patents
(37)
Tara Youngblood and the business of changing the temperature
A disagreement over the thermostat became a product. For Chilipad co-founder Tara Youngblood, the longer education was learning when to build, when to lead, and when to begin again.
Franco Cisternino and the importance of small things
Before he oversaw industrial groups with more than $2 billion in annual revenue, Franco Cisternino worked on the parts most drivers never notice. His path from product design to Madison Industries runs through seals, valves, factory visits and the business of making things fit.
Krishna Khadloya Spent Decades Teaching Cameras to Notice What Matters
Before AI became a boardroom reflex, Krishna Khadloya was building the plumbing beneath it - engineering teams, edge intelligence and systems that turn a camera from a witness into a decision-maker.
Jennifer Martucci Built the Interface Between Service and Software
Before QR menus became wallpaper, Jennifer Martucci was turning wine lists, room service and hotel touchpoints into living interfaces. Her career is a study in making technology feel less like machinery and more like service.
The Doorbell That Rang Before Ring
It crowdfunded $600K, out-patented its rivals, and put two million cameras on America's doorframes - then Amazon bought Ring and everything about the doorbell wars got louder.
Canon U.S.A. Sells You a Camera. It Also Prints Your Office, Scans Your Chest, and Etches the Chips in Your Phone.
Everyone knows the red logo from the camera strap. Almost nobody knows Canon also builds hospital scanners, factory-floor optics, and chip-making machines - and files more U.S. patents than almost anyone. Here is the whole company behind the shutter.
Amr Salahieh Built a Factory for Starting Companies
He kept losing time to leases, hiring and infrastructure. So the engineer behind Shifamed designed those distractions out - and turned one company-building career into a repeatable system.
Patent Watch
Patent Watch is an AI platform that turns dormant patent portfolios into revenue. It reads patents, finds products that appear to infringe them, and generates detailed claim charts in about 20 minutes instead of the months it takes patent attorneys by hand. Founded by brothers Alexander and Andreas Stroe and backed by Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch, the company helps IP teams pursue licensing, litigation, prior-art invalidation, and M&A due diligence.
Vishal Shukla
Vishal Shukla is the co-founder and CEO of Aviz Networks, a San Jose-based company building an AI-first, vendor-agnostic networking platform on top of the open-source SONiC operating system. A networking veteran with more than 20 years of experience, he previously held leadership roles at Cisco, IBM, Mellanox (NVIDIA), and Nortel. He holds 25-plus granted patents, has authored books on SDN, OpenFlow and OpenStack, and wrote 'Deciding the Future: Building New Networks for the AI Era.' Under his leadership Aviz raised a $17M Series A in November 2024 (roughly $31M total), backed by investors including Cisco Investments and Qualcomm Ventures.
Kurt Dobbins
Kurt Dobbins is the founder and CEO of Nrby, a New Hampshire company building AI-driven predictive network intelligence for broadband and telecom operators. A serial entrepreneur and networking engineer with more than three decades in the industry, he previously founded Ellacoya Networks (acquired by Arbor Networks) and Deep Information Sciences, and earlier served as technical director at Cabletron Systems. He is the named inventor on more than a dozen networking and communications patents and describes himself as a lifelong builder of ideas that challenge convention and reshape industries.
Paul Martini
Paul Martini is the CEO, chief architect and co-founder of iboss, a Boston-based cloud security company he built with his twin brother Peter starting from a San Diego garage in 2003. He holds more than 230 patents in cloud, cybersecurity and networking, and has helped push zero trust and Security Service Edge into the enterprise mainstream. Before iboss he did circuit-board and network software work at Copper Mountain Networks and SAIC.
Sam Clark
Sam Clark, MD, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Terran Biosciences, a CNS-focused platform biotech he started in 2017 from his medical school dorm room with $10,000. A neuroscientist trained at MIT and Columbia, Clark has built one of the largest psychedelic development programs in the industry, is the named inventor on more than 200 patent applications, and holds the world's first patents for new forms of psilocybin and MDMA. Terran pairs a medicinal-chemistry drug design engine with an FDA-cleared neuroimaging software platform and a pipeline of late-stage assets licensed from Sanofi and Pierre Fabre.
Jim Marggraff
Jim Marggraff is a serial inventor and entrepreneur with 70+ patents whose products have touched over 100 million children and adults worldwide. He co-invented the LeapFrog LeapPad - the #1 US toy two years running that generated $1B+ in sales - then built Livescribe (the world's first smart pen) and Eyefluence (acquired by Google in 2016 for eye-tracking AR/VR). Today he's back doing what he's always done: tackling childhood literacy. His Oakland startup Kibeam Learning has created a screen-free, AI-powered wand that brings physical books to life using sound, light, and motion - sending kids to 28 minutes of reading engagement versus the usual 5-7.
Dirk Buikema
Dirk Buikema is the founder and CEO of Hyperwear, an Austin-based functional fitness company he started in 2011. A former corporate attorney and semiconductor strategist turned inventor, he holds multiple US patents for training gear including the SandBell sandbag, the Hyper Vest adjustable weighted vest, and the SteelBell. Under his lean, research-driven, direct-to-consumer approach, Hyperwear grew 85% from 2022 to 2024 and landed on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private companies.
Randy Holleschau
Randy Holleschau is the founder, President and CEO of Elemental LED, the Reno, Nevada manufacturer that became one of America's largest providers of low-voltage linear LED lighting. A serial entrepreneur who says he has started more than fifty businesses and built what became DHL eCommerce, he has advised Fortune 500 companies including Charles Schwab, Bank of America, UBS and the USPS. Under his lead, Elemental LED has filed for close to 100 patents and operates two divisions, the wholesale Diode LED brand and a business solutions arm, while running on a homegrown culture code he calls FUCA: Focus, Urgency, Collaboration, Accountability.
Touradj Barman
Touradj Barman is the co-founder and CEO of Up 'n go, the San Diego company that lets restaurant guests scan a QR code, pull up their check, and pay without downloading an app. An MIT graduate with a Yale MBA and more than 20 issued patents - some acquired by Microsoft and now underpinning push and group messaging - Barman started Up 'n go to solve a small annoyance, splitting the check at a single San Diego restaurant. The platform has since processed more than $1.1 billion across over 16 million checks for 11 million-plus guests nationwide.
Wyly Wade
Wyly Wade is the CEO of Biometrica Systems (also operating as Safience), a Las Vegas and Virginia-based company that links physical and digital information to help prevent crime, identify threats, and recover victims. A self-taught coder who published his first video game at age ten and fixed a bug in Lotus Notes 4 while barely out of his teens, Wade has spent more than two decades at the intersection of biometrics, cybersecurity, and public policy. He helped build biometric standards for the U.S. passport, advised the ICAO on e-passports, and was part of the founding core team behind India's Aadhaar, the largest biometric identity program on Earth. Today he is pushing Biometrica toward a privacy-first, biometric-free model of threat and victim detection.
Avneesh Agrawal
Avneesh Agrawal is the co-founder and CEO of Netradyne, the San Diego AI company that turns dashcams into a real-time safety coach for commercial drivers. After more than a decade at Qualcomm, where he led 4G LTE research, ran corporate R&D, and served as president of Qualcomm India and South Asia, he left in 2015 to chase a convergence he saw coming: cheap camera sensors, edge computing, and deep learning arriving at the same moment. Netradyne's Driver-i platform now analyzes billions of miles of driving and reduces accidents by 30 to 50 percent. In January 2025, a $90 million Series D led by Point72 pushed the company past a $1 billion valuation. A Stanford PhD with more than 150 US patents, Agrawal builds at the intersection of research and the real world.
James DeMuth
James DeMuth is the co-founder and CEO of Seurat Technologies, a Wilmington, Massachusetts metal additive manufacturing company chasing a single audacious goal: printing metal parts fast and cheap enough to compete with mass production, then planting factories next to the customers who need them. He co-invented Seurat's Area Printing technology while working on laser fusion research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, holds a hand in roughly 145 patents, and has raised more than $181 million to reshore manufacturing and cut carbon out of how metal gets made.
Michael Ulin
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
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
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 Greene
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Thomas Tang
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
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.