mountain-view
(41)
Kobus Jooste Left Google's Scale to Chase a More Difficult Metric: Impact
After two decades inside research labs, infrastructure companies, startups, and Google, the engineer behind Syllable AI has settled on a plain test for ambitious work: can you see what changed because you were there?
The Vacuum That Watches Your Whole House and Tells Nobody
Two ex-Google engineers ditched the lidar puck, skipped the cloud, and built a robot that maps your home with five cameras - and keeps every frame on the device. Here is why families say it hands them their weekends back.
The company that indexed the web is now betting everything on an AI it calls Gemini - and for the first time, the search box has competition it built itself.
Aakash Mahalingam
Aakash Mahalingam is the cofounder and CEO of Canary (YC W26), a startup building an AI QA engineer that reads your source code to catch broken user flows before they hit production. Before Canary he built Windsurf's enterprise product and helped push its self-serve plan to roughly $20M ARR in six months. An ICPC APAC finalist with earlier stints at AWS and Morgan Stanley, he now works out of Mountain View on the problem of testing keeping pace with AI-accelerated coding.
Sivan Iram
Sivan Iram is the co-founder and CEO of Flow (Flow Specialty), a Mountain View-based next-generation wholesale brokerage that uses GenAI and licensed human experts to automate specialty commercial insurance placement. A former software engineer turned operator with a Harvard MBA, he spent a decade writing code and running go-to-market at Lenovo before starting Flow in 2021 to bring enterprise-grade service to the small and mid-market accounts the industry had long ignored. Flow has raised roughly $20-25M led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Contextual AI
Contextual AI is a Mountain View enterprise AI company that builds a context engineering platform for production-grade, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) agents. Founded in 2023 by RAG co-inventor Douwe Kiela and Amanpreet Singh, it packages retrieval, reranking and grounded language models into an end-to-end system that lets regulated enterprises deploy accurate, source-grounded AI on their own documents. The company has raised $100M from backers including Greycroft, Nvidia, Snowflake, HSBC and Bezos Expeditions, and counts Qualcomm and HSBC among its users.
Bespoke Labs
Bespoke Labs is a Mountain View AI research lab that builds tools and datasets for training more reliable AI models and agents, starting with synthetic data curation and hallucination detection and expanding into realistic reinforcement-learning environments for long-horizon agentic AI. Its open-source projects, including Bespoke Curator, Bespoke-MiniCheck, OpenThoughts, Terminal-Bench, and GEPA, are widely used across the AI research community, and the company raised $40M in seed and Series A funding by mid-2026 from investors including Wing Venture Capital, 8VC, and Mayfield.
Flow Specialty
Flow Specialty is a Mountain View insurtech that set out to automate the grind of specialty wholesale insurance placement with AI. Founded in 2021 as Capitola and rebranded to Flow in April 2024, the company built what it called the industry's first AI insurance broker: a system of backend AI agents - branded 'Platformless AI' - that read submissions, match risk to carrier appetite, build quotes and support human brokers end-to-end without asking retail agents to log into anything. In 2024 its AI reportedly became the first system to pass an RPLU underwriting certification exam, and the firm claimed a 50% quote-to-bind ratio, roughly double the industry norm. In June 2026, ReSource Pro acquired Flow's technology, IP and core team, appointing founder Sivan Iram to lead a new 'AI Factory.'
Fogarty Innovation
Fogarty Innovation is a nonprofit medtech incubator and education organization on the El Camino Health campus in Mountain View, California. Founded in 2007 by legendary surgeon-inventor Thomas J. Fogarty, MD, it helps early-stage medical device companies cross the gap from novel idea to clinical reality through hands-on coaching, education programs, and a network of 300+ industry experts. In October 2025 it merged with New York's Cardiovascular Research Foundation to become CRF's West Coast innovation hub.
Kognitos
Kognitos is a Mountain View-based enterprise AI company that lets business users automate back-office operations by writing instructions in plain English. Its patented neurosymbolic platform, Koncierge, pairs the language understanding of large language models with a deterministic symbolic execution engine, aiming to run automations that are auditable and free of hallucinations. Founded in 2020 by former Nutanix CTO Binny Gill, the company pitches itself as a modern alternative to legacy RPA tools like UiPath and has raised roughly $85M across seed, Series A, and a $25M Series B.
Materna Medical
Materna Medical is a Mountain View, California women's health company building FDA-cleared medical devices for pelvic health across a woman's life. Its consumer product, Milli, is the first vaginal dilator that expands one millimeter at a time to treat vaginismus and painful intercourse; its clinical-stage Ellora obstetrical system is designed to pre-stretch pelvic floor muscles during labor to reduce childbirth injury. Led by CEO Tracy MacNeal, the company has raised roughly $82.6M to date.
Syllable
Syllable is a Mountain View, California company that builds, deploys, and manages AI voice and text agents, originally to automate patient communication for health system call centers and medical practices. Founded in 2016, it has expanded from healthcare-specific natural language understanding into a broader, model-neutral agentic platform that lets organizations build agents once and run them across any cloud with governance, analytics, and compliance built in. The company has raised roughly $81.7M+ across Seed through Series C, counts investors like TCV, Oak HC/FT, Verily, and Northwell, and acquired Actium Health in 2024.
Niosha Kayhani
Niosha Kayhani is Chief of Staff to the CEO at Muon Space, a Mountain View based end-to-end space systems company building LEO satellite constellations for climate, earth observation, and national security missions. A chartered mechanical engineer trained at the University of Portsmouth with an executive MBA from Warwick, he arrived in Silicon Valley after building innovation programs at Cubic in London and San Diego, a detour through Google in Dublin, and a first job tuning fiber-optic lasers at SPI. He holds ten-plus U.S. patents and, on the side, has founded Taurus Space, a company working on standards-aligned command-and-control for coalition defense networks.
Proception
Proception is a Palo Alto and Mountain View robotics company building the dexterous robotic hand that humanoids are missing. Its flagship ProHand 1.0 packs 22 degrees of freedom, tendon-driven fingers and skin-like tactile sensors into a hand designed with input from surgeons - close enough to a human hand that robots can learn directly from human demonstration. A companion sensor glove, ProGlove, captures real human manipulation data at scale to train those movements. Founded in 2024 by former Tesla Optimus engineers Jay Li and Jack Xu, the company raised an $11M seed led by First Round Capital and is shipping its first hands to research labs and robotics companies.
Bill Wells
Bill Wells is the CEO of AMPL Optimization Inc., the Mountain View company behind AMPL, the algebraic modeling language born at Bell Labs that has long been a gold standard for large-scale mathematical optimization. A UC Berkeley-trained mathematician, Wells runs the small but globally influential team that turns business-critical decisions in energy, finance, supply chain, and transportation into solvable models, while steering the company from a classic modeling language toward a modern, API-driven optimization platform.
Matt Stone
Matt Stone is the Chief Business Officer of Corvic AI, the Mountain View startup building an Intelligence Composition Platform that sits between raw enterprise data and production AI. A Stanford-trained engineer who once walked on as a quarterback at the University of Arizona, Stone has spent more than a decade turning hard enterprise technology into revenue - first at Boeing, then as an operating partner at Intel Capital, and most recently leading strategic partnerships at the cybersecurity firm SecurityScorecard. He joined Corvic AI in March 2026 to scale its enterprise go-to-market across pharma, manufacturing, and logistics.
Scott Schorer
Scott Schorer is CEO and Chairman of G-Tech Medical, a Mountain View startup building GutTracker, a wireless dermal-patch system that reads the body's gut signals at home over days instead of hours. A Dartmouth-trained engineer and former 82nd Airborne infantry officer, he has spent two decades founding, turning around and selling medical-device companies, raising more than $120 million in equity and earning his name on six patents along the way.
dope.security
dope.security is a Mountain View cybersecurity startup that rebuilt the Secure Web Gateway (SWG) so it runs directly on the endpoint instead of routing traffic through a vendor's cloud datacenter. Founded in 2021 by ex-Symantec and Forcepoint product leader Kunal Agarwal, its 'fly-direct' architecture inspects web traffic on-device, claiming faster performance, fewer outages, and better privacy than legacy cloud proxies. The company has expanded from its core dope.swg product into AI-powered data protection with CASB Neural and DOPAMINE DLP, backed by roughly $20M from GV (Google Ventures) and Boldstart Ventures.
Novocuff, Inc.
Novocuff, Inc. is a clinical-stage maternal health medical device company based in Mountain View, California, building the Novocuff Cervical Control System (CCS) - a device designed to stabilize and close the cervix, retain amniotic fluid, and extend pregnancy in cases of preterm prelabor rupture of membranes (PPROM) and cervical shortening. Founded in 2021 by Amelia Degenkolb and Donald Lee, the company raised an oversubscribed $26M Series A in 2024 (about $28M total) to fund its U.S. multicenter pivotal RETAIN trial, for which it secured FDA IDE approval in September 2025.
Kunal Agarwal
Kunal Agarwal is the founder and CEO of dope.security, the 'Fly Direct' Secure Web Gateway that runs security on the endpoint instead of routing all traffic through a distant cloud data center. A self-described hacker since age 8 who once talked his way out of juvenile detention after breaking into his high school's grading system, he spent roughly a decade at Symantec and Forcepoint - rising from engineer to running Symantec's IoT business and leading product at Forcepoint - before launching dope.security in 2022. The company raised a $16M Series A led by GV (Google Ventures), and Agarwal was named SC Awards 2025 Innovator of the Year.
El Camino Health
El Camino Health is a not-for-profit healthcare system that has served Silicon Valley and the South Bay for more than 60 years. Born from a 1950s community vote and a tax that residents levied on themselves, it runs two acute care hospitals in Mountain View and Los Gatos plus roughly two dozen care locations across Santa Clara County. With 471 beds, about 4,480 employees and 1,585 physicians, it blends a community-rooted mission with the technology-forward instincts of the valley it sits in.
Rob Shilkin
Rob Shilkin is Vice President of Global Communications and Public Affairs at Google, overseeing one of the world's most complex corporate communications functions. A former antitrust lawyer from Australia who trained at Clayton Utz and Mallesons Stephen Jaques, Shilkin brings rare legal-policy fluency to Google's communications challenges - including antitrust litigation, AI debates, content moderation, and online advertising policy. His team handles approximately 2,000 issues per year. He took overall leadership of Google's communications in 2023, reporting to Chief Marketing Officer Lorraine Twohill, and has been recognized in Provoke Media's Influence 100 2025 rankings.
Selin Song
Selin Song is the President of Google Customer Solutions, leading the global organization that helps millions of small and medium-sized businesses grow using Google's AI-first advertising products. A 20-year Google veteran who started as a temp approving ads, she has lived and worked across four countries - the US, India, Singapore, and Ireland - building a career that spans revenue strategy, operations, and regional leadership across APAC and EMEA before taking the top seat at GCS.
Adrian Ridner
Adrian Ridner is the CEO and Co-Founder of Study.com, one of the world's most visited online education platforms serving 34+ million monthly users. An Argentine-Jewish immigrant who navigated multiple countries before settling in California, Ridner built Study.com from a bootstrapped startup in 2002 into a 4,100-person company offering 20,000+ micro-video lessons and 200+ transferable college courses. His Working Scholars program has saved graduates $20 million in tuition and is particularly focused on first-generation college students and students of color. Ridner is a recipient of the ASU+GSV 2022 Innovator of Color Award and Silicon Valley Business Journal's 40 Under 40.
Fang Cheng
Fang Cheng is a serial founder who builds AI that actually answers the question. She co-founded Touchco (acquired by Amazon, became the Kindle), founded Linc (acquired by Capacity in 2024), served as SVP & GM of Retail CX Automation at Capacity, and is now building a stealth venture focused on agentic commerce for restricted wallets.
Tomer Weingarten
Tomer Weingarten is the co-founder, chairman, president, and CEO of SentinelOne, the publicly traded cybersecurity company he started in 2013 to replace signature-based antivirus with autonomous, AI-driven endpoint protection. An engineer by trade, Israeli outsider by background, he scaled the company from a Tel Aviv kitchen-table idea to a NYSE-listed business crossing $1B in ARR, betting the platform on agentic AI through Purple AI and Wayfinder.
MatX
MatX is a Mountain View semiconductor company building chips designed exclusively for large language models. Founded in 2022 by ex-Google TPU engineers Reiner Pope and Mike Gunter, it aims to deliver an order-of-magnitude more performance-per-dollar for frontier model training and inference than current GPUs.
Mudit Garg
Mudit Garg is the co-founder and CEO of Qventus, a Mountain View-based AI healthcare company that automates hospital operations — from surgical scheduling to patient discharge. Trained as an electrical engineer at IIT and holding an MBA from Stanford, Garg spent time at McKinsey's healthcare practice before founding Qventus in 2012. Under his leadership, the company raised a $105M Series D led by KKR in January 2025, reached a valuation of over $400 million, and has helped health systems across the US free up tens of thousands of excess hospital days and generate tens of millions in surgical revenue.
Ofer Feldman
Ofer Feldman is the Co-Founder and CTO of Stampli, a Mountain View-based AI-powered accounts payable automation company he co-founded with his brother Eyal Feldman in 2015. A computer engineer by training from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Ofer spent over a decade building software across defense, enterprise, and healthcare sectors before channeling that depth into Stampli. Under his technical leadership, Stampli has grown to process over $100 billion in invoices annually for 1,600+ businesses, raised $145.7 million in total funding including a $61M Series D led by Blackstone in 2023, and pioneered Cognitive AI that brings human-level PO matching to finance teams worldwide.
Purva Gupta
Purva Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Lily AI, the Mountain View-based AI platform that bridges the gap between how retailers describe products and how consumers actually search for them. Founded in 2015 after her own frustrating experience shopping online as a newly arrived immigrant from India, Gupta built Lily AI into an enterprise-grade solution serving major retailers including Macy's, Bloomingdale's, J.Crew, and thredUP. The company has raised $62 million in total funding, achieved triple-digit year-over-year growth, and is recognized as a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 company. A Tory Burch Fellow, Ad Age Leading Women honoree, EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, and venture partner at Unshackled Ventures, Gupta has become a prominent voice in retail AI and immigrant entrepreneurship.