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The Engineer Running Zebra's Marketing Playbook
An electrical engineer runs marketing for the company behind every barcode you have ever scanned. His pitch: stop trying to do more with less.
The $5.4 Billion Company Behind Every Beep
Zebra Technologies turned the humble barcode into a bridge between physical work and digital intelligence. Now its scanners, printers, sensors, software and screens are becoming the control layer for the frontline.
The Company That Puts a Label on Almost Everything You Touch at Work
For 110 years, Brady has made the humble label a serious business. Now, fresh off a $1.4 billion deal for Honeywell's barcode-and-scanner unit, the Milwaukee manufacturer is betting that whoever labels the thing should also track it.
KeyMe Locksmiths
KeyMe Locksmiths is a New York-founded technology company that has rebuilt the roughly $12 billion locksmith trade around robotics and computer vision. Its self-service kiosks - more than 7,000 of them inside retailers like Kroger, Walmart, IKEA, Menards and Rite Aid - use trained neural networks to scan, store and duplicate house keys, car keys with transponders, and RFID fobs in minutes. Alongside the kiosks, KeyMe runs a nationwide dispatch network of professional locksmiths for lockouts, re-keying, lock installation and repair, plus a retail media network that turns its kiosk screens into advertising real estate. The company has raised roughly $200 million across eleven rounds since 2012.
Spencer Hewett
Spencer Hewett is the founder and CEO of RADAR, a New York retail-technology company that wires store ceilings with RFID and computer-vision sensors to locate inventory in real time. He dropped out of Washington University in St. Louis to take the Thiel Fellowship in 2012, spent years building and rebuilding the idea, and has since taken RADAR through Old Navy and American Eagle rollouts to a $1 billion valuation on a $170 million Series B closed in May 2026.
AlignOps
AlignOps is a Colorado-based construction operations software company that unifies tool and asset tracking, workforce time tracking, jobsite safety and compliance, and fleet/materials management into a single platform. Formed in 2024 by consolidating four established construction-tech brands - ToolWatch, busybusy, Safety Reports, and FleetWatcher - AlignOps helps thousands of contractors gain real-time visibility into where their tools, crews, equipment, and money are going across warehouses and jobsites.
Anthony Gangemi
Anthony Gangemi is a Long Island barcode and data-capture executive whose career runs straight through the heart of the auto-ID industry. He started at Symbol Technologies, the company that put laser scanners in the hands of cashiers worldwide, then went on to co-found Dolphin Data Capture and found ScanSata, two firms that specialize in integrating Zebra Technologies OEM scan engines, RFID, and machine-vision hardware into other companies' products. He currently lists himself as President and CEO of Pogo. Across three-plus decades he has been the person OEMs call when they need a barcode reader to disappear inside a medical device, a kiosk, or a self-checkout lane.
Steven Humphreys
Steven Humphreys is Deputy CEO of the Hirsch Group (formerly Vitaprotech), a French-headquartered high-security technology company that emerged from the 2024 merger of Vitaprotech and Identiv. Over three decades he has run a string of companies at the seam where the physical and digital worlds meet - SCM Microsystems, ActivCard, and Identiv - building the smart-card readers, secure credentials, and access-control platforms that guard U.S. embassies, federal agencies, and sensitive sites worldwide. A Yale and Stanford engineer who started his career at General Electric, he has spent his life turning identity into infrastructure.
Zone24x7
Zone24x7 is a US-headquartered, end-to-end technology innovation company that weaves hardware and software into intelligent products for enterprises - from Fortune 500 retailers to startups. Founded in 2003 by Llavan and Saw-Chin Fernando, it pairs a San Jose business front with a deep engineering talent hub in Colombo, Sri Lanka, delivering AI, data science, embedded systems, IoT, computer vision, RFID and DevOps work for 50+ enterprise customers across retail, manufacturing, logistics and healthcare.
EON
EON is a New York-based enterprise software company building the Digital ID layer for physical products. Through its EON Product Cloud platform, brands give each item a unique, traceable digital identity - accessed via QR code, NFC chip or RFID tag - that follows the product across its full lifecycle, powering resale, repair, authentication, customer engagement and compliance with the EU's upcoming Digital Product Passport regulation. Founded in 2017 by Natasha Franck, EON authored the open CircularID Protocol and works with brands including Coach, Chloe, H&M, Mulberry and Target.
Ravi Pappu
Ravi Pappu is the founder and CEO of Apeiron Labs, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup building low-cost autonomous robots that drift through the water column to measure the ocean at a scale never attempted. A physicist-turned-serial-founder, he invented Physical Unclonable Functions during his MIT PhD, co-founded the RFID pioneer ThingMagic (acquired by Trimble), and served as CTO of the CIA-linked venture firm In-Q-Tel before deciding the subsurface ocean was the hardest, most under-measured place on Earth and going after it with hardware he calls 'the CubeSat for the ocean.'
Darren Hakeman
Darren Hakeman is the CEO of Genesis Digital LLC, the company behind Kartra, WebinarJam, and EverWebinar - software tools powering the creator economy for 25,000+ entrepreneurs worldwide. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer, Hakeman spent decades in enterprise tech - from RFID logistics at Savi Technology to scaling 8x8's ARR 5x to over $500 million through eight acquisitions - before stepping into the CEO role at Genesis Digital in April 2024, where the company has processed over $1 billion in transactions for small business owners seeking financial freedom.
Neschae Fernando
Neschae Fernando is the CEO of Zone24x7, a 22-year-old technology engineering company headquartered in San Jose, California, with a major hub in Sri Lanka. With a dual background in electrical engineering (MS and BS from UCLA) and enterprise IT delivery at Cisco, Fernando leads a 270-person team that sits at a rare intersection: companies capable of integrating hardware and software end-to-end. Under his leadership since June 2022, Zone24x7 has won seven industry awards in 2025 alone, including Gold at NBQSA and the IoT Technology of the Year Award, while expanding its AI, RFID, and cognitive vision platforms across 50+ enterprise clients globally.