Atai Barkai is the co-founder and CEO of CopilotKit, the Seattle-based open-source company building the interface layer between humans and AI agents. He and his brother Uli created AG-UI, an open protocol now adopted by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, and major AI frameworks, with millions of weekly downloads. A physicist by training who pivoted into developer infrastructure at Meta and Doximity, Barkai bet early - during the GPT-3.5 era - that humans and agents would build software together, and is now turning that bet into the standard for how AI agents talk to the apps people actually use.
Baiju Bhatt co-founded Robinhood, the zero-commission trading app that put stock buying on a phone screen and made him one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the US. In 2024 he walked away from finance to chase the idea he grew up with: power and machines in orbit. His company, founded as Aetherflux and rebranded in 2026 as Cowboy Space Corporation, started by trying to beam solar energy to Earth with infrared lasers and has since aimed higher - building rockets and AI data centers that live in low Earth orbit. The son of a NASA scientist, Bhatt is a physicist and self-taught product designer who keeps picking old, stubborn problems and bringing capitalism to them.
Kevin Tan is the co-founder and CEO of Snackpass, the restaurant technology company he started in his last semester at Yale that turned takeout ordering into a social, viral experience. What began as a way to skip the line for campus munchies grew into a multi-product platform - mobile ordering, self-service kiosks, loyalty and gifting - used by hundreds of restaurants. A physics graduate, musician, and self-taught engineer, Tan raised $70 million in Series B funding in 2021 at a roughly $400 million valuation and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Peter Fedichev is a theoretical physicist turned longevity entrepreneur who co-founded Gero, a biotech AI company applying physics-based generative AI models to crack the root causes of aging. A former top-2 cited Russian physicist under 35, he traded quantum gases for aging clocks, building a platform that predicted biological age from wearable data before it was fashionable, secured a Pfizer collaboration, and landed a potential $250M deal with Chugai Pharmaceutical (Roche Group) in 2025 - all while publishing over 75 scientific papers and winning a $10,000 prize for winning a public debate on defeating aging.
Derek Muller is a Canadian-Australian physicist turned YouTuber who runs Veritasium, a channel of 20+ million subscribers built on the idea that learning science starts with admitting you got it wrong. His PhD thesis argued that confusion is a feature, not a bug, and he has spent fifteen years engineering that confusion on camera.
James Detweiler is a General Partner at Felicis, the venture firm behind investments in Shopify, Fitbit, and Twitch. Promoted to General Partner in February 2026, he has sourced, led, or co-led 25+ investments across AI, robotics, vertical software, and defense - including Skild AI (now valued at $14B), RunwayML, and Mercor. A summa cum laude Dartmouth grad in Physics and Mathematical Finance, he honed his AI investment lens at Zetta (the first AI-focused venture fund) and SVB Capital before joining Felicis. He founded the Felicis Fellows program to bridge top AI researchers and entrepreneurship, and coined the investment thesis 'The Great Splintering' - the idea that as thinking becomes cheap, value shifts to trust, judgment, and presence. He grew up in Santa Clara as the youngest of five children of an actress and a painter.
Sam Fahmy is the President and CEO of Ripcord, the Hayward-based robotic digitization company turning paper archives into searchable, structured data. A physics major turned enterprise-software operator, he previously helped take Cvent from $2M to $400M+ in revenue and led commercial strategy at WorkFusion before taking the top job at Ripcord in February 2022.
Andrew Quong is President and CEO of InterVenn Biosciences, a South San Francisco-based precision diagnostics company unlocking the human glycoproteome through AI-powered platforms. With a PhD in Physics and over 30 years spanning national laboratories, academia, and biotech, Quong bridges the physical and computational sciences with clinical medicine. He led InterVenn's development of GlycoKnow Ovarian, a non-invasive blood-based liquid biopsy test for distinguishing ovarian cancer from benign masses, and has steered the company through key commercialization milestones including a $201M Series C raise in 2021.
Ilya Fushman is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms, where he invests in early and growth-stage companies reshaping enterprise software, infrastructure, financial services, and AI. Before VC, he was a senior product leader at Dropbox (employee #75) and a General Partner at Index Ventures. A trained physicist with a Stanford PhD and a Nature paper on quantum computing, Fushman brings rare scientific depth to the investment table - having backed transformative companies including Slack, Robinhood, Rippling, Harvey, and Loom.
Bob Rogers, PhD, is the co-founder and Chief Product & Technology Officer of Oii.ai, a San Francisco-based AI company that deploys probabilistic digital twins to optimize end-to-end supply chains. A Harvard-trained astrophysicist who once modeled supermassive black holes, Rogers pivoted through quantitative hedge funds, healthcare AI (co-founding Apixio, acquired by Centene), and Intel—where he led enterprise-scale AI as Chief Data Scientist—before channeling that eclectic career into Oii.ai's flagship platform Optii. A prolific author of four AI books and TechArena's 2024-2025 Voice of Innovation, Rogers is known for translating dense physics intuition into practical tools that let supply chain executives make real-time decisions instead of waiting weeks for reports.
Justin Kan is a serial entrepreneur and investor best known as the co-founder of Twitch, the live streaming platform acquired by Amazon for $970 million in 2014. A Yale graduate who studied physics and philosophy, Kan pioneered lifecasting by wearing a camera 24/7 for Justin.tv in 2007, which evolved into Twitch and revolutionized gaming culture. He's launched multiple ventures including Socialcam (sold to Autodesk for $60M), served as a Y Combinator partner, and now invests through Goat Capital while building new companies in Web3, commerce, and music. Despite selling Twitch for nearly $1 billion, Kan has been candid about struggles with happiness, anxiety, and finding fulfillment beyond exits, making him a rare voice of authenticity in Silicon Valley's success-obsessed culture.
Vijay Pande is a Trinidadian-American scientist turned venture capitalist who convinced Marc Andreessen to make his first biotech bet. He spent 16 years as a Stanford professor pioneering computational biology, founded the Guinness World Record-holding Folding@home project that turned millions of home computers into a disease-fighting supercomputer, then built a16z's Bio+Health fund into a $3 billion+ powerhouse. Now he's co-founding VZ.VC to focus on AI-driven healthcare innovation - proof that you can go from writing video game code as a teenager to reshaping how Silicon Valley funds the future of medicine.