san-carlos
(11)
Sara Leoni
Sara Leoni is the founder and CEO of Ziplines Education, a Bay Area career accelerator that partners with 30-plus universities to deliver industry-recognized certificate programs in fields like AI, project management, and digital marketing. A former Division I softball player at UNLV and ex-CEO of the $50M course-materials company Rafter, she raised a $6.4M Series A in 2023-2024 to help close the digital skills gap and has helped more than 20,000 adult learners retool their careers. She frames learning as a zipline: intimidating, exhilarating, and continuous, with a clear start and a clear landing.
Attovia Therapeutics
Attovia Therapeutics is a San Carlos, California clinical-stage biotech developing first-in-class multispecific biologics for immune-mediated diseases. Its proprietary ATTOBODY platform builds small-format, biparatopic nanobody medicines with ultra-high (picomolar) affinity, tunable half-life and fast tissue penetration - engineered to hit multiple disease pathways at once. Lead programs ATTO-1310 (anti-IL-31) and ATTO-3712 (IL-13 x IL-31 bispecific) target chronic pruritus and atopic dermatitis. Founded in 2023 out of an Alamar Biosciences and Frazier Life Sciences incubation, the company has raised roughly $255M across Series A through C.
Beacon AI
Beacon AI builds an AI copilot for professional pilots, combining an in-cockpit assistant called Murdock with a data platform called Lighthouse to help commercial and military aviators manage checklists, routing, fatigue, and complex missions more safely.
Siolta Therapeutics
Siolta Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company spun out of UCSF that develops defined-consortia live biotherapeutic products to prevent and treat diseases rooted in a disrupted microbiome. Its lead program, STMC-103H, is an oral multi-strain therapy aimed at preventing atopic diseases such as atopic dermatitis and food allergy in newborns, built on the company's proprietary Precision Symbiotics Platform.
TELO Trucks
TELO Trucks is a San Carlos, California EV startup building the MT1, a compact all-electric pickup that packs the bed length and towing muscle of a mid-size truck into the road footprint of a two-door MINI Cooper. Founded in 2022 by Jason Marks, Forrest North, and designer Yves Behar, the company argues that American trucks got needlessly huge and that cities deserve a five-seat, five-foot-bed pickup that parks anywhere. With 12,000-plus preorders and a $20M Series A backed by Tesla co-founder Marc Tarpenning and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, TELO is targeting first deliveries by the end of 2026.
Ryan Swoboda
Ryan Swoboda is the co-founder and CEO of NAVAN Technologies, a San Carlos, California biotech commercializing NanoStraw, a non-viral platform that pokes microscopic hollow tubes into living cells to deliver DNA, mRNA, and proteins without killing them. He spun the technology out of Stanford's Melosh Group in 2017 while finishing his graduate research, holds inventor status on early NanoStraw patents, and ran the company's NSF STTR Phase II grant before becoming CEO in 2019. A first-generation college graduate, he splits his energy between scaling a deep-tech delivery platform for cell and gene therapy and running science demos for low-income kids.
Aetherflux
Aetherflux is a San Carlos, California space and energy startup founded in 2024 by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt. It is building a constellation of small low-earth-orbit satellites that collect sunlight in space and beam the energy back to compact ground stations on Earth using infrared lasers rather than the giant geostationary microwave platforms imagined by earlier space-solar concepts. Backed by a $50 million Series A and early defense funding, the company aims to deliver electricity to places the grid cannot reach, beginning with forward operating bases, remote research stations, and disaster zones, and planned a first in-orbit power-beaming demonstration for 2026.
Arda Therapeutics
Arda Therapeutics is a San Carlos, California biotech building precision biologics that eliminate the specific cells driving chronic disease rather than tinkering with the proteins those cells produce. Using a single-cell data discovery engine, Arda maps disease-specific cell states, pinpoints their surface markers, and designs targeted therapies that deplete only the harmful cells while sparing healthy tissue. Founded in 2021 by former Calico scientist Adam Freund, the company is applying lessons from oncology to fibrosis, autoimmune, and metabolic disease, backed by a $43M Series A led by a16z Bio + Health.
Baiju Bhatt
Baiju Bhatt co-founded Robinhood, the zero-commission trading app that put stock buying on a phone screen and made him one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the US. In 2024 he walked away from finance to chase the idea he grew up with: power and machines in orbit. His company, founded as Aetherflux and rebranded in 2026 as Cowboy Space Corporation, started by trying to beam solar energy to Earth with infrared lasers and has since aimed higher - building rockets and AI data centers that live in low Earth orbit. The son of a NASA scientist, Bhatt is a physicist and self-taught product designer who keeps picking old, stubborn problems and bringing capitalism to them.
Ritu Narayan
Ritu Narayan is the founder and CEO of Zūm, the Redwood City company rebuilding the United States' largest mass transit system: the yellow school bus. After 15 years as a product leader at eBay, Yahoo, Oracle and IBM, she left to fix the unreliable rides she was juggling for her own kids. Today Zūm runs electric school bus fleets for more than 4,000 schools, deployed the nation's first all-electric district fleet in Oakland with vehicle-to-grid technology, and has raised about $577 million.
Robust.AI
Robust.AI builds collaborative mobile robots for warehouses and factories. Its flagship Carter robot pairs an AI-driven 'cognitive engine' with a force-sensitive handlebar so workers can grab it, push it, redirect it, and let it run autonomously the rest of the time. Founded in 2019 by a who's-who of robotics and AI - Rodney Brooks (iRobot, Rethink), Gary Marcus, Anthony Jules, Henrik Christensen, and Mohamed Amer - the company has raised about $42.5M and is rolling Carter into DHL Supply Chain sites across the Americas.