purdue
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The Engineer Who Learned to Sell the Invisible
He built the guts of phones nobody could see inside, then spent 25 years learning to explain the chips that quietly run everything. Now he sells Marvell's silicon to the companies building the AI cloud.
Akash Raju
He made Forbes 30 Under 30 for a company he then threw away. The second version of Glimpse - AI that fights retail's most boring, most expensive fee - just raised $35 million.
Shaurya Aggarwal
Shaurya Aggarwal is the founder and CEO of Florin (YC S26), an AI-powered insurance carrier building a 'world model' that underwrites and binds coverage for hard-to-insure frontier industries like robotics, space, advanced energy, and defense in under a minute. Before founding Florin, he built next-generation TPUs at Google and shipped encryption products deployed across more than 100,000 hosts. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Purdue.
Viraat Das
Viraat Das is the cofounder and CEO of Exla, a Y Combinator (Winter 2025) startup building AI infrastructure. A former Amazon machine learning engineer who finished his Purdue computer science degree in two and a half years, he first shipped an SDK that squeezes large transformer models onto edge hardware like NVIDIA Jetsons, then aimed the company at Libra, an always-on AI site reliability engineer that reads production logs, traces failures to the deploy that caused them, and opens fix pull requests while the team sleeps.
Vikram Pavate
Vikram Pavate is the CEO and co-founder of Tacta Systems, a Palo Alto robotics company building 'Dextrous Intelligence' - a fusion of AI, software and tactile hardware meant to give robots human-like touch, spatial awareness and manipulation skills. A hard-tech operator with roughly three decades in advanced materials and hardware, he trained as a ceramic and materials engineer, earned an MBA from Wharton, and holds dozens of patents. Before Tacta he co-founded and ran the sensing and location startup Locix, and led business development at LuxVue Technology, the micro-LED display pioneer acquired by Apple in 2014. In June 2025 Tacta emerged from stealth with $75 million in funding to bring physical dexterity to machines.
Shubh Sinha
Shubh Sinha is the co-founder and CEO of Integral Privacy Technologies, a San Francisco company that certifies, transforms, and activates privacy-regulated data (HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA) for healthcare and other regulated industries. Integral compresses compliance workflows that once took months into hours. Before Integral, Sinha led regulated-data product work at LiveRamp. He is a Purdue-trained computer engineer, an angel investor, and a Forbes Technology Council member. In July 2026 the company raised its Series A, bringing total funding to about $25M.
Candice Xie
Candice Xie is the co-founder and CEO of Veo, the micromobility company she started in 2017 from West Lafayette, Indiana, while still in her twenties. A finance analyst by training rather than a Silicon Valley engineer, she built Veo into the first North American shared-micromobility operator to reach unadjusted EBIT profitability - reaching roughly $52 million in revenue on about $16 million of total funding, while competitors raised billions and flamed out. Calling herself an 'anti-tech bro' CEO and the 'tortoise' of the scooter race, she designs vehicles in-house, expands one city at a time, and won the largest exclusive micromobility contract in the United States with Denver.
Matt Booty
Matt Booty is the EVP and Chief Content Officer of Microsoft Gaming, overseeing content strategy and development across nearly 40 studios including Xbox Game Studios, Bethesda, Activision Blizzard, and King. A Purdue-trained engineer with an MFA, he began his career at Midway Games in 1991 - working on Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam - before rising to CEO of Midway in 2008. He joined Microsoft in 2010, led the Minecraft global team, and has since orchestrated some of the largest acquisitions in gaming history, including the $7.5B ZeniMax/Bethesda deal and the $68.7B Activision Blizzard King acquisition.
John Gedmark
John Gedmark is the CEO and Co-founder of Astranis Space Technologies, a San Francisco-based aerospace company building next-generation geostationary satellites. He previously helped shape the commercial space industry as co-founder and executive director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, where he influenced President Obama's 2010 decision to use commercial space transportation for NASA missions - a shift worth over $10 billion to the industry. At Astranis, he has led the company from a Y Combinator startup to a $2.8 billion valuation with a $1+ billion backlog, operating a fleet of MicroGEO satellites that bring dedicated broadband to underserved regions across Alaska, the Philippines, Mexico, and beyond.
Mary Jane Elmore
Mary Jane (MJ) Elmore is a pioneering venture capitalist who joined IVP (Institutional Venture Partners) in 1982 and became one of the first female General Partners in American venture capital history. Over a four-decade career spanning eight IVP funds, she backed transformative technology companies in software, communications, and computer-aided engineering. Now a Limited Partner and active angel investor through Broadway Angels and Sand Hill Angels, she has reinvented herself as an oil painter - applying the same mathematical precision that made her a formidable investor to abstract landscapes and architecture.
Aaron Sisto
Aaron Sisto is the Co-Founder & CEO of Chronicle Studios, a content intelligence platform that uses proprietary agentic AI to help creators launch and scale global IP franchises. A PhD quantum chemist turned deep-tech investor turned entertainment entrepreneur, Sisto blends hard science and pop culture instincts in a company that raised an oversubscribed $11.6M seed round in 2025 backed by Patron and Point72 Ventures. Previously a partner at First Spark Ventures and Director of Engineering at Schmidt Futures, he co-founded Chronicle alongside entertainment veteran Chris deFaria, former president of DreamWorks Animation.