Amanda Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American civil rights activist, author, and commercial astronaut who founded the nonprofit Rise after surviving sexual assault as a Harvard senior. She drafted the Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act, which passed Congress unanimously in 2016, and has helped pass dozens of laws protecting survivors. Nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize and named a 2022 Time Woman of the Year, she became the first Vietnamese and Southeast Asian woman in space aboard Blue Origin's NS-31 flight on April 14, 2025, fulfilling an astronaut dream she set aside for a decade to fight for survivors.
Andres Carranza is the co-founder and CEO of Luzid, a San Francisco startup building David, an agentic AI copilot that orchestrates SAP and Salesforce implementations. A Stanford dropout and former AI researcher, he interned at NASA, Harvard, MIT and was the youngest quantitative trader in Two Sigma's history before leaving school to build a company that aims to turn months-long enterprise software rollouts into something closer to a software update.
Shawn Murphy is the co-founder, CEO and CTO of Titan Advanced Energy Solutions, a Salem, Massachusetts company using ultrasound to see inside lithium-ion batteries. After deploying instruments for NASA at Draper Laboratory and building Royal Dutch Shell's innovation engine, Shell TechWorks, Murphy spent the summer of 2016 painting wave-propagation equations on the walls of a Croatian guest room. The result is technology that reads a battery's true state of health and charge in real time, claimed to be about 100 times better than the industry standard - now deployed on cell-manufacturing lines to catch defects before they ship. Titan raised a $33M Series B led by HG Ventures in 2021.
Michael Konialian is the founder and CEO of Modern Life, an AI-powered life insurance brokerage built for financial advisors. After a winding path from aerospace structures at NASA to nuclear diplomacy at the U.S. State Department to scaling CoverWallet's advisor business into an Aon acquisition, he was floored by how confusing, invasive, and outdated it was to buy life insurance for his own family. Modern Life is his answer: a single dashboard that lets advisors pull instant quotes from 30-plus carriers and compress a process that once took six months into minutes. In November 2025 the company raised a $20M Series A led by Thrive Capital, bringing total funding to $35M.
Monte Zweben is the co-founder and CEO of ControlRooms.ai, an AI troubleshooting platform for chemical and energy plants. A serial entrepreneur and AI pioneer, he ran NASA Ames' artificial intelligence branch (winning a Space Act Award for Space Shuttle work) before founding a string of companies: Red Pepper Software (merged into PeopleSoft), Blue Martini Software (which IPO'd at roughly $2.9 billion), and Splice Machine. He trained at Carnegie Mellon under AI legends Geoffrey Hinton, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell, holds a Stanford master's, co-authored the textbook Intelligent Scheduling, and now also advises AI Fund and sits on the board of Haven Safety AI.
George Sivulka is the founder and CEO of Hebbia, the AI platform that turns piles of unstructured documents into answers for asset managers, banks, and law firms. He cold-called NASA as a teenager, finished a Stanford math degree in 2.5 years, then walked away from a fully funded PhD to build software that lets AI agents do the multi-step grunt work of professional analysis. By 2024 Hebbia had raised $130M at a $700M valuation on $13M of profitable revenue, with Peter Thiel, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and Google Ventures behind it.
Frank Mycroft is the co-founder and CEO of Booster, the tech-driven mobile energy delivery platform that dispatches custom mini-tankers directly to fleet and consumer vehicles - eliminating the gas station entirely. A Princeton-trained aerospace engineer who worked at NASA, Boeing, and an asteroid-mining startup before parenthood inspired him to reinvent how America fuels its cars, Mycroft has raised over $242 million and built Booster into a platform serving Amazon, UPS, PepsiCo, and hundreds of fleets across the U.S.
Paulo Martins is the Brazilian-born founder and CEO of Arena (arena.im), a San Francisco-based AI-powered community engagement platform that lets brands embed live chat, live blogs, and audience interaction tools directly on their own websites with a single line of code. After stints at NASA, Ubisoft, and Hulu — where he helped grow the streaming company from 100K to 7 million paying subscribers — Martins founded Arena in 2017 with a clear thesis: businesses should own their audience, not rent it from social platforms. By 2022, Arena had grown to 25,000 customers across 150 countries and closed a $13.6M Series A led by CRV, with backing from heavyweights like David Sacks, Des Traynor, and Olivier Pomel.
Mark Rober is a former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer who spent seven years working on the Curiosity rover before becoming one of YouTube's most-watched science communicators with 77+ million subscribers. He founded CrunchLabs in 2022, an edtech company delivering hands-on STEM subscription boxes for children, and has helped raise over $94 million across three viral philanthropic campaigns (Team Trees, Team Seas, Team Water). In 2026 he invested $60 million to build Class CrunchLabs, a free STEM curriculum for teachers.
Andrew Anagnost is the President and CEO of Autodesk, the $41+ billion design and engineering software giant behind AutoCAD, Revit, Maya, and Fusion 360. A PhD aeronautical engineer who once simulated Mars rovers at NASA Ames, he joined Autodesk as a product manager in 1997 and spent two decades reshaping it from the inside - architecting the company's landmark pivot from perpetual licenses to cloud subscriptions before taking the top job in 2017. Under his tenure, revenue has grown from ~$2B to over $6B and the company entered the Fortune 500. Off the clock, he is CSUN's largest-ever alumni donor, having committed $22.1 million to the public university that he credits with saving him from falling through the cracks.
Ahmed Reza is the Founder and CEO of Yobi, an AI workforce platform that deploys synthetic agents to handle calls, texts, and social DMs for small businesses 24/7. A Milken Scholar at Cornell University who wrote image-processing software for NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, Reza went from child actor in Bangladesh to homeless student to serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. His previous ventures include Call Sumo (call tracking analytics) and Dental Web Now (AI dental marketing, acquired by NPI). Yobi raised a $2.37M seed round in 2023, reached $2.4M ARR by late 2025, and in 2026 partnered with Microsoft to develop a private foundation model for predictive behavioral intelligence.
Charles Wong is the CEO and Co-Founder of Bifrost AI, a San Francisco-based generative 3D data platform that lets robotics, aerospace, maritime, and industrial teams train and test AI models in hours instead of months. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree from Singapore, Wong built Bifrost after working on AI perception models for autonomous vehicles at NuTonomy (an MIT spinout). Bifrost has raised $13.7M in total funding, counts NASA JPL and the U.S. Air Force among its clients, and generates synthetic datasets for some of the world's most demanding physical-world AI challenges - from Mars rover navigation to maritime collision avoidance.
Jerry Qian is the Co-Founder and CEO of Reacher, an AI-powered creator marketing platform headquartered in San Francisco. After stints at Meta and NASA and graduating from UC Berkeley, Qian co-founded Reacher in 2024 with Bora Mutluoglu to automate influencer discovery, outreach, and campaign management for brands on TikTok Shop, Instagram, YouTube Shopping, and Amazon. The company is a Y Combinator S25 alum, holds the #1 spot on the TikTok Shop App Store, serves 1,000+ brands including Under Armour and Logitech, and has crossed seven figures in ARR.
Vishnu Sridhar is the Cofounder and CEO of Matter Intelligence, a deep-tech startup building ultraspectral satellite sensors and geospatial AI to map the planet at molecular resolution. A Queens-raised Indian American engineer, Sridhar spent years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as Cognizant Engineer for the SuperCam instrument aboard the Mars Perseverance rover and as Flight Director for the Opportunity rover before pivoting to commercialize the same sensor physics for Earth. Matter Intelligence emerged from stealth in October 2024 with $12M in seed funding backed by Lowercarbon Capital, Toyota Ventures, and Mark Cuban, building toward EARTH-1, a satellite that will deliver more than 500x the information density of existing sensors.