Don Vaughn, Ph.D. is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ampa Health, a Palo Alto-based neurotechnology company building FDA-cleared portable TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) devices that compress 36 days of depression treatment into a single day. A Stanford-educated physicist turned UCLA neuroscientist, Vaughn has built a career at the intersection of brain science, machine learning, and accessibility - detoured, notably, through a DJ career that landed him a #28 iTunes Dance chart hit featuring Nick Lachey. His TEDx talk on neurohacking has surpassed one million views. Ampa raised an oversubscribed $8.5M pre-A round in October 2025, achieved FDA clearance for its Ampa One device in February 2025, and is targeting 5,000 patient remissions by end of 2026 - with a long-term audacious goal of a billion remissions in ten years.
Joseph Semrai is a Thiel Fellow and serial AI builder who dropped out of Stanford at 20 to found Context, the world's first AI-native office suite. Context raised $11M in seed funding at a $70M valuation from Lux Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, and General Catalyst, and launched to automate an estimated 2.5 trillion hours of annual knowledge work. Before Context, Semrai built Friday - the world's first internet-connected LLM chatbot (later acquired by Andi Search) - and RealityGPT, a wearable GPT-4 device, as a Stanford freshman. He is known for assembling elite engineering teams and building AI products that reach millions of users.
Laurence Allen is the co-founder and CEO of Terranova, a Berkeley-based startup building autonomous terraforming robots that literally lift flood-prone land out of harm's way by injecting wood waste slurry deep underground. A UC Berkeley Mechanical Engineering graduate (Class of 2024) who dreamed up the idea during a 2021 SpaceX internship, Allen launched the company - originally called Levitree - to save his own hometown of San Rafael, California, which floods to waist depth several times a decade. Terranova raised a $7M seed round in 2025 at a $25.1M valuation led by Congruent Ventures and Outlander, and can lift one acre of land by one foot per day at a fraction of the cost of traditional seawalls.
Luke Wilson is the CEO and co-founder of ManageXR, the leading device management platform for enterprise XR (extended reality) deployments. A Stanford computer science graduate who designed and taught one of the university's first VR development courses as an undergraduate, Wilson built ManageXR out of a real operational problem: while deploying thousands of VR headsets to children's hospitals across the United States through his earlier venture Mighty Immersion, he found no viable management solution existed at scale. That gap became ManageXR, which raised a $4M seed round led by Rally Ventures in December 2021 and now serves 100+ enterprise customers across healthcare, training, education, and retail verticals.
Lily Clifford is the CEO and co-founder of Rime, a San Francisco-based voice AI company building enterprise-grade text-to-speech models with a linguistic edge. A Stanford NLP PhD dropout with a background in sociophonetics, she left academia in 2023 to prove that AI voices could sound like a friend rather than a voice actor. Rime now powers over 100 million phone conversations monthly for brands like Domino's and Wingstop, having raised $8.6M in total funding. Her counterintuitive thesis - that slightly 'bored' voices outperform perfectly polished ones - has become the foundation of a fast-growing enterprise voice platform.
Santhosh Purathepparambil is Co-Founder and Chief AI Scientist at Discern Security, an AI-native security policy management platform he co-founded in 2023 alongside Sai Venkataraman and Rohan Puri. A Stanford School of Engineering alumnus, he previously served as Sr. Director of Engineering at McAfee, co-founded SecurityAdvisor (acquired by KnowBe4 in 2021 - the company that created the Human Detection and Response category), and was VP of Product Strategy at KnowBe4. At Discern, he architects AI agents that help Fortune 500 companies continuously monitor, assess, and optimize their security posture at machine speed, backed by $3M in seed funding from BoldCap, WestWave Capital, Cyber Mentor Fund, and Security Syndicate.
Tarun Gaur is the Founder and CEO of qikfox Cybersecurity Systems, a San Mateo-based startup building what it calls the world's first browser with integrated decentralized identity and quantum-resistant cryptography. With 24+ years spanning Microsoft, Deloitte, and HP - and one successful exit (Tringapps, 500 employees, acquired 2018) - Gaur launched qikfox in 2019 after his mother was scammed online. Backed by Tim Draper with $1.1M in seed funding, qikfox charges $180/year for an invite-only premium browser targeting everyday consumers who want safety, security, and privacy baked into the foundation - not bolted on as an afterthought.