project-ara
(2)
Ara Knaian
Ara Knaian is an MIT-trained electrical engineer and inventor on more than 36 U.S. patents who now runs Acceleron Fusion, a Cambridge company chasing energy from muon-catalyzed fusion - a route that runs closer to 1,000 degrees C instead of the 100-million-degree plasmas everyone else fights. Before fusion he co-founded the product-design firm NK Labs, architected Google's modular Project Ara phone, tuned the drive waveforms behind Amazon's Kindle, and built the Milli-Motein, a self-folding robot chain at MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms. Acceleron raised a $24M Series A led by Lowercarbon Capital and Collaborative Fund and logged over 100 hours of continuous fusion at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland.
Paul Eremenko
Paul Eremenko is the co-founder and CEO of P-1 AI, a startup building 'engineering AGI' for the physical world through an AI agent named Archie. Born in Lviv, Ukraine and trained at MIT, Caltech and Georgetown Law, he ran X-plane and spacecraft programs at DARPA, created Google's modular-phone Project Ara, became the youngest CTO of Airbus at 35, served as CTO of United Technologies, and co-founded hydrogen-aviation company Universal Hydrogen. P-1 AI emerged from stealth in April 2025 with $23M in seed funding led by Radical Ventures.