Ray Liu is the CEO and co-founder of Vena Vitals, an Irvine, California medtech startup building a soft, skin-like sticker that tracks blood pressure continuously, beat by beat, without cuffs or invasive arterial lines. A National Science Foundation fellow turned operator, Liu spent two decades inside GE Healthcare, Siemens, and Vizient, and racked up two health-tech exits before reuniting with a former Berkeley labmate, UC Irvine professor Michelle Khine, and PhD scientist Josh Kim to turn a material-science breakthrough into a clinical product. Backed by Y Combinator, MedTech Innovator, and EvoNexus, Vena Vitals has tested its sensor on 600-plus patients in operating rooms and is targeting FDA clearance in 2026.
Jessica Toh is the co-founder and CEO of Huckleberry Labs, the AI-powered children's sleep and parenting app she built with her husband Seng Toh after their own son woke every two to three hours for 20 months. A UC Berkeley triple major in electrical engineering, computer science, and math & statistics with a Cambridge MBA, she turned a personal sleep crisis into data science, then into a company that now reaches more than 5 million families across 150+ countries - including roughly 15% of U.S. babies. Her mission is to make expert-grade parenting guidance affordable for everyone, not just families who can pay a sleep consultant thousands a year.
Todd Watts is the co-founder and CEO of PatientFi, an Irvine, California fintech that lets patients pay for elective and out-of-pocket healthcare in monthly installments at the point of care. Since starting the company in 2017, he has built a platform that has helped roughly 320,000 patients qualify for more than $3 billion in care across aesthetics, fertility, dentistry, ophthalmology and audiology, reaching a $140 million annual revenue run rate and 130 employees. A former J.P. Morgan investment banker with a Yale MBA, Watts was named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2024 Pacific Southwest winner.
Darrin Chen is the VP of Global Partners (NPN) GTM & Operations at NVIDIA, where he leads go-to-market strategy and operations for the NVIDIA Partner Network - the company's global partner ecosystem spanning solution providers, systems integrators, and channel partners. With 30+ years in technology from storage to networking to AI infrastructure, Chen joined NVIDIA through the 2020 acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, where he had spent over a decade building worldwide channel programs. In mid-2023, NVIDIA expanded his mandate as it split its global channel chief role in two, tapping Chen to oversee its entire NPN program as the company transformed into a full-stack AI computing company.
Saleel Awsare is President and CEO of Lantronix, the Irvine, California-based provider of compute, connect and management solutions for the intelligent edge. He took the top job in November 2023 after a quarter-century run that included senior leadership posts at Synaptics, Conexant Systems and Nuvoton Technology Corporation America. Under his watch, Lantronix has been repositioning from a networking-hardware vendor into a full-stack edge-AI and 'Physical AI' systems player, with drone, smart-city and industrial IoT deployments leading the pivot.
Adam Wegel is the Chief Executive Officer of Ease.io, the Irvine-based manufacturing audit and plant-floor platform used by Dana, Tenneco, Eaton and other manufacturers in 50+ countries. Appointed in October 2025, he succeeded Eric Stoop after more than a decade of Stoop's leadership. Wegel previously ran AI Application Development product at Salesforce, where his teams shipped the Agentforce Chat Client, and earlier worked as a manufacturing engineer at Delphi Automotive.