Michael Ulin is a three-time AI founder and engineer who builds machine-learning companies in heavily regulated industries. He was the founding AI engineer and VP of AI at ZestyAI, whose property-risk models help underwrite trillions in U.S. insured assets, then co-founded and served as CTO of Paxton AI, a generative-AI legal research tool used by thousands of attorneys that raised a $6M seed round in 2023. He now builds from Bend, Oregon, where his current work centers on Trarian, applying AI to patent underwriting, alongside ventures spanning AI forecasting and probabilistic reasoning. He also writes the Substack 'And Yet It Moves' on entrepreneurship and the case for building startups outside Silicon Valley.
Pandian Gnanaprakasam is the CEO and co-founder of ORDR, a Santa Clara-based cybersecurity company specializing in IoT, OT, and IoMT security with $94M in funding. A serial entrepreneur with 20+ years in networking and security, he previously co-founded Aruba Networks — acquired by HPE for $3 billion in 2015 — and led engineering at Cisco's multi-billion-dollar Wi-Fi business. At ORDR, he returned as CEO in March 2025 to spearhead the evolution of the ORDR AI Protect platform, which provides agentless device discovery, AI-driven risk scoring, and automated zero-trust policy enforcement across millions of connected devices in healthcare, manufacturing, and critical infrastructure.
Yatin Mundkur is a General Partner at Artiman Ventures, a Palo Alto-based early-stage venture fund with over $1 billion under management. With 25+ years spanning semiconductor design, founding a company, and two decades of VC investing, he holds 14 patents and has backed companies through 14 IPOs and 38 acquisitions. He also serves as CEO of Cellworks Group, applying his engineering roots to precision medicine.
Spencer H. Greene is a General Partner at TSVC (清谷资本), a certified women- and minority-owned seed-stage venture firm in Los Altos, California built on the Tsinghua Entrepreneur and Executive Club network. He leads the firm's healthtech practice after three decades as an operator, M&A executive, and two-time founder in Silicon Valley. Greene holds patents across graphics, networking, and encryption; ran M&A at Juniper Networks (buying the kinds of startups he now backs); and developed the 'Design for Exit' framework to help founders understand what makes them genuinely acquirable - not just successful.
Dean Drako is a serial entrepreneur and engineer who has founded more than six companies across cybersecurity, cloud video surveillance, physical access control, and electric vehicles. He invented the IT industry's first spam filter appliance at Barracuda Networks, took the company to a NYSE IPO, then turned his restless attention to cloud video security at Eagle Eye Networks and physical access control at Brivo. In December 2025 he merged both into the world's largest AI cloud-native physical security company, assuming the CEO chair at Brivo. He holds 53+ patents and has won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award twice - a feat as rare as his other hobby: co-founding an electric supercar company.
Debanjan Saha is the CEO of DataRobot, leading one of the most widely deployed enterprise AI platforms in the world. A PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland and alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, he built his career across IBM, Amazon Web Services (where he launched Amazon Aurora), and Google Cloud (where he oversaw BigQuery Omni and Dataplex). He joined DataRobot in February 2022, became interim CEO in July 2022, and was formally appointed CEO in September 2022. He holds 50+ patents, is an IEEE Fellow, and a Distinguished Member of the ACM.
Sanjai Kohli is the CEO of CSpeed Inc., a Palo Alto silicon photonics company building the future of datacenter connectivity. Best known as the architect of mass-market GPS, he co-founded SiRF Technology in 1995, whose chips eventually powered more than 70% of the world's consumer GPS devices. An IEEE Fellow and European Inventor Award winner, he holds dozens of US patents and has spent three decades founding and running companies in wireless, GPS, robotics and now AI networking.
Vishal Gauri is the CEO of Seclore, a data-centric security company protecting enterprise information in the AI era. A scientist-turned-entrepreneur with 18 patents and a PhD from Ohio State, he built his career from General Electric labs to Silicon Valley boardrooms, co-founded a venture capital fund (IvyCap Ventures), and now leads a $59.5M-revenue company that guards sensitive data as it flows across organizations, borders, and AI systems.
Chris Emerson, PhD, is the Founder, Chief Scientist, and CEO of LEVEL, California's #1 cannabis tablet brand. A US Navy veteran and Chinese interpreter turned small-molecule chemist, he abandoned a Stanford postdoc in 2012 to spend four months living in a tent on a Mendocino cannabis farm - and emerged with a founding thesis that would reshape how the industry thinks about getting high. Instead of chasing THC percentages, he built LEVEL around effects-driven cannabinoid formulations using precise ratios of acidic, neutral, and degradative compounds the plant alone can't deliver. Two US patents, multiple peer-reviewed publications, and an IRB-approved clinical trial later, LEVEL is the top-selling cannabis tablet brand in California, now operating in seven states.
Te (Thomas) Tang is Co-Founder and CEO of Anyware Robotics, a Fremont, California-based startup building AI-powered mobile robots for warehouse logistics. A UC Berkeley robotics PhD and founding member of FANUC's Silicon Valley research center, Tang combines deep academic research with industrial commercialization experience. His flagship robot, Pixmo, autonomously unloads shipping containers at 1,000 boxes per hour, won MHI's Best New Innovation award at ProMat 2025, and helps customers reduce receiving labor costs by up to 60%. In March 2025 Anyware Robotics closed a $12M seed round led by GFT Ventures, accelerating commercial deployments with leading third-party logistics providers.
Todd Mozer is Chairman and CEO of Sensory, Inc., the Santa Clara-based company he co-founded in 1994 that has quietly powered voice recognition in over 3 billion consumer devices - from the 'OK Google' and 'Hey Siri' wake words to smart home gadgets, automotive systems, and medical devices. A second-generation tech entrepreneur (son of physicist Forrest Mozer, with whom he also co-founded ESS Technology), Todd holds 50+ patents and an MBA from Stanford. He has spent 30+ years making AI run tiny, private, and always-on - long before the rest of the industry caught up.
Advay Mengle is a San Francisco Bay Area-based tech founder, engineer, and self-taught fine artist living a genuinely rare double life. As CEO and founder of a stealth-mode startup, he brings over 25 granted patents and deep experience at Google and Microsoft to bear on whatever he's building next. Simultaneously, in 2025 alone - his first year exhibiting - he was accepted into over 18 juried art exhibitions across the US, Spain, UK, France, and Japan, earning an Award of Excellence at Magnum Opus 2026 for his painting 'The City'. Born in Los Angeles in 1989, he holds a degree from MIT and previously served as VP Engineering at Talos Robotics before founding Holvonix LLC, a game and app studio.
Ambuj Kumar is the co-founder and CEO of Simbian, an AI-native security company building autonomous AI agents that run security operations 10x faster than human teams. A Gold Medalist from IIT Kanpur and Stanford EE graduate, he spent eight years designing NVIDIA's early GPUs before pivoting to security - where he invented Confidential Computing, raised $135M for Fortanix, and is now betting that AI agents can solve the industry's 3.5-million-person talent gap. With 100+ patents and recognition from IIT Kanpur's Distinguished Alumni Award 2025, Kumar stands at the intersection of the GPU revolution he helped build and the AI security era he is now shaping.
Felix Ejeckam is the Co-Founder and CEO of Akash Systems, a San Francisco-based deep-tech company that invented GaN-on-Diamond semiconductor technology - a breakthrough that enables dramatically better thermal management for both satellite communications and AI data center servers. A serial entrepreneur with two prior exits, Ejeckam holds 80+ patents and 100+ scientific publications, was named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, and led Akash to a $68.2M CHIPS Act preliminary agreement and the world's first diamond-cooled NVIDIA GPU server deployment.
Shekhar Natarajan is the Founder and CEO of Orchestro.AI and the inventor of Angelic Intelligence, a framework that embeds ethics directly into AI architecture rather than bolting it on as an afterthought. He grew up in a one-room home in Secunderabad, Hyderabad, arrived in the US with $34, and spent 25+ years scaling supply chains at Walmart, Disney, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Target, and American Eagle before founding Orchestro.AI in 2023. He holds 207+ patents, raised $15M in seed funding, and in May 2026 received Oxford's Bodleian Medal for his contributions to AI in the public interest.
Yasin Ehsan is a New York-bred software engineer turned edtech founder and venture scout. After winning 13 hackathons, landing a job at Capital One the week he graduated, and filing two AWS patents on the Eno chatbot, he co-founded Headstarter - an edtech platform that has helped generate 60+ six-figure job offers for undergrads. In 2025, he joined Andreessen Horowitz's Speedrun accelerator as a scout, bridging the gap between emerging technical talent and Silicon Valley capital.
Trae Vassallo is a Stanford-educated mechanical engineer, venture capitalist, and technology leader who co-founded Good Technology (acquired by Motorola for $500M), served as a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins for 14 years investing in companies like Nest Labs and eero, co-founded Defy Partners (raising $151M+ in capital), and now leads business operations and strategy at Apple. She holds 13 patents across technologies and disciplines, and became a pivotal figure in the conversation about gender bias in Silicon Valley after testifying about sexual harassment in the landmark Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins case and co-authoring the influential 'Elephant in the Valley' survey.
Wayne Chang is a Taiwanese-American serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and technologist who co-founded Crashlytics (acquired by Twitter for ~$260M, then sold to Google as Fabric), co-founded Digits (AI-powered fintech for SMBs), and is currently building Reasoner, a neurosymbolic AI company claiming to outperform OpenAI's o1 models. Named one of Forbes' Top 50 Angel Investors with 80+ investments and 31+ exits generating over $150 billion in combined value, Chang also holds the coveted @wayne Twitter handle, holds 20+ patents, won an Emmy for producing Chasing Coral, and helped launch Dropbox by recruiting co-founder Arash Ferdowsi.