Evan Kaplan is the CEO of InfluxData, the company behind InfluxDB - the world's most popular open-source time series database with over 1.3 million developers. With nearly 20 years in CEO roles across multiple companies, he took InfluxData from a scrappy open-source project of 3,000 users to a platform handling billions of data points per second for 1,900+ enterprise customers. His path to the C-suite ran not through computer science but through environmental science degrees and years spent as a mountain guide in his late 20s - an unconventional origin story that shows up in how he thinks about resilience and long-term endurance.
Mark Housley is the Chairman and CEO of Vigilent, an Oakland-based AI-powered cooling optimization company that serves over 1,500 data center and telecom facilities across 36 countries. A serial entrepreneur and seasoned technology executive, Housley has led multiple companies through turnarounds, acquisitions, and growth phases across optical networking, display technology, and enterprise software. At Vigilent, he oversees a platform backed by 52 patents in applied AI that has collectively reduced energy consumption by hundreds of millions of kilowatt hours and eliminated hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2 emissions globally.
Felix Fink is the co-founder and CEO of RIIICO, a German deeptech startup building AI-powered 3D factory digital twins using LiDAR point cloud data. Founded in 2021 out of RWTH Aachen University, RIIICO transforms physical factory floors into collaborative, predictive digital environments in a fraction of the time traditional modeling takes. The company raised a $5M seed round in 2025 led by Pi Labs, won the Siemens Inventors of the Year 2024 award in the Open Innovation category, and counts Volvo, Porsche, Volkswagen, and Schaeffler among its customers. Fink drives product strategy with a philosophy of combining startup agility with deep industrial knowledge.
Jane Ren is the Co-Founder and CEO of Atomiton, a Santa Clara-based industrial IoT and sustainability software company she co-founded in 2013. With a rare combination of a medical degree from Peking Union Medical College and an MBA from UC Berkeley Haas, she bridges the gap between operational technology and enterprise sustainability. At Atomiton, she leads a 33-person team building AI-powered platforms that help data centers, manufacturers, and buildings reduce energy costs, optimize water use, and hit their carbon targets - work that earned the company the 'Most Innovative Platform in Energy and Sustainability 2025' award from Energy Business Review Magazine.
Lucas Funes is the CEO and Co-Founder of Webee, a Silicon Valley-based Industrial IoT and AI platform company he built from Córdoba, Argentina to the global stage. With an engineering background spanning electronics and telecommunications, and a Master's in Innovation Technology, he has spent over two decades pioneering enterprise software and connected hardware solutions. Webee's patented no-code IIoT platform lets manufacturers deploy AI-driven monitoring - covering machine health, energy, water, and emissions - in hours rather than months, without writing a single line of code. A Stanford Latino Entrepreneur and recognized thought leader in Industry 5.0 digital transformation, Funes is on a mission to make complex industrial technology accessible to businesses of every size.
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.