Philipp Skogstad runs Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America - the Sunnyvale-to-San-Jose corridor of the company that invented the car. A Stanford-trained engineer who once managed open innovation programs at SAP, he now oversees an 830-person R&D operation that ships Drive Pilot (the only SAE-certified Level 3 system on US roads), the MBUX infotainment stack, and Mercedes' ChatGPT-in-the-dashboard experiment.
Albert Invent builds an AI-native operating system for chemists and materials scientists, unifying electronic lab notebooks, LIMS, regulatory compliance and predictive AI into one cloud platform that aims to compress decades-long R&D cycles into weeks.
Hermann Tribukait is the co-founder and CEO of Atinary Technologies, a Lausanne- and Silicon Valley-based deeptech startup that built SDLabs — a no-code AI/ML platform compressing years of R&D into days. A Harvard-trained economist who helped coin the term 'Self-Driving Labs®' in 2017, Tribukait has channeled a career spent brokering $200M+ in global R&D partnerships into software that lets machines design experiments, learn from results, and iterate without human bias getting in the way. Atinary's tools are now used in pharma, biotech, chemicals, and climate tech, with a physical self-driving lab open in Boston since early 2026.