san-jose-startup
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Stephen Klein
Stephen Klein is the co-founder and CEO of Hyphen, a San Jose food-robotics company that builds the automated Makeline - a hybrid manual-and-robotic assembly system that runs beneath the counter to build bowls and plates at up to 350 meals per hour. A self-described foodservice fanatic since childhood, Klein started a text-to-order frozen yogurt business in college, helped scale Instacart in its early days, and ran operations at robotic coffee bar Cafe X before launching Hyphen in 2020 with co-founder Daniel Fukuba. Hyphen has since drawn investment from Tiger Global, Chipotle and Cava and deployed systems with chains and foodservice operators across the country.
Tarique Mustafa
Tarique Mustafa is a Silicon Valley cybersecurity founder, engineer and AI researcher who serves as CEO, CTO and founder of Chorology, Inc., a San Jose company applying deep AI to automate data discovery, classification, mapping and compliance enforcement for enterprises. A serial entrepreneur with two prior startups that ended in acquisitions, he previously founded GhangorCloud, a pioneer of fourth-generation data leak prevention, and held senior roles at Symantec, MCI WorldCom and others. He holds dual master's degrees and did PhD research in AI at USC, and holds multiple patents in deep AI.
B GARAGE
B GARAGE builds fully autonomous drones and inventory-management software that scan warehouse shelves without pilots, added infrastructure, or pre-mapped facilities, helping logistics operators count inventory faster and cover labor shortages in remote distribution centers.
Chorology, Inc.
Chorology, Inc. is a San Jose-based data security and compliance startup that uses a Deep-AI 'knowledge encoding' engine - rather than conventional machine learning - to automatically discover, classify, and map an enterprise's sensitive data across structured and unstructured repositories. Its flagship platform, CAPE (Compliance and Posture Enforcer), aims to give organizations a continuous, mandate-agnostic view of where regulated data lives so they can enforce data security posture and meet frameworks like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. Founded by serial cybersecurity entrepreneur Tarique Mustafa, the company emerged from stealth in July 2024 with $9M in funding and a roster of early Fortune 500 users.
Ethernovia
Ethernovia is a San Jose semiconductor company building a new class of high-performance automotive and edge packet processors, Ethernet PHY transceivers and switches in 7nm. Its chips act as the deterministic 'nervous system' for software-defined vehicles and physical-AI machines, scaling from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps to move sensor and compute data with low latency and low power. Founded in 2018 by veterans of Aquantia, the company has raised more than $150 million from backers including Porsche SE, Qualcomm Ventures and AMD Ventures.
Duet
Duet is a San Jose-based software company that builds an all-in-one dispatching, scheduling, and billing platform for non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) providers. Founded by Jing Zhu, the company started as a neighborhood carpooling app and pivoted into medical transportation, where it now helps ambulatory, wheelchair, and stretcher fleets of every size handle booking, real-time tracking, driver management, billing, and broker integration. Duet pairs its software with hands-on support - training, marketing, market research, and back-office staffing - aimed at helping small and growing NEMT operators get off the ground and scale.
Menos AI
Menos AI is a San Jose-based, AI-native fintech building institutional-grade artificial intelligence for hedge funds and asset managers. Founded in 2024 by a team of quant and AI practitioners, its flagship product Sonar is an intelligent research agent that uses proprietary Alpha Signal Extraction technology to surface timely, differentiated investment ideas from the flood of financial data. The company raised a $5.2M oversubscribed seed round in 2025 and positions its platform as an augmentation layer for investment teams - secure, auditable, and designed to integrate with existing workflows rather than replace the humans who use it.
Opsin
Opsin is a San Jose-based enterprise AI security company that helps organizations adopt generative AI tools like Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT Enterprise, Claude, and Google Gemini without leaking sensitive data. Its platform continuously maps AI agents across the enterprise, assesses what data those agents can surface, detects oversharing and policy violations in real time, and remediates misconfigurations - giving security, GRC, and legal teams visibility and control within about 24 hours of a one-click API integration.
Willy Halim
Willy Halim is a chemical engineer and the founder of BANIQL, a San Jose climate-tech startup he started in his backyard in 2021 to refine nickel and cobalt without the heat, pressure, and toxic waste of conventional mining. Trained at UC Berkeley and Cornell and seasoned as a battery engineer in Silicon Valley, he built a low-temperature, atmospheric-pressure chemical process that BANIQL says uses about 80% less energy than industry-standard high-pressure acid leaching, produces net-zero toxic waste, and turns leftovers into fertilizer and construction material. The company raised a $1.6M seed round led by BEENEXT in 2024 and added 500 Global and Genesia Ventures in 2025, aiming first at Indonesia, which holds roughly a quarter of the world's nickel.