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.
Jonas Schneider is the Founder and CEO of Daedalus, an AI-powered precision manufacturing company headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, building the factory of the future. A former OpenAI technical lead and co-founder of its robotics team, Schneider left Silicon Valley in 2019 to solve a problem he lived firsthand: getting precision-manufactured parts takes months, and the world's most advanced machines sit idle 80% of the time. Daedalus deploys proprietary AI software across CNC shop floors to double machine utilization, catch defects in real time, and preserve tacit manufacturing knowledge before it disappears with retiring machinists. The company has raised $41.1M in total funding, including a $21M Series A led by NGP Capital in February 2024, and operates a 50,000-square-foot factory serving defense, medical devices, aerospace, and semiconductor clients.
Liam Casey is the Irish founder and CEO of PCH International, the supply chain orchestration company he named after California's Pacific Coast Highway. Built from a Cork dairy farm upbringing and a decade in European fashion, PCH became a billion-dollar operation linking Silicon Valley's most ambitious hardware companies to a network of over 1,200 Chinese factories. Known as 'Mr China' in tech circles, Casey is renowned for carrying three phones, living out of hotels across two continents per week, and never once learning Mandarin — a deliberate vulnerability he credits for building deeper factory relationships than any fluent speaker could.
Nicholas Flanders is the Co-Founder and CEO of Twelve, a carbon transformation company that converts CO2, water, and renewable electricity into sustainable aviation fuel and carbon-neutral chemicals. A Stanford MBA and former McKinsey consultant, Flanders co-founded Twelve (originally Opus 12) in 2015 alongside scientists Dr. Etosha Cave and Dr. Kendra Kuhl to commercialize breakthrough electrochemical CO2 conversion technology developed at Stanford. The company has raised over $790 million, including a $645 million financing round in 2024 led by TPG Rise Climate, and is building AirPlant One - the world's first commercial-scale e-fuels facility - in Moses Lake, Washington.
Nick Haase is co-founder of MaintainX, the AI-powered CMMS and connected worker platform that reached a $2.5B valuation after its $150M Series D in July 2025. Leading go-to-market strategy, Haase has helped grow MaintainX to 11,000+ enterprise customers across manufacturing, food & beverage, and facilities — while separately angel-investing in 40+ startups including Anduril, Hadrian, and Figure. A former mobile marketing founder turned industrial software builder, he's spent years on factory floors helping maintenance teams ditch paper checklists and embrace digital workflows.
Rebecca Hu-Thrams is the co-founder and CEO of Glacier, a San Francisco-based company building AI-powered robotic arms that sort recyclables in material recovery facilities. Raised by Chinese immigrant parents who instilled a 'reduce, reuse, recycle' ethos, she channeled her Bain consulting background and Thumbtack operating experience into tackling what she calls 'the most demented form of manufacturing on the planet.' Glacier's robots, trained on 3.8 billion images of waste, sort 70+ material categories at 60 picks per minute - preventing roughly 10 million items per robot from reaching landfill annually. Named Fast Company's #1 Most Innovative Company in Robotics & Engineering for 2026, Glacier has raised $33.2 million including a $16M Series A extension in April 2025 backed by Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund and New Enterprise Associates.