santa-clara-university
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Hideo Esaka Sells the Data That Runs Every Car You Never Think About
He trained in physics and psychology, then spent 25 years learning to explain complicated software to the people who buy it. At Solera, the product is the data quietly steering the auto and insurance industries.
Sergey Savastiouk
Sergey Savastiouk, Ph.D., is the founder and CEO of Tickeron, a Reno-based platform that pairs artificial intelligence with plain-language explanation to give self-directed investors and advisors trading signals, pattern recognition, and automated 'AI robots.' A former applied-mathematics professor at Santa Clara University with two prior startups behind him, he turned the losses of the 2008 crisis into a mission to hand retail investors the kind of algorithmic tools once reserved for institutions.
Samantha Malone
Samantha Malone is Chief of Staff to the CEO at Farther, the New York-based wealthtech that turned unicorn in early 2026 on the back of a $150M Series D led by General Atlantic. She joined roughly five months before the round closed - her first startup - after an MBA at Chicago Booth and stints at McKinsey, Skydio, GoDaddy, and Apple's global finance projects. A Bay Area kid who commuted through Santa Clara's business school a year early, she is the person building the deck, running the room, and stitching the operating rhythm as Farther scales past $23B in recruited assets.
Kevin Conley
Kevin Conley is the CEO of Applied Brain Research (ABR), the Waterloo-based startup commercializing brain-inspired, ultra-low-power chips for edge AI. A 30-plus-year semiconductor veteran, he spent more than two decades at SanDisk - rising to Senior Vice President and CTO - then led Everspin Technologies as President and CEO. He is named on 90+ patents covering non-volatile memory architecture and management.
Mohammad Musa
Mohammad Musa is the founder and CEO of Deepen AI, a San Jose company building the data engine for Physical AI - tools and managed services that handle collection, calibration, annotation, validation, and synthetic data for autonomous vehicles and robotics. A Santa Clara University-trained computer engineer who once ran launch readiness for Google Apps, Musa co-founded Deepen in 2017 and has spent nearly a decade arguing that machines, like people, need many senses working together to move safely through the world. He also teaches product management at his alma mater.
Eduardo Fonseca
Eduardo Fonseca is the CEO of XCath, a Houston- and Pangyo-based medtech company building endovascular robotic systems and steerable guidewires to treat stroke and other cerebrovascular conditions. A former Panamanian ambassador to the UAE and Saudi Arabia turned investor and operator, he joined the XCath board in 2019 and took the helm in 2023, also serving as interim CEO of sister company EndoQuest Robotics. Under his leadership XCath has logged a string of world firsts, including the first public remote mechanical thrombectomy demonstration and, in 2026, the world's first remote robotic intervention in a stroke patient.
James DeMuth
James DeMuth is the co-founder and CEO of Seurat Technologies, a Wilmington, Massachusetts metal additive manufacturing company chasing a single audacious goal: printing metal parts fast and cheap enough to compete with mass production, then planting factories next to the customers who need them. He co-invented Seurat's Area Printing technology while working on laser fusion research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, holds a hand in roughly 145 patents, and has raised more than $181 million to reshore manufacturing and cut carbon out of how metal gets made.
Jim Douglas
Jim Douglas is a five-time CEO and seasoned enterprise technology executive now leading Luciq (formerly Instabug) as it pioneers the category of Agentic Mobile Observability. With over 30 years of executive experience — including transforming Wind River from a flat-growth embedded software company into a half-billion-dollar enterprise — Douglas brings a rare combination of go-to-market expertise and operational scale to a startup that counts DoorDash, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Disney among its customers. Appointed CEO in February 2025, he oversaw Instabug's September 2025 rebrand to Luciq.ai, signaling a shift from passive monitoring to AI agents that autonomously detect, diagnose, and fix mobile app issues.
Divakar Tantravahi
Divakar Tantravahi is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Innominds, a San Jose-based AI-first digital product engineering company with 1,400 employees and $80M in annual revenue. Starting his career at Visakhapatnam Steel Plant in 1987, he moved through Informix and a startup called Everypath before founding Innominds in 2003. Under his leadership, Innominds has become a full-cycle product engineering partner helping technology companies build products that land in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Recognized for his employee-centric leadership style, Tantravahi was named one of India's Best Leaders in Times of Crisis 2021 by Great Place to Work India and received ET Now's 'CEO with HR Orientation' Award in 2019.
Saleel Awsare
Saleel Awsare is President and CEO of Lantronix, the Irvine, California-based provider of compute, connect and management solutions for the intelligent edge. He took the top job in November 2023 after a quarter-century run that included senior leadership posts at Synaptics, Conexant Systems and Nuvoton Technology Corporation America. Under his watch, Lantronix has been repositioning from a networking-hardware vendor into a full-stack edge-AI and 'Physical AI' systems player, with drone, smart-city and industrial IoT deployments leading the pivot.