Duncan Haldane is the co-founder and CEO of JITX, a Berkeley-born startup that lets electrical engineers design circuit boards by writing code instead of dragging lines on a screen. Before software, he built robots: at UC Berkeley he created two Guinness World Record machines - the X2-VelociRoACH, the fastest robot relative to its size, and Salto, the most vertically agile jumping robot ever built. He holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from Berkeley and started JITX in 2017 because he wanted a faster way to design the hardware inside his robots.
Hardik Kabaria is Co-Founder and CEO of Vinci4D.ai (now getvinci.ai), a Palo Alto-based AI company building a physics foundation model that makes hardware simulation 1000x faster than traditional finite element analysis. A Stanford PhD in Mechanics and Computation, he spent eight years at Carbon - the 3D printing unicorn - rising from software engineer to CXO before founding Vinci in 2023. His company emerged from stealth in December 2025 with $46M raised from Xora Innovation, Khosla Ventures, and Eclipse, already deployed with three leading semiconductor manufacturers and validated by over half the world's top 20 chip companies.