Timo Korpela is CEO of Haltian Inc. and VP of Sales for North America at Haltian, the Finnish IoT pioneer behind the Thingsee sensor platform and the 'Empathic Building' concept. Raised under the Northern Lights in Finnish Lapland and educated at Helsinki University of Technology, he bridges the precision of Nordic engineering with the deal-making culture of Silicon Valley. Operating from Palo Alto, he drives Haltian's North American growth - a market that accounts for roughly a third of the company's revenue - while negotiating global partnerships with Cisco, Microsoft, and healthcare systems across three continents.
Honghao Deng is the CEO and co-founder of Butlr, a San Francisco-based Physical AI company that uses anonymous thermal sensors to understand how spaces are occupied - without cameras or personal data. A Harvard GSD MDes graduate and MIT Media Lab researcher, Deng spun Butlr out of MIT in 2019 alongside co-founder Jiani Zeng. The company has raised over $105M in venture funding, deployed 30,000+ sensors across 22 countries, and processes 1 billion data points daily. Deng is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree (2022), a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, and the inventor of 'Illusory Material' - a multi-material 3D printing breakthrough named one of TIME Magazine's 100 Best Inventions of 2021.