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.
UnitX builds AI-powered visual inspection systems for manufacturers who can't afford to ship defective products. Their flagship platform - combining OptiX (software-defined imaging), CorteX (AI edge computing), GenX (synthetic defect generation), and FleX (the full integrated system) - cuts defect escape rates by 9x and deploys in about a week. With 820+ systems running across 170+ factories globally, UnitX has inspected over $6.1 billion worth of goods and counts five of the world's top ten automotive tier-1 suppliers among its customers.
Neschae Fernando is the CEO of Zone24x7, a 22-year-old technology engineering company headquartered in San Jose, California, with a major hub in Sri Lanka. With a dual background in electrical engineering (MS and BS from UCLA) and enterprise IT delivery at Cisco, Fernando leads a 270-person team that sits at a rare intersection: companies capable of integrating hardware and software end-to-end. Under his leadership since June 2022, Zone24x7 has won seven industry awards in 2025 alone, including Gold at NBQSA and the IoT Technology of the Year Award, while expanding its AI, RFID, and cognitive vision platforms across 50+ enterprise clients globally.
Clinton Smith is Co-Founder and CEO of RIOS Intelligent Machines, a Menlo Park-based robotics and AI company deploying dexterous robots in factories across industries like wood products, food, and beverage distribution. A Princeton-trained electrical engineer with a Ph.D. on laser spectrometers for wireless trace-gas sensing, he spent years at Xerox PARC and Physical Sciences Inc. before co-founding RIOS in 2018 with fellow PARC engineers. Under his leadership, RIOS has raised $37.5M total including a $13M Series B in March 2024 co-led by Yamaha Motor Corp. and IAG Capital Partners, pioneering a Robots-as-a-Service model that shifts CapEx burden away from manufacturers and promises outcomes from day one.
Christopher Van Dyke is the Co-Founder and CEO of Overview AI, a San Francisco-based industrial machine vision company using deep learning to catch manufacturing defects before they cost factories millions. A Stanford-educated mechanical engineer who spent eight-plus years at Tesla launching the Supercharger network and scaling the Model 3 battery program, Van Dyke founded Overview in 2018 with a simple premise: manual inspection costs manufacturers an estimated $300 billion a year, and AI can fix that. Overview's smart cameras - running NVIDIA GPUs at the edge - now serve over 100 manufacturers across 15 countries, including Toyota, Honda, and Tyson Foods, typically delivering ROI within three to six months.