hardware-engineering
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Pasi Leipala and the team that outlasted the job
When Nokia closed an Oulu unit in 2012, Pasi Leipala helped turn its engineering talent into Haltian. Twelve years later, he handed over the CEO role with a company operating across six countries.
Adnan Esmail and the Problem That Followed Him Into Every Machine
A coffee that ran six hours took Adnan Esmail from Tesla to a barking airport hangar. Now the Physical Intelligence co-founder is trying to give robots something his old machines lacked: a reusable way to learn the physical world.
Harry Chan Is Building the Tiny Roads Inside Tomorrow's Machines
The eTopus founder spent three decades making data move faster. His real subject is resistance - in a circuit, on a morning run, and inside any team trying to turn a difficult idea into silicon.
Jeri Ellsworth Keeps Bringing the Future Back to the Table
She built race cars, taught herself chip design, survived one startup’s collapse, and returned with a stranger, more sociable idea for augmented reality: keep the people, the pizza, and the table in view.
Jay Li
Jay Li is the founder and CEO of Proception, a Palo Alto robotics startup building high-dexterity robotic hands for humanoid robots. A former electronics lead on Tesla's Optimus program, he left to bet that the fastest path to capable robots runs through hardware close enough to the human hand that machines can learn directly from people. His ProHand packs 22 degrees of freedom and skin-like tactile sensors; its companion ProGlove captures human manipulation data with no robot in the loop. In June 2026 Proception shipped its first hands, settled a Tesla trade-secret lawsuit, and closed an $11M seed round led by First Round Capital on the same day.
Pradyut Paul
Pradyut Paul is the CEO and co-founder of Bild, a San Francisco cloud-native product data management (PDM) platform built for hardware engineers. A former RFIC designer at Raytheon and hardware program manager at Apple (iPhone 8 through 11, early AirTags), he started Bild while earning his MBA at Yale, raised $3M in seed funding months after graduating in 2021, and pivoted the company toward version control and collaboration for mechanical engineering teams - growing revenue tenfold in 2023.
Valentina Ratner
Valentina Ratner is the co-founder and CEO of AllSpice.io, the 'GitHub for hardware' that brings version control, collaboration, and automated design review to the engineers who build PCBs, schematics, and bills of materials. An Argentina-born mechanical engineer turned Amazon PM turned Harvard MS/MBA, she launched AllSpice after watching brilliant teams build complex machines on archaic, file-shuffling workflows. In June 2025 she raised a $15M Series A to take the company's AI design-validation agent out of private beta, with customers spanning Blue Origin, Bose, and Tools for Humanity.
Kamran Maniar
Kamran Maniar is the Chief Executive Officer at Flux (flux.ai), the AI-powered PCB design platform headquartered in San Francisco. Flux - backed by 8VC and Bain Capital Ventures - has raised $39 million in total funding and serves over one million hardware builders across the globe, making professional circuit board design as accessible as writing a prompt. Operating at the intersection of AI, electronics, and manufacturing, Maniar leads from the crossroads of Silicon Valley ambition and Pakistan's deep engineering talent.