Ravi Pappu is the founder and CEO of Apeiron Labs, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup building low-cost autonomous robots that drift through the water column to measure the ocean at a scale never attempted. A physicist-turned-serial-founder, he invented Physical Unclonable Functions during his MIT PhD, co-founded the RFID pioneer ThingMagic (acquired by Trimble), and served as CTO of the CIA-linked venture firm In-Q-Tel before deciding the subsurface ocean was the hardest, most under-measured place on Earth and going after it with hardware he calls 'the CubeSat for the ocean.'
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.
Eileen Tanghal is the Founder and General Partner of Black Opal Ventures, a women-led early-stage venture capital firm based in New York investing at the intersection of healthcare and frontier technology. With over 20 years of VC experience spanning corporate venture (Applied Ventures, ARM Holdings), national security investing (In-Q-Tel), and European VC (Amadeus Capital, Kennet Partners), she co-founded Black Opal in 2021 alongside Dr. Tara Bishop - a friend of 30 years from their days as MIT engineering students. The firm raised a $58M debut fund with backing from Eli Lilly, Bank of America, and J.P. Morgan, and invests in companies using AI, bioengineering, and advanced computing to reshape how healthcare is delivered and who can access it.
Gilman Louie is a fourth-generation Chinese-American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and national security strategist who built the CIA's venture capital arm In-Q-Tel from scratch, co-founded Alsop Louie Partners, and now leads America's Frontier Fund — a nonprofit deep-tech investment vehicle aimed at securing U.S. technological leadership against China. Before any of that, he was the video game pioneer who brought Tetris to the West and built the Falcon F-16 flight simulator so realistic it trained actual Air National Guard pilots.