redwood-city
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The Korean Startup Trying to Shrink the Grid's Heaviest Box
Crocus wants to replace the hundred-year-old iron transformer with a silicon one that thinks. Its bet: the same box that charges electric cars can also keep an AI data center from browning out.
Christian Apfel Is Betting on the Tumor, Not the Spreadsheet
The physician-scientist behind SageMedic built his career turning clinical uncertainty into compact decisions. Now he is applying the same habit to functional precision oncology, angel investing and the slow work of changing a standard.
Dyna Robotics
Dyna Robotics is a Redwood City, California startup building embodied-AI foundation models that let robots perform dexterous, real-world manipulation tasks around the clock. Founded in 2024 by repeat entrepreneurs Lindon Gao and York Yang (who sold Caper AI for $350M) and former DeepMind researcher Jason Ma, the company's DYNA-1 model runs commercial deployments in laundries, factories, restaurants and gyms. Dyna raised a $23.5M seed and a $120M Series A in 2025, reaching a valuation above $600M with backing from NVIDIA, Amazon, Salesforce Ventures, Samsung Next and CRV.
Seyed Tabatabaei
Seyed A. Tabatabaei is the founder, chairman and CEO of mmTron, a Redwood City fabless semiconductor company building high-linearity millimeter-wave MMICs for 5G, 6G, SATCOM, instrumentation and defense. A PhD engineer who has worked in mmWave since 1986, he spent decades at M/A-COM, Hewlett Packard, and Endwave before starting the design house Teramics and then founding mmTron in 2020. In April 2026 the company closed a $45M Series A led by Maverick Silicon.
Mixbook
Mixbook is a Redwood City, California company that lets everyday people design and print highly customizable photo books, cards, calendars, wall art, and home decor. Founded in 2006 by UC Berkeley graduates Andrew Laffoon and Aryk Grosz, the bootstrapped-turned-venture-backed company pairs a flexible browser-based design studio with AI-assisted layout tools and print quality that has earned it top marks from Wirecutter and Tom's Guide. Its stated purpose is to help people be creative and connect with the people they love through the stories their photos tell.
Tianyin Zhang
Tianyin Zhang is the founder and CEO of DreamCraft Entertainment, a Redwood City-based startup building a code-free platform that lets anyone create, publish, and monetize video games without programming or art skills. A former Google engineer and game programmer, he co-founded DreamCraft in 2018 with Veronica Yao out of Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch. The company has raised more than $15 million, including a $10 million Series A in November 2021 led by March Capital, with backing from Makers Fund, Tencent, and Hiro Capital. DreamCraft's mission is to make game creation roughly ten times easier and to open game development to hobbyists, modders, and first-time creators.
David Weber
David Weber, PhD, is the President and CEO of Mosanna Therapeutics, a Redwood City biotech developing MOS118, a bedtime nasal spray for obstructive sleep apnea that aims to restore the body's natural airway reflex during sleep. A biotech operator with more than 30 years in drug development, capital formation, and corporate strategy, he previously led Otonomy through its IPO and multiple clinical programs, and served as CEO of MacuSight and Oculex Pharmaceuticals. He joined Mosanna in June 2025 as the company launched with an $80 million Series A.
Mosanna Therapeutics
Mosanna Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotech developing MOS118, a bedtime nasal spray for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Rather than mechanically forcing the airway open like CPAP, MOS118 is a small molecule pan-K+ channel inhibitor that reactivates the body's own negative pressure reflex - stimulating pressure-sensing nerves in the nasopharynx to increase upper airway muscle tone and reduce apnea episodes. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Redwood City, California with an office in Basel, Switzerland, the company launched publicly in June 2025 with an $80 million Series A to advance MOS118 through Phase 2.
Teon Therapeutics, Inc.
Teon Therapeutics is a clinical-stage, privately held biopharmaceutical company in Redwood City, California, developing a focused portfolio of orally administered small-molecule drugs that block immunosuppressive, cancer-promoting signaling pathways in the tumor microenvironment. Its GPCR-directed candidates - TT-702, a first-in-class adenosine A2B receptor antagonist, and TT-816, a first-in-class cannabinoid CB2 receptor antagonist - aim to restore anti-tumor immunity for the roughly 88% of solid-tumor patients who do not benefit from existing immunotherapies. The founding team members were primary inventors of Lexiscan, the only FDA-approved selective adenosine therapeutic.
Corcept Therapeutics
Corcept Therapeutics is a commercial-stage pharmaceutical company that discovers and develops medicines that treat severe endocrinologic, oncologic, metabolic and neurologic disorders by modulating the effects of cortisol, the body's primary stress hormone. Founded in 1998 and based in Redwood City, California, Corcept built its business on Korlym, the first FDA-approved treatment for hypercortisolism (Cushing's syndrome), and has since discovered more than 1,000 proprietary selective cortisol modulators. In 2026 it won FDA approval for Lifyorli (relacorilant) in platinum-resistant ovarian cancer, extending a single scientific idea - blocking cortisol at the glucocorticoid receptor - from a rare endocrine disease into oncology.
Model N
Model N is a Redwood City-based enterprise software company that builds cloud revenue-management systems for pharmaceutical, medtech, semiconductor, and high-tech manufacturers. Its Revenue Cloud automates pricing, quoting, contracting, rebates, incentives, and regulatory compliance - the commercial machinery that governs how life sciences and high-tech companies book and protect their top line. Founded in 1999 and taken public in 2013, Model N was acquired by Vista Equity Partners in 2024 for $1.25 billion and now serves 150+ leading brands across more than 120 countries.
AmMax Bio., Inc.
AmMax Bio is a clinical-stage biotechnology company in Redwood City, California, developing first-in-class cancer therapeutics built on a CSF1R-targeting antibody platform. Founded in 2020 by pharmaceutical veteran Larry Hsu, PhD, in partnership with Amgen, the company advances a pipeline that spans a monoclonal antibody for tenosynovial giant cell tumor (TGCT), a therapy for colorectal cancer minimal residual disease (in partnership with MD Anderson), and a lead antibody-drug conjugate, AMB-104, for acute myeloid leukemia. AmMax's strategy is to de-risk development by combining clinically validated antibodies with established linker-payload technology.
Array Labs
Array Labs designs, builds, and operates radar satellites that fly in coordinated clusters to image the same place on Earth from many angles at once. By distributing the radar across many small, mass-manufacturable satellites instead of one large bespoke spacecraft, the company aims to produce continuously refreshed, high-resolution 3D maps of the planet - a form of space-based radar it likens to what SpaceX did for launch. Founded in 2021 and based in Redwood City, California, Array Labs raised a $20M Series A in January 2026 to scale radar manufacturing and prepare to launch the world's first formation-flying radar satellite cluster.
InterVene, Inc.
InterVene, Inc. is a Redwood City, California vascular medical device company building catheter-based tools for severe venous disease. Born out of Stanford Biodesign, it first pioneered BlueLeaf, a non-implantable system that forms new vein valves from a patient's own tissue, then pivoted its lead product to Recana, an FDA-cleared thrombectomy catheter system that clears venous in-stent restenosis and native-vessel obstructions - a stubborn problem that leaves stented patients with debilitating complications and few good options.
mmTron
mmTron is a Redwood City, California semiconductor company that designs high-performance millimeter-wave integrated circuits (MMICs). Founded in 2020 by Seyed Tabatabaei and Mona Molaasgari, the company builds power amplifiers, low noise amplifiers, front-end modules, mixers, switches and wideband distributed amplifiers using GaAs, GaN, InP, SiGe and RFSOI process technologies. Its chips target the linearity, bandwidth and power-efficiency demands of satellite communications, 5G/6G wireless, aerospace and defense radar, and RF instrumentation up to 180 GHz. In April 2026 mmTron closed a $45M Series A led by Maverick Silicon.
Quilt
Quilt is a Redwood City climate-tech company building a software-defined ductless heat pump for room-by-room home heating and cooling. Founded in 2022 by former Google and Nest people, its system pairs an outdoor compressor with slim indoor heads that carry millimeter-wave occupancy sensors, a Quilt Dial thermostat, and an app that ships over-the-air updates so the hardware gets smarter after install. Quilt sells direct-to-consumer through certified installers and has raised $62M across seed, Series A, and Series B rounds to move households off fossil-fuel heating.
SageMedic Corp.
SageMedic Corp. is a Redwood City, California biotech and CLIA-accredited laboratory advancing functional precision oncology. Its flagship product, the SAGE Oncotest, grows hundreds of live 3D microtumors from a patient's own fresh tumor biopsy and tests them against a panel of FDA-approved chemotherapies and targeted drugs, predicting which treatments a tumor will resist or respond to within 7-10 days - independently of genetic mutations. The company reports actionable results in 88% of cases versus roughly 26% for genomic tests. Founded by physician-scientists Dr. Chris Apfel and Dr. Brigitte Apfel, SageMedic aims to more than double a patient's odds of receiving the most effective therapy the first time.
WorkBoard
WorkBoard is a Redwood City-based enterprise SaaS company that builds an AI-native strategy execution and OKR platform. It helps large organizations set objectives and key results, align teams around them, automate business reviews, and track progress in real time so strategy turns into a repeatable 'operating rhythm.' Co-founded in 2014 by CEO Deidre Paknad and Daryoush Paknad, the company serves major enterprises including Boeing, 3M, Cisco, Capital One and Workday, and in 2025 acquired rival Quantive to consolidate the enterprise OKR market.
Hammerhead AI
Hammerhead AI is a Redwood City data center infrastructure startup that uses reinforcement learning agents to turn stranded power into usable AI compute. Its ORCA platform (Orchestrated RL Control Agents) coordinates power, cooling, and GPU workloads in real time so operators can raise token throughput by up to 30% within their existing power envelope - without waiting for new grid capacity. Founded in 2024 by former AutoGrid executives Rahul Kar and Rajeev Singh, the company emerged from stealth in November 2025 with a $10M seed round led by Buoyant Ventures.
humans&
humans& is a human-centric frontier AI lab based in the San Francisco Bay Area, founded in September 2025 by researchers and builders from xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and Stanford. Rather than building AI to replace people, the company designs models and products around how humans connect, communicate, and work together - investing in long-horizon and multi-agent reinforcement learning, memory, and user understanding. It launched publicly in January 2026 with a $480 million all-cash seed round at a roughly $4.48 billion valuation, backed by NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, SV Angel, GV, and Emerson Collective.
Integrated Biosciences
Integrated Biosciences is a Redwood City biotech founded in 2022 that fuses optogenetics, chemistry, and AI to discover small-molecule drugs for age-related diseases. Its optogenetic screening platform uses light to control cellular biology at millisecond and micron scale, generating clean data to train an explainable-AI drug-discovery engine. The company has published in Nature - including a new structural class of antibiotics - and raised $17.2M in seed funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures.
Sortly
Sortly is a cloud-based, visual inventory and asset-tracking platform that lets businesses photograph, QR-code, and organize their stuff into searchable folders on any device. Built for the non-warehouse crowd - construction crews, medical offices, electricians, interior designers, schools, and retailers - it swaps clipboards and spreadsheets for a mobile app with barcode scanning, custom fields, low-stock alerts, and offline access. Founded in 2012 by Dhanush Balachandran and bootstrapped to profitability, Sortly now tracks millions of items for well over 15,000 paying businesses.
GridCARE
GridCARE is a Redwood City, California company that uses generative AI to find hidden capacity inside the existing electric grid - turning data-center 'time-to-power' from a 5-to-7-year wait into 6-to-12 months. Founded in 2024 by Amit Narayan with co-founders from Stanford, the company is building what it calls 'power acceleration for AI,' partnering with utilities like National Grid and Portland General Electric and counting Sutter Hill Ventures, Xora, Emerson Collective and John Doerr among its backers.
Dhanush Balachandran
Dhanush Balachandran is the founder and CEO of Sortly, a visual, QR-code-driven inventory and asset tracking platform used by small businesses, families, and teams in construction, medical, retail, and education. A marketer-turned-iOS-developer, he taught himself to code, built an app originally called 'My Things,' rebranded it to Sortly, and grew it to millions of downloads. Before Sortly he spent over 15 years across Intel, Apple, DJI, and Y Media Labs, where he forecast worldwide CPU demand, priced server chips, and built ResearchKit medical research apps.
Nathan Schuett
Nathan Schuett is the founder and CEO of PreNav, a Redwood City company that builds drones guided by computer vision to inspect the infrastructure most people never look at - cell towers, wind turbines, bridges, smokestacks. The idea started as a half-serious plan to fly coffee across a cafe and grew into a navigation system precise enough to fly a robot within centimeters of a steel structure without a GPS signal or an expert pilot. A Stanford computer-music graduate who detoured through video games and robotics, Schuett now also lists himself as founder of Forming AI, the next chapter of turning the physical world into analyzable 3D data.
Rahul Kar
Rahul Kar is the founder and CEO of Hammerhead AI, a Redwood City startup that uses reinforcement-learning control agents to squeeze stranded power out of AI data centers. After helping build and scale AutoGrid - the distributed-energy software pioneer acquired by Schneider Electric - Kar launched Hammerhead in November 2025 with a $10M seed round led by Buoyant Ventures. His thesis is blunt: the real bottleneck for AI is not chips or models, it is power, and most data centers run at 30-50% of their allocated capacity. Hammerhead's ORCA platform orchestrates power, cooling, and compute in real time to unlock roughly 30% more usable capacity without touching the grid.
Avisi Technologies
Avisi Technologies is a clinical-stage ophthalmic medical device company building VisiPlate, an ultrathin, nanotechnology-enabled aqueous shunt that drains excess fluid from the eye to lower pressure in glaucoma patients. Spun out of the University of Pennsylvania's Y-Prize program in 2017, the company is advancing VisiPlate through the FDA-cleared SAPPHIRE pivotal trial and has raised roughly $21.7M to date, including a $10.7M Series A in February 2026.
Collov AI
Collov AI (Collov Labs) is a Redwood City visual-AI company that turns a single phone photo of a room into a fully furnished, photorealistic redesign in seconds. Founded by Stanford PhD Xiao Zhang, it started as an AI interior-design and virtual-staging tool for homeowners, designers and real-estate agents, and is now expanding into broader 'agentic visual intelligence' - systems that read camera input and act on it. The company reports more than 6 million users across 200+ countries and 300+ business customers, and raised a $23M Series A in April 2026 to launch a dedicated research lab.
Rui Jing
Rui Jing Jiang is the Founder and CEO of Avisi Technologies, a Redwood City-based clinical-stage medical device company developing VisiPlate, the world's thinnest freestanding ophthalmic implant for treating glaucoma. Built on University of Pennsylvania nanotechnology, VisiPlate is a multichannel aqueous shunt composed of alumina and Parylene-C that is 20 times thinner than a human hair. Rui Jing co-founded the company in 2017 as a junior at Penn's Wharton School, won the $100,000 President's Innovation Prize in 2018, secured FDA Investigational Device Exemption approval in October 2025 for the US SAPPHIRE trial, and closed a $10.7M Series A in February 2026 to advance pivotal clinical development.
Bon Appétit Management Company
Bon Appétit Management Company is an on-site restaurant company that runs more than 1,000 cafés and catering operations for corporations, universities, and museums across the United States. Founded in 1987 by Fedele Bauccio and Ernie Collins, it pioneered cooking from scratch in the contract food world and built a reputation as the industry's sustainability conscience - the first major food service company to commit to sustainable seafood, cage-free eggs, antibiotic limits, and tying food choices to climate change. A Compass Group subsidiary since 2002, it operates from Redwood City, California.