Robert Yang (Guangyu Robert Yang) is a computational neuroscientist turned AI founder who left a tenure-track professorship at MIT to build Fundamental Research Labs (formerly Altera), a company creating socially intelligent AI agents. Trained in physics at Peking University, with a PhD from NYU and postdoc at Columbia, Yang became a 2022 Searle Scholar before pivoting to the startup world in December 2023. His company made waves running 1,000 autonomous AI agents in Minecraft — watching them spontaneously develop religions, trade economies, and social hierarchies — and has since raised over $45M to bring that vision into enterprise productivity tools and beyond.
Scott Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, the AI company behind Devin - widely recognized as the world's first autonomous AI software engineer. A three-time International Olympiad in Informatics gold medalist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Wu started coding at age 9, interned at a fintech startup as a high schooler alongside future Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, briefly attended Harvard, then spent five years building Lunchclub as CTO before co-founding Cognition in 2023 with fellow competitive programming champions. Under his leadership, Cognition grew from a 10-person apartment startup to a $10.2 billion company with over 200 employees, acquired Windsurf in July 2025, and raised $675 million in total funding - with Devin's annualized revenue surging from $1 million to $73 million in under a year.
Itzik Gilboa is the CEO of minds.ai, a Santa Cruz-based AI company applying multi-agent reinforcement learning to semiconductor fabrication. With aerospace and materials science degrees from the Technion and decades of experience at Cypress, SanDisk, and Western Digital, he bridges the gap between chip-floor pragmatism and cutting-edge AI research. Under his leadership, minds.ai secured a multi-year partnership with GlobalFoundries to deploy its Maestro(R) platform across global fab operations, aiming to reduce cycle times, improve on-time delivery, and help fabs run at peak efficiency in a world where every nanosecond of lost throughput costs millions.