Tagged: hardware
30 results
Gembah
Gembah is an Austin-based product development platform and marketplace that helps entrepreneurs, e-commerce sellers, and small-to-midsize businesses take physical products from idea to shelf. It connects creators with a global network of vetted designers, engineers, and supply chain specialists, and manages design, prototyping, factory sourcing, and production across regions including China, Vietnam, India, Mexico, and Eastern Europe - aiming to demystify and democratize the process of bringing new consumer products to market.
Dell Technologies
Dell Technologies is a multinational technology company headquartered in Round Rock, Texas, that designs, sells, and supports personal computers, servers, data storage, networking, and IT services. Founded by Michael Dell in 1984, it pioneered the direct-to-customer, build-to-order sales model and grew into one of the world's largest infrastructure and PC vendors. Following its 2016 merger with EMC, Dell now spans consumer laptops, workstations, and a fast-growing AI-optimized server business serving customers in more than 180 countries.
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.
Jim Reinhart
Jim Reinhart is the CEO of TEKVOX, a New Braunfels, Texas company reshaping the professional audiovisual industry with factory-built, pre-programmed Drop-In AV systems for classrooms, meeting rooms and complex spaces. A Rice University electrical engineer with more than 35 years in technology, he built his career across semiconductors and startups, co-founding and leading Luminary Micro, the lead partner on ARM's Cortex-M3 processor, through its 2009 acquisition by Texas Instruments. At TEKVOX he pushes a simple conviction: AV is IT, and it deserves the same discipline, standardization and lifecycle management as the rest of an organization's technology stack.
Gridware
Gridware builds pole-mounted sensors and an analytics platform that give electric utilities real-time awareness of what is physically happening on their power lines. Its Gridscope device measures mechanical, electrical, and environmental signals directly at the pole, and its Active Grid Response platform turns those signals into immediate hazard detection, precise fault localization, and faster outage response. Founded in 2020 by three UC Berkeley graduate students - including a former lineman - Gridware aims to close the 'hazard awareness delay' that leaves utilities blind to fallen limbs and damaged lines until after they spark outages or wildfires.
Halo Industries, Inc.
Halo Industries is a Santa Clara deep-tech company that uses lasers instead of diamond wire saws to slice silicon carbide crystal boules into wafers, the foundational substrate for high-voltage power electronics. Spun out of Stanford in 2014, its proprietary light-based process aims to eliminate kerf loss, cut defects, and slash water and energy use, giving more usable wafers from every expensive crystal. Backed by an $80M Series B, Halo is scaling SiC production for electric vehicles, grid infrastructure, renewables, and aerospace, and extending the same approach to silicon, sapphire, and diamond.
nEye.ai
nEye.ai (nEye Systems) is a Santa Clara semiconductor company building optical circuit switches (OCS) on a single chip. By fusing MEMS with silicon photonics and CMOS at wafer scale, its flagship SuperSwitch aims to move data between thousands of GPUs, CPUs and memory units with far less power and space than conventional electrical switching. Founded in 2020 by UC Berkeley photonics researchers and led by telecom-optics veteran Ashish Vengsarkar, the company raised an $80M Series C in April 2026, bringing total funding to about $152.5M as it scales foundry-based manufacturing for AI data centers.
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.
Matthieu Masselin
Matthieu Masselin is the CEO and co-founder of Wandercraft, the Paris-based robotics company behind Atalante, the Eve personal exoskeleton, and the Calvin-40 humanoid robot. Trained as an engineer at Ecole Polytechnique, he took over as CEO in 2018 and led the company through FDA clearances, a Renault manufacturing partnership, and a Series D that brought total funding to about $169M.
Factorem
Factorem is an AI-driven on-demand manufacturing platform based in Singapore. Founded in 2020 by Alexandra Zhang and Hardik Dobariya, it lets engineering and hardware teams upload a CAD file, get an instant quote, and order custom parts - CNC machining, 3D printing, sheet metal fabrication, injection molding and surface treatment - from a vetted network of Southeast Asian factories, with no minimum order quantity. The platform uses AI to scan designs, match them to the best-suited manufacturer, and manage end-to-end fulfilment, compressing prototyping timelines from months to days.
Foundry Robotics
Foundry Robotics is a San Francisco startup building 'The Everything Factory' - an AI-first, assembly-focused contract manufacturer that uses Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models to run flexible robotic assembly cells. Instead of retooling a line for every new product, Foundry aims to let general-purpose robots switch between building drones, robot dogs, battery packs and satellite components on demand. Founded in 2025 by ex-Ghost Robotics and Scale AI robotics lead Adarsh Kulkarni, the company positions itself as a dual-use manufacturer serving both commercial customers and the U.S. Department of Defense, backed by a seed round led by Khosla Ventures and Garuda Ventures.
Jim Marggraff
Jim Marggraff is a serial inventor and entrepreneur with 70+ patents whose products have touched over 100 million children and adults worldwide. He co-invented the LeapFrog LeapPad - the #1 US toy two years running that generated $1B+ in sales - then built Livescribe (the world's first smart pen) and Eyefluence (acquired by Google in 2016 for eye-tracking AR/VR). Today he's back doing what he's always done: tackling childhood literacy. His Oakland startup Kibeam Learning has created a screen-free, AI-powered wand that brings physical books to life using sound, light, and motion - sending kids to 28 minutes of reading engagement versus the usual 5-7.
Jin Lim
Jin-Myoung Lim is the co-founder, CEO, and CTO of ACT-ion Battery Technologies, a Dallas-based deep-tech startup reinventing how cathode active materials (CAM) are made for lithium-ion batteries. A PhD mechanical engineer from Seoul National University with 2,272+ research citations and an h-index of 27, Lim spun ACT-ion out of Hunt Energy Enterprises in 2019 with a bold thesis: that the biggest bottleneck in the battery supply chain isn't the chemistry - it's the manufacturing process. His Hydro4Crystal platform produces coated single-crystal CAMs continuously, with lower energy, cost, and emissions than any incumbent method, and it works across chemistries from LFP to NMC. In 2024, the technology won an R&D 100 Award. By late 2025, ACT-ion had raised $11.5 million from BASF Venture Capital, LG Technology Ventures, Mirae Asset Capital, and Korean institutional investors, and was breaking ground on a pilot plant in Carrollton, Texas.
Kshitij Marwah
Kshitij Marwah is an Indian deep-tech entrepreneur who founded Tesseract, an MIT Media Lab spin-off building extended reality hardware and software in India. Acquired by Reliance in 2019, Tesseract became Jio Tesseract and shipped consumer XR products including JioDive, JioGlass and JioFrames. A former head of the MIT Media Lab India Initiative, he is an MIT Technology Review TR35 honoree (2017), a Forbes 30 Under 30 (2018) awardee and a TED speaker working at the intersection of AI, optics and immersive design.
Friend
Friend is a consumer AI startup making a $129 always-listening pendant that texts the wearer with commentary, jokes and emotional support. Founded by Harvard dropout Avi Schiffmann - the teenager behind the viral nCoV2019 COVID tracker - Friend bet $1.8 million on its one-word domain and then $1 million on a deliberately graffiti-bait subway campaign that turned New York City into an unfiltered focus group.
Irrigreen
Irrigreen makes a digital, robotic sprinkler system that uses inkjet-printer-inspired technology to paint water onto a lawn with near-pixel precision. Custom zone shapes, weather-aware AI scheduling, and a single rotating head that replaces a half-dozen old-school sprays let homeowners cut outdoor water use by roughly 50% while keeping the grass green.
LuxCreo
LuxCreo is a digital manufacturing company turning dental clinics and labs into same-day production floors. Its patented LEAP (Light Enabled Additive Production) printers, ActiveMemory polymers, and LuxFlow software combine to deliver FDA-cleared, directly 3D-printed clear aligners, night guards, dentures and crowns - cutting weeks of traditional workflow down to hours.
Alexandra Zhang
Alexandra Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of Factorem, an AI-native, on-demand manufacturing platform born in Singapore that connects hardware and photonics teams with a vetted network of factories across Southeast Asia. After hitting sourcing walls as an engineer building EV transmissions in Toronto, she built the platform she wished she'd had: instant quotes, no minimum order quantities, and lead times cut from months to days. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, she relocated from Singapore to Colorado to open the U.S. market, which now drives nearly half of company sales.
Allen Tsai
Allen Tsai is an Austin-based serial entrepreneur and engineer who spent roughly two decades shipping connected consumer electronics for Sony, Microsoft Xbox, Panasonic, Sonos, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments before turning his attention to water. After a month spent building water wells in a Nepali village, he founded Pani, the maker of the Pani Source - a tech-enabled water personalization system often described as the 'Keurig for water.' The device filters, remineralizes and customizes tap water with compostable pods, paired with an app that tracks quality and usage. Pani is Tsai's sixth startup.
Ami Lebendiker
Ami Lebendiker is the founder and CEO of Roga, a neurotech company that makes a discreet behind-the-ear wearable for stress relief paired with an on-demand content app. A former product manager at Google, he spent a decade shipping hardware including Pixel phones and Google Home before turning his cost-engineering instincts toward consumer neurotech. Earlier he founded Mango Startups, billed as the first ICO backed by a venture fund in Latin America, and helped coordinate the region's startup accelerator network. Costa Rica-born and multiply credentialed, he is part operator, part investor, and part builder who keeps returning to the same idea: democratize access to things normally locked behind gatekeepers.
Oscar Mattsson
Oscar Mattsson is the founder and CEO of allwhere, a New York startup that handles the unglamorous physics of remote work: buying, shipping, tracking, and retrieving the laptops and gear that distributed teams scatter across the globe. A founding member of WeWork's enterprise business, he launched allwhere out of D.E. Shaw's venture studio in 2021 and brought it out of stealth in July 2022 with $9.5 million in seed funding. His bet is simple and stubborn - flexibility is permanent, and someone has to manage the hardware behind it.
CANDY HOUSE
CANDY HOUSE, Inc. is the consumer-hardware company behind Sesame, the retrofit smart lock that mounts over an existing deadbolt with adhesive tape and turns a smartphone, fingerprint, card, PIN or face into a key. Founded in 2014 by Stanford engineer Jerming Gu and famous for a 2015 Kickstarter that raised about $1.4M, the company built an open ecosystem around SesameOS - locks, touch and face readers, a coin-sized Matter hub, sensors and finger robots - aimed at making smart-home access affordable, rental-friendly and developer-open.
General Radar Corp.
General Radar Corp. is a Menlo Park deep-tech company building high-resolution, software-defined phased-array (AESA) radar systems for aerospace, defense, wind energy, autonomy, and weather markets. Founded in 2016 by former NASA/JPL engineer Dmitry Turbiner, the company pairs a GaN AESA front-end with digital beam-forming and GPU supercomputing to deliver radars it says are dramatically higher resolution and roughly 20x cheaper than legacy aerospace radar - largely from commercial off-the-shelf parts. It raised a $22M Series A in 2022, bringing total funding to roughly $47.5M.
Heron Power
Heron Power is a Scotts Valley, California company building solid-state transformers - power electronics purpose-built for the modern electrical grid. Founded in 2025 by former Tesla powertrain and energy chief Drew Baglino, its flagship Heron Link converts medium-voltage electricity to usable low-voltage power in a modular, software-integrated package, replacing the century-old iron-core transformer. The company targets utility-scale solar, grid-scale batteries, and hyperscale AI data centers, and is building a 40-gigawatt US factory to meet a backlog of orders.
AT Nakanishi
AT Nakanishi (Atsushi Nakanishi) is the founder and CEO of Triple W, the company behind DFree, the world's first personal wearable ultrasound sensor that predicts toilet timing. He launched the company in 2015 with high school and college friends, took it from Tokyo to Berkeley, and steered it to a Best of CES award and Series D funding. A self-described non-engineer who built a hardware company from zero, Nakanishi blends business pragmatism with a stubborn focus on solving an unglamorous, very human problem.
Quilter
Quilter is a Los Angeles-based company building the first fully autonomous, physics-driven AI for printed circuit board (PCB) layout. Founded in 2019 by former SpaceX avionics engineer Sergiy Nesterenko, Quilter trains reinforcement-learning agents on the laws of physics - not human design patterns - to place components, route traces, and physics-validate complete board designs in hours instead of weeks. The company positions itself as the 'compiler for hardware,' aiming to make manual PCB layout as obsolete as hand-compiling code.
Jerming Gu
Jerming Gu is the Taiwanese founder and CEO of CANDY HOUSE, the company behind SESAME, the smart lock that clamps onto an existing deadbolt and turns a smartphone into a key. He started the company as a Stanford mechanical engineering master's student in 2014 with co-founder Jongho Shin, then turned a 3D-printed dorm-room prototype into a Kickstarter phenomenon that raised roughly $1.4 million in 2015. After a decade building a dominant smart-lock business in Japan - including funding from ITOCHU and a strategic alliance with lock maker MIWA - he relaunched CANDY HOUSE in the US and Canada in 2025 with a lineup spanning SESAME 5, face recognition, palm-vein biometrics and Matter-compatible hubs.
Antares
Antares is a nuclear fission energy company building factory-produced, transportable microreactors that deliver strategic power for mission-critical systems across land, sea, and space. Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Torrance, California, its R1 reactor uses TRISO fuel, sodium heat pipes, and a nitrogen Brayton cycle to produce 100kWe-1MWe for six-plus years. In June 2026 its Mark-0 reactor became the first privately developed advanced reactor to achieve criticality under the U.S. Department of Energy's Reactor Pilot Program.
CHAOS Industries
CHAOS Industries is a Los Angeles defense technology company building Coherent Distributed Networks (CDN), software-defined sensing systems that detect aerial and missile threats faster and cheaper than traditional radar. Founded in 2022, it makes distributed radar products like Vanquish and Astria for counter-drone, border, and homeland defense. By late 2025 the company had raised over $1 billion and reached a roughly $4.5 billion valuation.
Paul Gross
Paul Gross is the co-founder and co-CEO of Remora, a Detroit-area climate hardware company that bolts a carbon-capture device onto the tailpipes of semi-trucks and locomotives, grabbing the CO2 before it ever hits the sky and selling it as beverage-grade gas to breweries and greenhouses. He read a stranger's PhD dissertation on mobile carbon capture during his senior year at Yale, wrote the author a business plan, and convinced her to quit the EPA to build a company with him. Remora has raised roughly $117 million and signed pilots with Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, Ryder, Werner, and Cargill.