Tagged: infrastructure
30 results
PlanetScale
PlanetScale is a San Francisco database company that turns the hard parts of running relational databases at scale into a managed cloud service. Founded in 2018 by the creators of Vitess - the MySQL-sharding system built at YouTube and later used by Slack, GitHub and Square - the company sells a serverless database platform known for non-blocking schema changes, branching workflows borrowed from Git, and, more recently, Metal instances built on locally-attached NVMe drives. In 2025 it extended the same platform to Postgres, chasing the fastest-growing part of the database market while still, in its own words, loving MySQL.
Michael Mazur
Michael Mazur is co-founder and CEO of AI Clearing, an Austin-based platform that ingests drone imagery, BIM designs, schedules and ground data to produce autonomous progress tracking and quality control for large infrastructure builds. A former PwC partner who ran the firm's global Drone Powered Solutions unit, Mazur left in 2020 with co-founder Adam Wisniewski to spin the idea out as an independent company; in October 2023 the company closed a $14M Series A led by Prudence, on the back of 15x revenue growth.
Aren
Aren is a New York-based AI company that helps owners of bridges, tunnels, and other large civil infrastructure figure out what is quietly falling apart before it becomes a headline. Its platform ingests source-agnostic data - smartphone photos, drone video, laser scans, infrared, and sensors - and turns it into 3D digital twins that detect and quantify damage, track deterioration over time, and produce maintenance and capital-allocation plans. Founded by structural engineer Ali Khaloo out of Cornell Tech, Aren pairs computer vision and deep learning with decades of structural mechanics to give asset owners a quantitative, repeatable way to decide where to spend limited repair dollars.
BuildQ
BuildQ is an AI-native software and services company for capital-intensive infrastructure - energy, data centers and real estate. Founded in 2024 by attorney and former renewable-energy operator Maryssa Barron, the platform centralizes a project's documents, financials and contracts, then uses AI to run due diligence, surface risks and obligations, and produce investor-ready memos and data rooms. The pitch, in Barron's words, is 'TurboTax for project finance': turn the slow, six-figure, thousand-page grind of financing a clean-energy project into something faster and cheaper. Less than a year after launch, BuildQ reported 300+ projects, 10+ gigawatts of capacity and $150M+ in deal flow on the platform.
CivilGrid
CivilGrid is a San Francisco construction-intelligence company that centralizes utility, environmental, geotechnical and land-rights data into a single collaborative platform - often called 'Google Maps for pre-construction.' Founded in 2021 by Wharton classmates Josh Mackanic and Brandon Cohen, it partners with utilities and agencies to pull current GIS datasets so engineers and construction teams can scope, plan and de-risk projects before anyone breaks ground, cutting pre-construction research time by up to 90%.
Clad
Clad is project management and billing software purpose-built for infrastructure. It unifies project operations and finance so telecom operators and construction subcontractors can track production in the field, automate invoicing and payments, manage vendor compliance, and handle 811 utility locate requests - all in one place. Founded in 2022 by ex-Instagram product manager Jason Rudin and backed by Y Combinator (W23), Clad aims to help the companies rebuilding America's internet and power networks build faster and get paid faster.
Mit Jha
Dr. Mit Jha is the CEO of Quantum Corridor, the first inter-state quantum-safe commercial communications network in North America, running fiber from Chicago's 350 Cermak data center to Hammond, Indiana. A Purdue-trained PhD in transportation systems and former MIT research associate, he spent two decades structuring mega public-private-partnership infrastructure deals as a Managing Principal at Keystone Global before turning that dealmaking discipline toward building a quantum internet backbone across the American Midwest.
Josh Mackanic
Josh Mackanic is the founder and CEO of CivilGrid, a San Francisco construction intelligence platform that stitches together utility, environmental, and geotechnical site data so engineers stop discovering surprises with a backhoe. A licensed mechanical engineer with a decade inside PG&E and an MBA from Wharton, he has shepherded north of half a billion dollars of gas, electric, and renewable infrastructure into the ground.
Kam Eshghi
Kam Eshghi is Chief Business Officer at OpenInfer, the Inference OS for the agentic era. He co-founded Lightbits Labs, where he helped pioneer NVMe/TCP storage and drove its adoption across data centers and AI clouds before the company was acquired by NVIDIA. Earlier in his career he led strategic alliances at DSSD (acquired by EMC for $1B), built the NVMe controller business at IDT, and shaped server chipset and Ethernet switch roadmaps at Intel. MIT EECS and Berkeley Haas MBA. Forbes Technology Council member.
Atlas AI
Atlas AI is a Palo Alto-based Public Benefit Corporation building GeoAI software that turns planetary-scale satellite imagery, ground-truth surveys, and predictive models into decision-support tools for enterprises, governments, and development institutions investing in emerging markets.
Blumen Systems
Blumen Systems is a San Francisco software company building an AI-powered operating system for infrastructure permitting and environmental diligence. It fuses 2,000+ geospatial datasets, a nationwide database of local zoning and permitting rules across 3,200+ jurisdictions, and a decade of historic permit outcomes to flag fatal flaws and regulatory risk on energy and infrastructure sites in days instead of months. In 2025 its tools were used to evaluate roughly 60 GW of solar, battery, gas, and data-center projects.
EV Realty
EV Realty develops, owns, and operates high-powered EV charging hubs - 'Powered Properties' - for commercial truck and van fleets across California. The company secures grid power, real estate, and hardware in one package so logistics operators can electrify Class 8 trucks without waiting years for utility interconnects.
FriendliAI
FriendliAI is a San Francisco-based AI inference cloud built by the researchers who invented continuous batching - the technique now standard across the industry. Its platform serves open-weight and custom generative AI models in production with high throughput, lower GPU costs, and 99.99% reliability, used by customers including LG and Twelve Labs.
GridCARE
GridCARE is a Redwood City, California company that uses generative AI to find hidden capacity inside the existing electric grid - turning data-center 'time-to-power' from a 5-to-7-year wait into 6-to-12 months. Founded in 2024 by Amit Narayan with co-founders from Stanford, the company is building what it calls 'power acceleration for AI,' partnering with utilities like National Grid and Portland General Electric and counting Sutter Hill Ventures, Xora, Emerson Collective and John Doerr among its backers.
Succinct
Succinct is a San Francisco cryptography company building SP1, an open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine that lets developers prove the correct execution of any Rust program, and the Succinct Prover Network - a decentralized marketplace where independent provers compete to generate ZK proofs for rollups, bridges and onchain applications.
Laurence Allen
Laurence Allen, co-founder and CEO of Terranova, explains how his startup lifts land out of flood zones by injecting slurries of waste wood chips deep underground, an inexpensive, scalable alternative to seawalls, levees, and demolition. Drawing on a 1970s Venice mudjacking experiment and powered by autonomous robots and AI geology modeling, Terranova aims to be 'the anti-subsidence,' protecting whole communities and critical infrastructure. Allen also reflects on his formative internship at SpaceX, his maker upbringing, the intensity of deep-tech founding, and his vision for licensing the technology to contractors worldwide.
Maryssa Barron
Maryssa Barron is the founder and CEO of BuildQ, an AI-powered project intelligence platform for the energy sector that structures project data, automates due diligence, and accelerates clean energy financing and M&A. A Harvard graduate, Stanford-trained lawyer, and licensed D.C. attorney, she spent nearly a decade in renewable energy - pioneering early power purchase agreements and rising to COO at a global independent power producer - before building the tool she wished had existed. She founded BuildQ in 2024 while studying for the bar exam, won the 2025 AngelNV competition and over $1 million in funding, and within a year had grown the platform to 300+ projects, 10+ gigawatts of clean energy capacity, and over $150 million in deal flow.
Nicholas D'Andre
Nicholas D'Andre is the CEO and co-founder of GridMatrix, a San Francisco-founded software company that turns a city's existing traffic cameras and sensors into a real-time, AI-driven nervous system for roads, tunnels, ports and airports. A supply-chain operator turned infrastructure entrepreneur, he spent years buying sensors and RF components at Apple and forecasting demand at Amazon and Google before deciding the bigger problem was the analog infrastructure those devices lived inside. GridMatrix was selected from more than 150 global startups by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and now runs on landmarks like the Lincoln and Holland tunnels and the George Washington Bridge, spotting near-misses, congestion and emissions before they become headlines.
ngrok
ngrok is developer infrastructure that puts any app, API, or AI model online with a single command. What began in 2013 as one engineer's weekend project to learn Go is now a unified ingress platform - reverse proxy, firewall, API gateway, and global load balancer rolled into one - used by more than 5 million developers and trusted by companies like GitHub, Twilio, Zoom, and HashiCorp.
Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP)
Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP) is an infrastructure developer and holding company that builds and operates businesses reshaping how energy and digital systems work together. Founded inside Alphabet in 2017 and spun out as independent in 2019 by Sidewalk Labs veterans Jonathan Winer and Brian Barlow, SIP raised $400 million in 2020 backed by Alphabet and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan. It identifies bottlenecks in physical infrastructure, then pairs technology with capital to create new operating companies - most recently Renew Home, a roughly one-gigawatt residential virtual power plant, and Verrus, which designs large-scale data centers that flex their grid draw on demand.
Quantum Corridor
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.