Simon Jones is the founder and CEO of Fluid Efficiency, a Caltech spin-out commercializing 'megasupramolecules' (MSMs), self-assembling polymers that make fuels harder to ignite in a crash and oil cheaper to push through a pipeline. An Oxford-trained inorganic chemist who spent years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jones is the industrial chemist who took a decades-old academic dream of safer jet fuel and figured out how to actually manufacture it at scale. He has collaborated with the original Caltech research team behind the technology since 2008.
Vishnu Sridhar is the Cofounder and CEO of Matter Intelligence, a deep-tech startup building ultraspectral satellite sensors and geospatial AI to map the planet at molecular resolution. A Queens-raised Indian American engineer, Sridhar spent years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as Cognizant Engineer for the SuperCam instrument aboard the Mars Perseverance rover and as Flight Director for the Opportunity rover before pivoting to commercialize the same sensor physics for Earth. Matter Intelligence emerged from stealth in October 2024 with $12M in seed funding backed by Lowercarbon Capital, Toyota Ventures, and Mark Cuban, building toward EARTH-1, a satellite that will deliver more than 500x the information density of existing sensors.