubai International. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 (Manufacturing & Industry, 2022), Wang is reshaping the last 500 feet of global logistics - the chaotic tarmac - with self-driving software built from scratch for the airport environment.