metamaterials
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Mike Ellenbogen keeps looking through things
First came airport luggage. Then the crowds at the door. Now the Evolv co-founder is taking his imaging experience to the walls around us - and starting over with another small team.
Bernard Casse and the intelligence in a pair of hands
Before he co-founded RIOS, Bernard Casse worked on lenses small enough to focus light a few micrometers away. His next challenge was considerably less tidy: getting robots to handle the unpredictable objects of an ordinary factory.
Patrick Bowen
Patrick Bowen is co-founder and CEO of Neurophos, an Austin-based startup building optical AI accelerator chips around metamaterial-based photonic tensor cores. A Duke PhD in electrical engineering and ETH Zurich master's grad, he previously co-founded Metacept with his Duke advisor David Smith. In January 2026 Neurophos closed a $110M Series A led by Gates Frontier with Microsoft's M12, Aramco, Bosch and others.
Jifei Ou
Jifei Ou is the founder and CEO of OPT Industries, a Medford, Massachusetts company that turned a decade of MIT Media Lab research into a new kind of factory. After nearly seven years spent learning to 3D-print fur, hair, and micro-textures no mold could produce, Ou built RAMP, described as the world's first roll-to-roll 3D printing system, which prints intricate microstructures by the mile. Rather than sell machines, OPT sells the products it makes on them - false eyelashes, beauty applicators, and diagnostic swabs that outperformed the gold standard during COVID. Ou raised $15M in Series A funding and is betting that reconnecting design and production can bring precision manufacturing back onshore.