Metalenz is a Boston-based deep-tech company that replaces stacks of curved glass lenses with a single flat, nanostructured semiconductor chip called a metasurface. Spun out of Harvard's Capasso Lab, it is the first company to mass-produce meta-optics, shrinking cameras and sensors for smartphones, biometrics, and 3D sensing. Its flagship Polar ID brings polarization-based, payment-grade face authentication to devices at a fraction of the size and cost of existing systems.
Luminar Technologies is an automotive lidar and perception company founded by teenage Thiel Fellow Austin Russell. It built 1550nm lidar sensors and software designed to give passenger cars, trucks and robotaxis long-range, high-resolution sight in the dark, winning production deals with Volvo, Mercedes-Benz and Polestar and partnerships with NVIDIA and Mobileye. After a 2020 SPAC debut at a roughly $3.4B valuation, mounting losses, a 2025 CEO ethics inquiry that removed Russell, and the loss of its anchor Volvo contract pushed the company into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2025.
Austin Russell founded Luminar Technologies at 16, built lidar hardware in his parents' garage, dropped out of Stanford after three months on a Thiel Fellowship, and briefly became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at 25 when Luminar went public in December 2020. His company's 1550nm lidar sensors were integrated into production vehicles from Volvo and Mercedes-Benz, representing a rare case of autonomous vehicle hardware reaching mass-market cars. After a highly publicized attempt to acquire Forbes magazine fell through in 2023, Russell resigned as Luminar's CEO in May 2025 following a board ethics inquiry, and the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2025.
Bedrock Robotics is a San Francisco startup retrofitting existing heavy construction equipment - excavators, dozers, articulated trucks - with an AI kit that turns them into 24/7 autonomous machines. Founded in 2024 by former Waymo leaders, the company raised a $270M Series B in February 2026 at a $1.75B valuation to scale its 'Bedrock Operator' platform across active job sites in the US.
DeepRoute.ai is a Shenzhen-headquartered autonomous-driving company building full-stack self-driving software, from Level-4 robotaxi systems to mass-market driver-assistance for production cars. Its DeepRoute IO 2.0 platform - powered by a 40-billion-parameter Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation model running on NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor - is being shipped by Great Wall Motor and a handful of other OEMs.
Kyle Moore is co-founder and Software Fellow at Pyka, the Alameda, California company building the world's largest commercially-approved autonomous electric aircraft. A self-taught programmer who started writing code at age 11 from rural Washington, Moore brought firmware and robotics expertise from Google X to help design Pyka's Pelican — a 1,320-lb autonomous electric aircraft now spraying crops across four continents and delivering cargo for the U.S. Air Force. Pyka has raised $95M in total funding and achieved back-to-back FAA authorizations for the largest uncrewed aircraft systems in U.S. commercial history.
Maxwell Zhou (周光) is the founder and CEO of DeepRoute.ai, a Shenzhen-based autonomous driving company he built from a 2019 conviction that AI could prevent traffic deaths. A Tsinghua-trained physicist turned AI PhD, Zhou led sensor fusion breakthroughs at Baidu and co-founded Roadstar.ai before pivoting to build what is now one of China's fastest-scaling third-party ADAS providers - deploying its end-to-end intelligent driving platform across 300,000+ vehicles and accumulating 1.3 billion kilometers of real-world data with over $500M in total funding.
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.
Omni Design Technologies builds high-performance, ultra-low-power semiconductor IP - the data converters and mixed-signal blocks that move information between the analog and digital worlds. Its Swift family of ADCs, DACs and analog front-ends sits inside SoCs for AI infrastructure, 5G/6G, Wi-Fi 7, automotive lidar/radar, satellite links, and quantum control, fabricated on processes from 28nm down to advanced FinFET nodes.
Outsight builds Physical AI software that turns raw 3D LiDAR data into real-time, anonymous spatial intelligence - tracking people and vehicles inside airports, train stations, stadiums, factories and city streets without ever recording a face.
Polycam is a cross-platform 3D scanning and spatial AI company that turns iPhones, Android phones, and drones into professional reality-capture tools. Used by architects, game studios, forensics teams, and millions of hobbyists, it combines LiDAR, photogrammetry, and Gaussian splatting to make 3D capture as easy as taking a photo.
Seyond (formerly Innovusion) is a Sunnyvale-based maker of image-grade LiDAR sensors and perception software for autonomous vehicles, ADAS, smart infrastructure, robotics and industrial applications. Best known as the long-range LiDAR supplier behind NIO's ET7, ET5 and ES7, the company has shipped more than 250,000 Falcon units and is pushing solid-state designs into mass production.
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.
Cédric Hutchings is a French serial entrepreneur and engineer who has spent two decades turning sensors into systems that change how the physical world gets understood. He co-founded Withings in 2008, building one of the first connected health companies from scratch to a €170M Nokia acquisition, then pivoted to co-found Outsight in 2019 - a Paris-based spatial intelligence company deploying 3D LiDAR software in airports, rail stations, and smart cities worldwide. Today, Outsight holds a $17.2M contract with Dallas Fort Worth Airport for the world's largest 3D LiDAR deployment, with installations at Charles de Gaulle and Rome Fiumicino airports among its growing portfolio.
Elliott Spelman is the co-founder and CEO of Polycam, the world's most-used 3D imaging app with over 10 million downloads and nearly 100,000 paying customers. A Stanford-trained designer and creative technologist, Spelman built Polycam to make 3D capture as accessible as photography - describing it as the Kodak Brownie of spatial computing. After meeting co-founder Chris Heinrich at Ubiquity6, they launched Polycam in 2020, raising an $18M Series A in early 2024 backed by Left Lane Capital, Adobe Ventures, and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley. Today Polycam serves individuals across more than half the Fortune 500 and is pushing hard into AI-powered floor plans, generative 3D, and enterprise spatial workflows.
Junwei Bao is the co-founder and CEO of Seyond (formerly Innovusion), a Silicon Valley-founded LiDAR company that went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2025. With a PhD in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley and a physics background from Peking University, Bao spent nearly two decades building precision optical sensors before pivoting to autonomous-driving hardware. He co-founded Timbre Technologies - the company that invented OCD (optical critical dimension) scatterometry, a kind of microscale LiDAR for semiconductors - then led Baidu's autonomous driving hardware division before founding Innovusion in 2016. Under his leadership, Seyond delivered 230,000 automotive-grade LiDAR units in 2024 and holds a 12.8% global ADAS LiDAR market share, ranking fourth worldwide.
Kush Gulati is the Co-founder, President, and CEO of Omni Design Technologies, a Milpitas-based semiconductor IP company he founded in 2015. A serial entrepreneur on his fifth venture, he holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and has spent over two decades pioneering ultra-low power analog circuit design. His proprietary SWIFT technology powers data conversion IP used in 5G, autonomous vehicles, AI infrastructure, satellite communications, and LiDAR applications by tier-one customers worldwide. Omni Design raised a $35M+ Series A in September 2025.
Nikhil Naikal is the CEO and co-founder of Kinetic, the automotive infrastructure startup using AI, computer vision, and robotics to automate the calibration and digital repair of modern vehicles. A roboticist with a PhD from UC Berkeley and an MS from Carnegie Mellon — where he was part of the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge-winning Tartan Racing team — Naikal previously founded Mapper.ai (acquired by Velodyne Lidar) and engineered AR software at Flyby Media (acquired by Apple). At Kinetic, he is building a national network of high-throughput digital repair hubs that slash ADAS calibration time from hours to under 15 minutes, backed by $31M in total funding including a $21M Series B led by Menlo Ventures.
Hrach Simonian is a General Partner at Canaan Partners, one of the oldest venture capital firms in the US, where he has spent nearly two decades rising from investment analyst to leading the firm's West Coast technology practice. A UCLA and Michigan-trained electrical engineer who detoured through laser physics research at Northrop Grumman before pivoting to VC via Stanford GSB, Simonian is best known for writing one of the first institutional checks into Instacart when the company was just five weeks old in 2012 - a bet that returned billions. His current portfolio spans industrial AI, autonomous robotics, advanced manufacturing software, and battery safety tech, reflecting a full-circle return to his engineering roots.
Yarbo M Series is a modular, autonomous yard robot that replaces four seasonal machines - lawn mower, snow blower, leaf collector, and edge trimmer - with one tracked, wire-free platform. Unveiled at CES 2026 and raising $2.6M on Kickstarter (26x its goal), the M Series uses nRTK GPS, LiDAR, and onboard AI to navigate without buried boundary wires, handles slopes up to 35 degrees, and operates year-round from -13F to 113F.
The Volvo EX90 is a full-size, seven-seat luxury electric SUV and Volvo's most technologically ambitious vehicle ever made. Serving as the electric successor to the iconic XC90, it combines Scandinavian design, 300 miles of EPA range, and an unprecedented sensor suite - including LIDAR, 8 cameras, 5 radars, and an AI-powered Driver Understanding System that can pull the car over and call emergency services if the driver is unresponsive. Starting at $76,695, it won the 2025 World Luxury Car of the Year and a 2024 TIME Best Invention award.
The Xpeng G9 is a flagship mid-size electric SUV from Chinese EV maker Xpeng Motors, built on an 800V silicon carbide platform with class-leading fast charging (10-80% in 12 minutes on 2025 models), up to 725 km CLTC range, and a full-stack autonomous driving system called XNGP. It competes directly with Tesla Model Y and premium European EVs, and has been exported to Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Its tech is now licensed to Volkswagen Group.
The Zeekr 001 is a premium battery electric shooting brake made by Zeekr, a Geely Holding Group sub-brand. Launched in 2021, it is widely described as the world's first mass-produced EV shooting brake - a swooping 5-door fastback combining Porsche Taycan Sport Turismo aesthetics with aggressive EV performance and tech at a fraction of the price. With triple five-star safety ratings, up to 1,265 hp in its FR quad-motor variant, and charging speeds that hit 546 kW peak on its 2026 900V platform, the 001 has become the benchmark for Chinese premium EVs seeking global legitimacy.