physical-world-ai
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Deepti Yenireddy Is Teaching AI to Read the Physical World
From oil-field instruments to construction drawings, the Boon founder has spent two decades turning stubborn, real-world data into software people can inspect, correct and trust.
Eliot Horowitz
Eliot Horowitz is the founder and CEO of Viam, a New York robotics-and-automation software platform that lets developers build, deploy, and manage machines in the physical world. He wrote the original core code of MongoDB, which he co-founded in 2007 and steered as CTO for 13 years through a 2017 IPO and a market cap that climbed into the tens of billions. After tinkering with a cat feeder, a chess-playing robot, and a smarter sprinkler during the pandemic, he concluded that robotics hardware had outrun its software, and built Viam to close that gap.
Viam
Viam is a New York-based software platform that lets engineers build, deploy, and manage AI, data, and automation in the physical world across any hardware - from a single prototype to a global fleet. Founded in 2020 by MongoDB co-founder and former CTO Eliot Horowitz, Viam treats robots, sensors, cameras, and machines as programmable building blocks, giving hardware and software teams a common, modular, largely open-source stack. It powers everything from arena concession lines to robotic kitchens, marine sonar, and industrial equipment, and has raised $117M to date.