BrightAI is a Palo Alto-based physical AI company building Stateful OS, a platform that pairs edge sensors, robots, and multimodal AI models to monitor, inspect, and maintain critical infrastructure - pipes, power grids, HVAC systems, and more. Co-founded in 2019 by SmartThings creator Alex Hawkinson, the company crossed $80M in revenue while bootstrapped before raising a $51M Series A in July 2025.
Daedalus is an AI-driven precision manufacturing company building software-defined factories that produce high-precision parts for defense, medtech, semiconductors and industrial customers. Founded by former OpenAI Robotics technical lead Jonas Schneider, the company pairs off-the-shelf CNC hardware with its proprietary Manufacturing AI Platform to automate the work that traditionally requires veteran machinists - quoting, process planning, machine control and quality inspection - and runs it all out of a 50,000-square-foot factory in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Jonas Schneider is the Founder and CEO of Daedalus, an AI-powered precision manufacturing company headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, building the factory of the future. A former OpenAI technical lead and co-founder of its robotics team, Schneider left Silicon Valley in 2019 to solve a problem he lived firsthand: getting precision-manufactured parts takes months, and the world's most advanced machines sit idle 80% of the time. Daedalus deploys proprietary AI software across CNC shop floors to double machine utilization, catch defects in real time, and preserve tacit manufacturing knowledge before it disappears with retiring machinists. The company has raised $41.1M in total funding, including a $21M Series A led by NGP Capital in February 2024, and operates a 50,000-square-foot factory serving defense, medical devices, aerospace, and semiconductor clients.
Versatile is a construction-technology company using AI, IoT and computer vision to turn cranes into the smartest data source on a jobsite. Its flagship product, CraneView, mounts under the hook of any tower or mobile crane and streams real-time data on materials, productivity and progress to project managers and steel erectors. Founded in Israel in 2016, the company is headquartered in Los Altos with offices in Boca Raton and Tel Aviv.
Sight Machine is an industrial AI company that turns the messy, unstructured exhaust of factory floors into a single live model of production. Its Manufacturing Data Platform connects machines, lines and plants - then runs AI on top so Global 500 manufacturers can see, decide and act in real time.
Dr. Christopher Cuong T. Nguyen is CEO and Co-Founder of Aitomatic, a Silicon Valley-based Industrial AI company advancing what he calls 'Knowledge-First AI' - the conviction that decades of human domain expertise must be encoded alongside data, not replaced by it. A Stanford PhD and UC Berkeley summa cum laude graduate, his four-decade arc runs from building Intel's first flash memory transistors to launching Google Apps as founding Engineering Director, co-founding HKUST's Computer Engineering program, and helping connect Vietnam to the internet. Today he leads Aitomatic in deploying Small Specialist Agents for semiconductor, energy, and manufacturing industries, and sits on the Steering Committee of The AI Alliance.
Clinton Smith is Co-Founder and CEO of RIOS Intelligent Machines, a Menlo Park-based robotics and AI company deploying dexterous robots in factories across industries like wood products, food, and beverage distribution. A Princeton-trained electrical engineer with a Ph.D. on laser spectrometers for wireless trace-gas sensing, he spent years at Xerox PARC and Physical Sciences Inc. before co-founding RIOS in 2018 with fellow PARC engineers. Under his leadership, RIOS has raised $37.5M total including a $13M Series B in March 2024 co-led by Yamaha Motor Corp. and IAG Capital Partners, pioneering a Robots-as-a-Service model that shifts CapEx burden away from manufacturers and promises outcomes from day one.
Jon Sobel is the co-founder and CEO of Sight Machine, the industrial AI company he built from scratch in 2011 after a career spanning the law departments of Yahoo and Tesla and executive roles at CBS Digital and SourceForge. A Princeton and Wharton graduate who also holds a Michigan law degree, Sobel spent over a decade as one of Silicon Valley's most senior in-house lawyers before betting his career on a hunch: that factory floors, drowning in data they could not use, were the biggest missed opportunity in enterprise software. Sight Machine has since raised over $124M, operates in 20+ industries across 20+ countries, and in 2025 closed an equity investment from NVIDIA's venture arm — proving that a former general counsel with a journalism fellowship can, in fact, build a category-defining AI company.
Sam Lurye is the founder and CEO of Kargo, a San Francisco-based industrial AI company that installs computer-vision towers at warehouse loading docks to automatically capture, verify, and digitize freight data in real time. A Stanford electrical engineering dropout, Lurye left campus in 2019 after touring factories across the US and spotting a universal blind spot: every warehouse still tracked its most important physical transactions - trucks arriving, pallets moving, damages happening - on paper and memory. Kargo has since deployed over 1,000 sensor towers, grown its enterprise customer base from 3 to 45+ (including Mercedes-Benz, Tillamook, and Aurobindo), tripled annual revenue from 2024 to 2025, and raised a $42M Series B in December 2025.
Hrach Simonian is a General Partner at Canaan Partners, one of the oldest venture capital firms in the US, where he has spent nearly two decades rising from investment analyst to leading the firm's West Coast technology practice. A UCLA and Michigan-trained electrical engineer who detoured through laser physics research at Northrop Grumman before pivoting to VC via Stanford GSB, Simonian is best known for writing one of the first institutional checks into Instacart when the company was just five weeks old in 2012 - a bet that returned billions. His current portfolio spans industrial AI, autonomous robotics, advanced manufacturing software, and battery safety tech, reflecting a full-circle return to his engineering roots.