Quantum Corridor is a Midwest network-infrastructure company building North America's first inter-state, quantum-safe commercial fiber backbone. Its live coherent optical network links Chicago to Northwest Indiana with 40 Tbps capacity and 0.274 ms round-trip latency, connecting quantum research labs, hyperscalers, data centers and defense partners. Formed in 2021 as a public-private partnership, it is extending the route toward Purdue, Indianapolis and the Crane naval research base.
Steven Jepeal is the co-founder and CEO of Allium Engineering, a Massachusetts deeptech startup making bridges last 100 years instead of 30. An MIT nuclear-engineering PhD who once worked on fusion reactor materials, Jepeal pivoted from the physics of plasma to the unglamorous economics of rebar, inventing a way to clad ordinary steel reinforcing bar in a thin layer of stainless so it stops rusting. The trick: the process slots into existing steel mills without changing how they operate. Allium's clad rebar is already in bridges in California and Florida, and Jepeal was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Manufacturing & Industry.
Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor of City Journal, and a New York Post columnist who has become one of the most-cited voices on how New York moves, pays its bills, and keeps itself safe. A Chartered Financial Analyst turned urban-policy writer, she translates municipal bonds, subway capital plans, and congestion-pricing math into prose ordinary readers can follow. Her 2024 book Movement: New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car won the 2025 Gotham Book Prize and reframed the century-long fight over the city's streets as a story with many heroes, not just one Robert Moses villain.
Webcor is a San Francisco-based commercial general contractor and one of California's largest builders, known for self-performed concrete, finish carpentry and millwork, deep preconstruction and BIM expertise, and a portfolio of landmark projects from the California Academy of Sciences to the Salesforce Transit Center. Founded in 1971 and owned by Japan's Obayashi Corporation since 2007, Webcor pairs craft-trade self-performance with virtual-building technology to deliver complex, sustainable buildings across the state.
Ross Ortega is VP of Product Management at Microsoft, currently leading Discovery and Communications initiatives. He previously built a $1 billion portfolio of Azure networking services - including ExpressRoute, Virtual WAN, Application Gateway, and Web Application Firewall - and then led Azure for Operators, Microsoft's 5G and edge computing platform for telecommunications providers. Before Microsoft, he co-founded Consystant Design Technologies and served as President and CTO of GraniteEdge Networks. A career technologist with roots in embedded systems and networking, Ortega has spent over two decades at Microsoft shaping how enterprises and telecoms connect to the cloud.
Eric Foster spent 42 years at Swinerton - one of the largest 100% employee-owned construction companies in the US - rising from project engineer in 1982 to CEO in January 2020, the company's 12th chief executive in its 132-year history. A UC Berkeley civil engineering graduate, he led Swinerton through the COVID-19 pandemic, oversaw the launch of mass timber subsidiary Timberlab, and expanded the firm to $4.3 billion in revenue across 20 locations before retiring on January 11, 2024. His career touched landmark San Francisco structures including SFMOMA and the historic Monadnock Building.
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.
Cribl is a vendor-agnostic data engine for IT and security teams that routes, shapes, reduces, and enriches observability and security telemetry between any source and any destination - letting enterprises escape vendor lock-in and tame runaway data costs.
Exodigo is an AI-powered underground mapping company that fuses multiple geophysical sensors with machine learning to produce non-intrusive 3D maps of what lies beneath the surface, helping transit agencies, utilities and engineers de-risk multi-billion-dollar infrastructure projects.
Dylan Cui is a co-founder of PingCAP, the company behind TiDB - one of the world's most widely adopted open-source distributed SQL databases. A software engineer by trade, Dylan co-built TiDB from scratch starting in 2015 after experiencing firsthand the pain of database scaling at scale while working at Wandoujia. PingCAP has raised over $341 million and TiDB has more than 33,000 GitHub stars, serving thousands of enterprises globally across fintech, gaming, and e-commerce.
Alexander Gallego is the founder and CEO of Redpanda Data, a San Francisco-based streaming data platform that reached unicorn status in April 2025 after raising $100M in Series D funding led by GV. A Colombian immigrant who moved to the US at 14, Gallego built a storage engine at Akamai that outperformed Kafka by 34x, then left to found Redpanda in 2019 with a singular mission: make real-time data infrastructure simple enough to deploy in 60 seconds. Today Redpanda powers mission-critical systems for Fortune 1000 companies, government contractors, and telecom firms, processing up to 14GB/second sustained throughput, and is pivoting toward enterprise agentic AI infrastructure as autonomous agents reshape how applications are built.
Dan Wright is the Co-Founder and CEO of Armada, a San Francisco-based edge computing company building ruggedized, modular AI data centers deployable anywhere in the world - from oil rigs to military forward operating bases. Before Armada, he led DataRobot as CEO during its hypergrowth phase (peak valuation $6.3B) and was COO and General Counsel at AppDynamics through its landmark $3.7B acquisition by Cisco. A lawyer-turned-operator, Wright co-founded Armada in December 2022 alongside Jon Runyan, raised a $230M Series B at a $2B valuation in May 2026, and has deployed edge AI infrastructure across 43 countries for customers including the U.S. Navy and Aker BP.
Jason Warner is the co-founder and CEO of Poolside, a San Francisco-based frontier AI lab building proprietary foundation models for software development with $626M raised and a $3B+ valuation. Before Poolside, he was CTO of GitHub - where he launched Actions, Packages, Codespaces, and incubated what became GitHub Copilot - and then a Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures. A self-described 'average developer but excellent architect,' Warner is betting that reinforcement learning from code execution will make software the first domain where AI surpasses human-level intelligence.
Jeremy Suard is the Co-Founder and CEO of Exodigo, a Palo Alto-based deep tech company applying AI and multi-sensor fusion to solve one of infrastructure's oldest problems: accurately mapping what's underground before drilling through it. Born in France and raised partly in Israel, Suard served nearly eight years in Israeli Military Intelligence Unit 81, directing AI and signal processing R&D teams and becoming the most decorated technology major in the IDF. He co-founded Exodigo in 2021 with fellow IDF alumni Ido Gonen and Yogev Shifman, channeling classified sensor-fusion expertise into a commercial platform that scans the ground non-intrusively, locates 20-30% more utility lines than premium competitors, and has raised over $271 million in funding to date.
Kwindla Hultman Kramer is co-founder and CEO of Daily.co, a developer platform providing real-time voice, video, and AI infrastructure. He is also the creator of Pipecat, the most widely used open-source framework for building voice AI agents. A Harvard and MIT Media Lab alumnus, Kwindla has spent his career at the intersection of real-time communication and developer infrastructure—from scaling AllAfrica.com as CTO to building spatial computing interfaces at Oblong Industries to raising $62M+ for Daily and releasing Pipecat to the open-source community.
Larry Gadea is the founder and CEO of Envoy, the San Francisco-based workplace platform that turned the humble office sign-in book into a $1.4 billion unicorn. A Romanian refugee who was recruited by Google at 17, created Twitter's 'Murder' infrastructure tool as one of its first 50 employees, and spotted a market gap nobody else noticed: enterprise software had completely ignored the physical office. From smuggled out of communist Romania to building the software that runs 14,000+ workplaces in 70 countries, Gadea's story is one of relentless pattern recognition, resilience, and the stubborn conviction that the office deserves the same engineering love as everything else in tech.
Max Liu (刘奇) is co-founder and CEO of PingCAP, the company behind TiDB - an open-source distributed SQL database designed for hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP). He co-founded PingCAP in 2015 after stints at JD.com and Wandou Labs, solving the database scaling crisis at hyperscale. Under his leadership, PingCAP raised $341.6M in total funding including a $270M Series D, and TiDB now serves customers including Pinterest, Plaid, Bolt, and Atlassian. In 2025, Liu was named one of The Top 50 Software CEOs of 2024 by The Software Report.
Matthew Rosenthal is CEO and Co-Founder of SewerAI, the AI-powered platform transforming how cities inspect and manage underground sewer infrastructure. A Carnegie Mellon-trained engineer who worked at Fitbit and founded Centosette (acquired 2010), Rosenthal pivoted into sewer tech after recognizing that one million miles of U.S. pipes were being assessed with 20-year-old software. SewerAI's Pioneer platform and AutoCode AI have now processed over 135 million feet of sewer inspection footage, slashing inspection costs by 40-70% and saving municipalities tens of millions of dollars. In June 2024, Rosenthal closed a $15M Series B led by Innovius Capital, bringing total funding to $18.5M.
Nelson Lee is the Founder and CEO of InfrasAI (formerly iLife Technologies), an AI-powered workflow infrastructure company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Drawing on early stints at Tencent and J.P. Morgan and participation in Stanford's Idea-to-Market program, Lee spent years mapping the fragmentation inside insurance distribution before building infrastructure to fix it. InfrasAI's headless connectivity platform decouples business logic from user interfaces, enabling insurance carriers to deploy workflows across any distributor channel without rebuilding backend systems - reducing maintenance costs by up to 60% and accelerating deployment speed by up to 70%. Backed by $21M in funding led by Foundation Capital and top insurtech investors, the company serves enterprise clients including Transamerica and Guardian across life, annuities, group benefits, disability, and wealth management.
Redpanda Data is a high-performance streaming data platform built in C++ that is wire-compatible with the Apache Kafka API while ditching the JVM and ZooKeeper. Founded in 2019 by Alexander Gallego, the company helps engineering teams move terabytes of real-time data per day with a simpler, faster, and cheaper architecture, and has expanded its remit toward agentic AI infrastructure.
SewerAI is a Walnut Creek, California software company building AI for the people who keep the sewers running. Its Pioneer cloud platform and AutoCode computer vision tools help cities, utilities, engineers, and contractors inspect, code, and prioritize sewer pipe defects faster and more accurately than manual review.
Teleport is the infrastructure identity company. Its open-source Access Platform replaces shared secrets, VPNs, and long-lived credentials with short-lived cryptographic identities for humans, machines, and AI agents accessing servers, Kubernetes clusters, databases, applications, and Windows desktops.
Tom Eliaz is the Co-Founder and VP of Engineering at Bedrock Robotics, a San Francisco-based startup building autonomous systems for heavy construction equipment. With over two decades of software engineering leadership spanning robotics, cloud infrastructure, and AI, he previously led 100+ engineers at Twilio Engage, directed engineering at Segment through its $3.2B acquisition, and was an early cloud platform engineer at Anki. Before Bedrock, he also founded a healthcare technology company. At Bedrock - a $1.75B-valued company that raised $270M in Series B funding in February 2026 - Eliaz applies engineering depth to the problem of retrofitting excavators and heavy machinery with LiDAR, GPS, and AI software to run autonomously on construction sites 24/7.
Varun Talwar is the co-founder and CTO of Tetrate, the enterprise service mesh company built on Istio and Envoy. Before Tetrate, he was the founding product manager for both gRPC and Istio at Google — two open-source projects now embedded in the plumbing of the modern internet. He helped stream Felix Baumgartner's 2012 space jump to 8% of all internet traffic, then spent a decade building the connectivity layer that would make that kind of scale routine. Today Tetrate has raised $52.5M and is redefining how AI agents talk to each other securely in production.
Alfred Chuang is the General Partner of Race Capital, a San Francisco venture firm investing in Web2 and Web3 infrastructure. Before becoming a VC, he co-founded BEA Systems in 1995 and led it as CEO until Oracle bought it in 2008 for $8.6 billion. Andreessen Horowitz has called him the Silicon Valley CEO's CEO.
Andrew Verhalen is a General Partner at Matrix Partners who has been investing in infrastructure and communications companies since 1992. A former Intel product manager for the 8086 microprocessor and a divisional VP at 3Com, he brought operator scars to venture before that was a phrase. He helped seed Grand Junction Networks (later a major division at Cisco), led Matrix into Unwired Planet, SiTera, and Alteon WebSystems, and serves as lead independent director at semiconductor company Ambarella.
Arsham Memarzadeh is a General Partner at Meritech Capital in Palo Alto, where he leads enterprise software and infrastructure growth investments. He arrived in early 2025 after six years at Lightspeed Venture Partners, where he helped lead the growth practice and backed Wiz, Chainguard, Verkada, ClickUp, Axonius, Personio, Enable, Payhawk, and Spiff.
Ashu Garg is a General Partner at Foundation Capital in Palo Alto, where he writes the first check into deeply technical, pre-revenue founders building AI-first enterprise companies. He was an early investor in Databricks and six unicorns including Cohesity, Eightfold, Amperity, Turing, Anyscale, and Alation. He hosts the B2BaCEO podcast and convenes Foundation's annual CEO Summit.
Brittany Walker is a General Partner at CRV in San Francisco who writes first checks to technical founders in AI, infrastructure software, and frontier technology. She joined CRV in 2020, was promoted to General Partner in 2024, and co-founded The Table, a community for women building in enterprise.