Allen Tsai is an Austin-based serial entrepreneur and engineer who spent roughly two decades shipping connected consumer electronics for Sony, Microsoft Xbox, Panasonic, Sonos, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments before turning his attention to water. After a month spent building water wells in a Nepali village, he founded Pani, the maker of the Pani Source - a tech-enabled water personalization system often described as the 'Keurig for water.' The device filters, remineralizes and customizes tap water with compostable pods, paired with an app that tracks quality and usage. Pani is Tsai's sixth startup.
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.
Matt Crowley is the CEO of SCINTIL Photonics, a fabless silicon-photonics company in Grenoble building single-chip DWDM laser engines for AI data centers. A Princeton-trained physicist who grew up in a family of small-business owners, he spent 25 years turning lab-stage technologies into volume products, founding and exiting two MEMS startups (Sand 9 and Vesper Technologies, the latter acquired by Qualcomm) before taking the helm at Scintil in late 2024. He argues the next bottleneck in AI is the network, not the chip, and is betting that light - not copper - will carry it.
Laurie Yoler is a General Partner at Playground Global, a Palo Alto-based deep-tech venture capital firm backing companies working on fundamental technologies - robotics, AI, quantum computing, biotech, and beyond. A founding board member of Tesla and early backer of Zoox (acquired by Amazon for $1.3B), she has spent three decades at the intersection of engineering, strategy, and capital allocation. Before venture, she helped launch Visa's debit card division, built Sun Microsystems' server platform dominance, and ran Qualcomm Labs as President. She holds a summa cum laude degree from Washington State University and audits courses at Stanford across engineering, law, and neuroscience.
Samir Kumar is Co-Founder and General Partner at Touring Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that closed its oversubscribed $330 million Fund I in September 2025 to back AI-driven software companies approaching product-market fit. Before co-founding Touring Capital in 2023 with Nagraj Kashyap and Priya Saiprasad, Samir spent years at Microsoft's M12 venture fund investing in AI, deep tech, and hardware-enabled software, and prior to that held senior roles at Qualcomm's corporate R&D division, Samsung, and Palm. A Cornell-trained mechanical engineer who grew up in New York after being born in New Delhi, Samir brings a rare blend of hands-on engineering, product management, and institutional investing experience to backing the next wave of AI-powered enterprise companies.
Joseph Bousaba is the CEO of InvenSense and General Manager of TDK Corporation's MEMS Sensors Business Group, leading a global powerhouse in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) sensing solutions. With over 18 years of senior leadership in the semiconductor industry - spanning Philips Semiconductors, Qualcomm Atheros, and Qualcomm - he stepped into the top role at InvenSense in October 2024, bringing a track record of building multi-hundred-million-dollar businesses at the intersection of motion, sound, and AI-driven sensing.
Manlio Allegra is the co-founder, President, and CEO of Polaris Wireless, a Silicon Valley company he built from the ground up in 1999 to become the global leader in high-accuracy, software-based 3D mobile location solutions. With over 30 years of international business experience spanning video games, Sega Enterprises' European expansion, and wireless technology, Allegra has guided Polaris Wireless to secure 90+ patents, earn multiple Frost & Sullivan awards, and sign landmark E911 Z-axis agreements with major U.S. carriers - helping emergency dispatchers locate people not just on a map, but on the right floor of a building.
Steve Poizner is a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur who sold GPS-in-cell-phones pioneer SnapTrack to Qualcomm for $1 billion, served as California Insurance Commissioner, ran for governor, taught high school for a year, wrote a New York Times bestseller, and is now back in the lab as Co-Founder and CEO of oneNav - building the world's first L5-direct GNSS receiver ASIC to make GPS jamming-proof for drones, autonomous vehicles, and defense applications.