QbDVision is an Austin-based software company building the first cloud platform for Digital CMC (Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls), giving pharmaceutical and biotech teams a structured, single source of truth for product and process knowledge. By operationalizing Quality by Design principles, the platform replaces scattered documents and spreadsheets with connected, machine-readable data that accelerates drug development, tech transfer, and regulatory submissions. Founded in 2015 as CherryCircle Software, QbDVision now serves several of the world's largest biopharma organizations and CDMOs.
Relimetrics is an AI software company building ReliVision, a no-code visual inspection platform that lets manufacturers digitize quality assurance on the factory floor. Hardware-agnostic and self-installable, it puts model training, retraining and defect detection in the hands of plant engineers instead of data scientists - and its accuracy is unusual enough that reinsurer Munich Re will underwrite it. Founded in 2015 with offices in Silicon Valley and Berlin, the company counts HPE, Lockheed Martin, Foxconn and Siemens Gamesa among its users.
Garrett Waggoner is the co-founder and CEO of Cirkul, the Tampa-based hydration company whose reusable bottle and flip-dial flavor cartridges turned a college locker-room frustration into a business valued at $1 billion. A former Dartmouth safety who played professional football in the CFL and worked as a car valet to bootstrap the idea, Waggoner built Cirkul into a roughly $378M-revenue, 800-person operation by insisting on owning its own manufacturing.
James DeMuth is the co-founder and CEO of Seurat Technologies, a Wilmington, Massachusetts metal additive manufacturing company chasing a single audacious goal: printing metal parts fast and cheap enough to compete with mass production, then planting factories next to the customers who need them. He co-invented Seurat's Area Printing technology while working on laser fusion research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, holds a hand in roughly 145 patents, and has raised more than $181 million to reshore manufacturing and cut carbon out of how metal gets made.
Summer Robotics is a Campbell, California machine-vision company giving robots what it calls superhuman perception. Its patented Kortx platform fuses event-based sensors with continuous laser scanning - a category the company calls laser-event sensing - to deliver blur-free 3D tracking with sub-5ms latency, 100-micron precision and 100Hz tracking. The technology lets robots see and react in dynamic, unstructured, variably lit environments, including on metal, glossy and transparent surfaces that defeat conventional cameras, unlocking automation in manufacturing, logistics and humanoid applications.
Axion Ray (operating as Axion) builds an AI 'observability command center' that helps the world's largest manufacturers catch product quality and safety problems months before they turn into recalls. Founded in 2021 by former McKinsey AI strategist Daniel First, the company fuses fragmented, unstructured field data - service tickets, dealership notes, call-center transcripts, sensor telemetry - into early-warning intelligence for engineering teams. Backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, RTX Ventures, Amplo and Inspired Capital with $25M raised, Axion works with manufacturers across aerospace, automotive, medtech and consumer goods.
Tulip Interfaces is a Boston-area software company that gives factory-floor workers a no-code platform to build the apps, dashboards, and connected-machine workflows that run modern operations. Spun out of the MIT Media Lab in 2014, Tulip treats human operators as the most valuable resource on the shop floor rather than something to automate away. Its composable platform stitches together people, machines, sensors, and AI into 'frontline operations' apps used by more than 200 manufacturers across pharma, medical devices, aerospace, and consumer goods. In January 2026 the company raised a $120M Series D led by Mitsubishi Electric at a $1.3B valuation, crossing into unicorn territory.
Tutor Intelligence builds AI-powered collaborative robots that pick, pack, and palletize alongside people on factory and warehouse floors. Born out of MIT's CSAIL, the company sells robots by the hour - a Robots-as-a-Service model that drops a working robot onto a line in days, not months, with no programming required. Its flagship Cassie handles infinite SKUs at up to 14 cases per minute, while Data Factory 1, a 100-robot facility in a renovated Watertown mill, trains the next generation of factory-ready robot AI on real-world data.
Tom Molden is CIO of Global Executive Engagement at NinjaOne, a role that puts a 30-year IT practitioner in the room with the buyers he used to be. He learned automation in the car rental business, spent 14 years moving through the semiconductor industry across the US and Europe, then ran planning for a multi-billion-dollar IT transformation at General Motors before becoming Chief of Staff to GM's global CISO. Fluent in English and German, he trades in the language of boards: revenue, margin, and risk.
Tom Petit is the co-founder and CEO of Didero, a New York company building an agentic AI procurement platform that sits on top of a manufacturer's existing systems and quietly does the routine work of running a supply chain. A Belgian who came of age in Texas, he trained in computational mathematics at Stanford and Cambridge, did data science at Airbnb and HelloFresh, and co-founded the real-estate fintech Landis before turning to the unglamorous world of purchase orders and supplier emails. In February 2026 Didero raised a $30M Series A co-led by Chemistry and Headline, with Microsoft's M12 participating, bringing total funding to roughly $37M.
Zack Eakin is the co-founder and CEO of Layup Parts, a Huntington Beach startup that wants to make ordering custom carbon-fiber and fiberglass parts as easy as ordering from Amazon. A composites engineer who started in IndyCar bodywork at Chip Ganassi Racing, became the first engineer at Elon Musk's The Boring Company, and led mechanical engineering on Anduril's Roadrunner drone, Eakin launched Layup in 2024 to attack a problem he kept hitting himself: composite parts that take weeks and cost a fortune. With software-driven manufacturing and standardized stock materials, Layup compresses some jobs from weeks to hours. In June 2026 the company raised a $42 million Series A led by Marlinspike, on top of a $9 million seed from Founders Fund.
Daniel First is the founder and CEO of Axion (Axion Ray), an AI-powered quality intelligence platform that helps manufacturers detect, investigate, and resolve product issues before they reach customers. After watching enterprise AI pilots stall at analysis rather than action during his years at McKinsey and QuantumBlack, he built Axion to put AI directly in the hands of field engineers across aerospace, automotive, medical devices, and consumer goods. The New York company has raised $25M total, including a $17.5M Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners with RTX Ventures, and counts Boeing, Cummins, Baxter, DENSO, Newell, and Pratt & Whitney among its customers.
Josh Gruenstein is the co-founder and CEO of Tutor Intelligence, an MIT CSAIL spinout building AI-powered robots that work alongside people in American factories and warehouses. He leases robots by the hour instead of selling them, betting that fleet-scale learning, not bigger algorithms, is what finally puts a robot in every factory. In December 2025 the company raised a $34M Series A led by Union Square Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $42M.
Natan Linder is the cofounder and CEO of Tulip Interfaces, the no-code frontline operations platform that reached a $1.3B valuation with its $120M Series D in January 2026. An MIT Media Lab PhD out of Pattie Maes' Fluid Interfaces Group, he also cofounded and chairs Formlabs, the desktop 3D-printing company behind the Form 1 Kickstarter. He wrote the book Augmented Lean and hosts the Augmented Ops podcast, arguing that software should give frontline workers superpowers rather than automate them away.
Ben Reinhardt is the founder and CEO of Speculative Technologies, a nonprofit industrial research lab built on the ARPA model to unlock materials and manufacturing breakthroughs that have no natural home in startups, academia, or government. A space-robotics PhD who once built tractor beams at Cornell and taught machines to see at Magic Leap, he became one of the most-read writers on how DARPA actually works, then set out to build a privately funded version of it. He hosts the Idea Machines podcast, where he interviews people who design the systems that produce innovation.
Oren Cass is the founder and chief economist of American Compass, the think tank that rewired the economic playbook of the American right. A former Bain consultant and domestic policy director for Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign, Cass turned against the free-market orthodoxy he once served and built an intellectual case for tariffs, industrial policy, and worker power that now echoes through the speeches of JD Vance and Marco Rubio. He is the author of The Once and Future Worker and editor of The New Conservatives, and a contributing opinion writer for the Financial Times.
Basic American Foods is a family-owned food production company founded in 1933 and headquartered in Walnut Creek, California. It is the world's largest producer of dehydrated potato products, best known for Potato Pearls premium mashed potatoes, Golden Grill hash browns, and Santiago refried beans. The company serves foodservice operators, retail consumer brands, and food manufacturers through its ingredients business, sourcing potatoes from prime growing regions in Idaho and Washington.
Bob McCollum is the long-serving CEO and driving force behind R.S. Hughes Co., Inc., an employee-owned industrial distributor headquartered in Sunnyvale, California that has grown into a $527 million enterprise spanning North America. A University of Michigan alumnus and former college quarterback, McCollum spent decades building RS Hughes into one of North America's top 50 industrial distributors, known for its culture of integrity and genuine care for employees. He has been recognized for significant philanthropic contributions to the University of Michigan athletics program, endowing the quarterbacks coaching position with a $2 million gift in 2022.
Dennis Howard is CEO and President of GILLIG LLC, America's oldest surviving bus manufacturer and the second-largest heavy-duty transit bus maker in North America. Based in Livermore, California, GILLIG produces clean diesel, CNG, hybrid electric, battery electric, and hydrogen fuel cell buses that move millions of commuters across the United States daily. Under executive leadership, the company has leaned into the electric revolution - deploying fleets for King County Metro, PSTA, and dozens of transit agencies - while remaining a privately held American family business rooted in 135 years of craftsmanship.
Derek Maunus is the President and CEO of GILLIG LLC, America's oldest surviving bus manufacturer, founded in 1890 and now headquartered in Livermore, California. He joined GILLIG in 2011 and rose through roles in aftermarket parts and manufacturing before being appointed CEO in 2018. Under his leadership, GILLIG has expanded its clean-energy portfolio - including battery electric, hybrid, CNG, and hydrogen fuel cell buses - and executed a complex relocation from Hayward to a new 600,000 sq ft solar-powered facility in Livermore. With roughly 1,100 employees and annual revenue near $325M, GILLIG holds significant market share in North American heavy-duty transit bus manufacturing.
Marc Winterhoff is the interim Chief Executive Officer of Lucid Motors, the Newark, California luxury EV maker behind the Air sedan and Gravity SUV. A German-trained electrical engineer who spent decades advising automakers at Roland Berger and Arthur D. Little, he joined Lucid as COO in December 2023 and was elevated to interim CEO in February 2025 after founder Peter Rawlinson stepped aside. He has steered the company through a fragile stretch: stretching the cash runway into 2027, deepening the PIF and Uber partnerships, and prepping a robotaxi-ready Midsize platform. In April 2026 Lucid named Schindler veteran Silvio Napoli as permanent CEO; Winterhoff will return to the COO role.
Cellares is the first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization (IDMO) for cell therapy. Its Cell Shuttle - a fully automated, high-throughput platform roughly the size of a small conference room - replaces a warren of manual labs with one box that can run 16 patient batches in parallel, cutting labor and facility footprint by about 90 percent.
Figure is a Bay Area robotics company building autonomous, general-purpose humanoid robots powered by Helix, its in-house vision-language-action model. Founded by Brett Adcock in 2022, Figure is one of a small handful of companies racing to put commercially viable humanoids inside factories, warehouses and - by late 2026 - homes.
GSME (Global Semiconductor Microelectronics) is a San Jose-based semiconductor solutions company offering customized silicon, RF and power management IC design, multi-project wafer services, and turnkey chip manufacturing for fabless customers building GPUs, CPUs, IoT and wireless products.
Knowde is a B2B digital marketplace and AI-powered master data platform for the chemicals, polymers and ingredients industry. It helps chemical suppliers and distributors digitize fragmented product data, launch storefronts, and reach the researchers, formulators, and procurement buyers who need their materials.
MaintainX is a mobile-first, AI-powered maintenance and asset management platform (CMMS/EAM) used by frontline industrial teams to replace paper work orders, prevent equipment downtime, and run safer, more predictable operations. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in San Francisco, it serves 11,000+ companies and manages over 11 million assets across manufacturing, facilities, food & beverage and distribution.
Andrew Butt is the co-founder and CEO of Enable, the San Francisco-based B2B rebate management platform that reached unicorn status in 2023 with a $1.12 billion valuation after raising $120 million in Series D funding. A UK-born entrepreneur who left school at 15 and became the youngest qualified helicopter pilot in his region at 17, Butt built his first software business from a flying school in Coventry and has spent over two decades turning overlooked operational problems in distribution and manufacturing into category-defining software companies. Enable now serves over 10,000 brands across 50+ industries and has raised more than $275 million total, with Butt positioning it as the system of record for all B2B rebate and trading agreements between manufacturers, distributors, and retailers.
Chris Turlica is the CEO and Co-Founder of MaintainX, a San Francisco-based industrial operations platform that has raised $254M and reached a $2.5B valuation. A McGill commerce graduate who previously built and sold a consumer messaging startup, Turlica spotted a striking data point while at Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners — 80% of the global workforce is deskless, yet only 1% of enterprise software spend serves them. That insight became MaintainX, which now helps over 11,000 companies manage 11M+ assets and has transformed maintenance teams at companies including ABInBev, Duracell, Marriott, and McDonald's.
Chris Walti is co-founder and CEO of Mytra, the Brisbane, CA-based robotics company rebuilding industrial material flow from the software up. Before founding Mytra in 2022, he spent 7.5 years at Tesla leading Model 3 material flow engineering, building the company's internal mobile robotics team, and becoming the first lead of what would become the Optimus humanoid robot program. Mytra has since raised $198M in total funding including a $120M Series C in January 2026, and its 3D robotic storage systems are deployed at Albertsons distribution centers, delivering up to 88% labor hour savings versus conventional solutions.
Farhat Jahangir is the Founder, President & CEO of GS Microelectronics (GSME), a San Jose-based semiconductor solutions company he founded around 2021-2022. With 25+ years in semiconductor manufacturing, operations, and chip design, he previously served as VP & General Manager at ON Semiconductor and SVP of Manufacturing at Quantenna Communications, where he helped steer the company through its 2016 IPO and a $1.1B acquisition. GSME raised a $35M Series B in January 2026, backed by Maverick Silicon, and has since made two strategic acquisitions - Sinble Technology Vietnam and Muse Semiconductor - to build a vertically integrated semiconductor services platform spanning chip design, MPW services, and advanced process node capabilities.