manufacturing-analytics
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Megan Buntain Made the Cloud Feel Less Like Weather
Her career began with a summer internship and grew across seven versions of Windows, five cities, an agency, and an industrial AI company. The connecting idea is wonderfully unglamorous: remove friction so smart people can do useful work.
Pep Gubau Bet on AI Before Pharma Wanted to Hear About It
A two-week internship taught him what he did not want. Four decades, two exits and one stubborn bet later, Pep Gubau is still trying to make industrial data useful where every decision needs a paper trail.
Bernhard Kratzwald Wants Factories to Answer the Hard Question: Why?
The Austrian computer scientist spent years teaching AI to cope when the world changes. Now he is applying that instinct to factory floors - where one unexplained defect can become an expensive habit.
Vinay Nathan Has Spent 13 Years Teaching Factories to Tell the Truth
Before factory AI can sound clever, someone has to connect the old machines, clean up the records and prove the software pays. Vinay Nathan built Altizon around that less glamorous - and more useful - work.
Elan Greenberg
Elan Greenberg is the CEO of Augury, the Industrial AI company that listens to factory machines and predicts their failures before they happen. A former US Marine Corps captain who went from Morgan Stanley M&A to launching DoorDash's non-restaurant business to running operations at Flock Safety, he took the top job at the roughly $1 billion-valued Augury in October 2025 after a year as its COO. His through-line is operations at scale: taking proven technology and putting it in front of every customer who needs it.
John Kibarian
John Kibarian is the co-founder, President, and CEO of PDF Solutions (NASDAQ: PDFS), a Santa Clara-based semiconductor analytics company he has helmed for over 35 years. Armed with a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon, Kibarian started building yield-improvement algorithms while still a researcher at SEMATECH - then turned those algorithms into a company. Today PDF Solutions generates $219 million in annual revenue helping chipmakers, test facilities, and battery manufacturers squeeze more quality out of every wafer, with flagship products like the Exensio Analytics Platform and the Sapience Manufacturing Hub driving AI-powered collaboration across global semiconductor supply chains.
Jon Sobel
Jon Sobel is the co-founder and CEO of Sight Machine, the industrial AI company he built from scratch in 2011 after a career spanning the law departments of Yahoo and Tesla and executive roles at CBS Digital and SourceForge. A Princeton and Wharton graduate who also holds a Michigan law degree, Sobel spent over a decade as one of Silicon Valley's most senior in-house lawyers before betting his career on a hunch: that factory floors, drowning in data they could not use, were the biggest missed opportunity in enterprise software. Sight Machine has since raised over $124M, operates in 20+ industries across 20+ countries, and in 2025 closed an equity investment from NVIDIA's venture arm — proving that a former general counsel with a journalism fellowship can, in fact, build a category-defining AI company.