self-driving
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Joseph Burke
Joseph Burke is the co-founder and CEO of Ottometric, a Waltham, Massachusetts software company that automates the validation of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous-vehicle software. An engineer by training who entered the ADAS field in 2010 building radar and blind-spot detection for an airbag maker, Burke started Ottometric in 2019 to attack a brutal industry problem: validating a single vehicle model can cost automakers over $100 million and take more than a year. Ottometric's platform uses proprietary data-distillation technology to turn oceans of raw sensor data into structured safety insights, cutting validation cost and time by more than half. The company has raised roughly $14.9 million, including a $10 million Series A in April 2025.
Matthew Carey
Matthew Carey is the co-founder and CEO of Teradar, a Boston deep-tech company building a solid-state automotive sensor that sees in the terahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum, the sliver between microwaves and infrared. His pitch is blunt: combine radar's ability to punch through fog and rain with lidar's crisp resolution, then make it cheap enough to bolt onto a Ford Focus. After a friend died in a car crash that no existing sensor could have prevented, Carey teamed with terahertz specialist Gregory Charvat and chip architect Nicholas Saiz in 2020. In November 2025 the company left stealth with a $150 million Series B and claims to be validating its tech with five global automakers.
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.
Peter McKee
Peter McKee is the co-founder and CEO of Aeqium, a San Francisco compensation-management platform that pulls HR and finance teams out of spreadsheet chaos and into a controlled, data-driven system for planning salaries, bonuses, equity, and benefits. An MIT-trained engineer who led self-driving rider experience at Uber and was an early backend engineering manager at Braze, McKee also served as a US Army officer running battalion combat-engineer operations in Afghanistan. He started Aeqium in late 2020 to make pay fairer, faster, and less of a fire drill.
Tudor Achim
Tudor Achim is the cofounder and CEO of Harmonic, the Palo Alto AI lab he started in 2023 with Robinhood founder Vlad Tenev to build what they call Mathematical Superintelligence. Harmonic's system Aristotle reached gold-medal performance on the 2025 International Math Olympiad while formally verifying every proof in Lean 4, a feat that put a roughly 40-person startup alongside OpenAI and Google DeepMind. A former competitive pianist turned machine-learning researcher, Achim previously cofounded the self-driving company Helm.ai and worked on ranking at Quora. He argues that mathematics is the route to AI that does not hallucinate.
Kevin McNamara
Kevin McNamara is the Founder and CEO of Parallel Domain, a San Francisco-based synthetic data and simulation platform that has raised $43.9M to power the next generation of AI perception systems. With a rare career arc spanning Pixar's animation pipeline, Microsoft's Xbox game studios, and Apple's secretive autonomous systems group, McNamara distilled a career of building virtual worlds into a platform that lets autonomous vehicle, drone, and robotics companies train their AI on infinite synthetic scenarios - accelerating ML development cycles by over 180x compared to real-world data collection.
Raymond Wang
Raymond Wang is the Co-Founder and CEO of AeroVect, a Silicon Valley startup building AI-powered autonomous driving systems for airport ground support equipment. A Harvard computer science graduate (Class of 2020) who grew up in Vancouver, Canada, Wang came to aviation obsession early - as a high school student he won the $75,000 Gordon E. Moore Award at the 2015 Intel ISEF for an invention that reduced pathogen transmission on aircraft by 55x, and later gave a TED Talk on the subject. At Harvard he co-founded Civology (YC W20) before pivoting to AeroVect, where he and co-founder Eugenio Donati built the world's largest airside driving dataset and deployed autonomous tractor systems at major hubs including Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson and Dubai International. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 (Manufacturing & Industry, 2022), Wang is reshaping the last 500 feet of global logistics - the chaotic tarmac - with self-driving software built from scratch for the airport environment.
Jared Friedman
Jared Friedman is Managing Director of Software at Y Combinator, one of the world's most influential startup accelerators. A Harvard dropout, he co-founded Scribd - one of YC's earliest bets - and grew it to 80M+ users as CTO before joining YC as a partner in 2015. He has read over 12,000 startup applications, advised 20+ YC unicorns, and championed hard tech, biotech, and AI at YC. In 2024 he became one of the loudest voices on vertical AI agents being '10X bigger than SaaS.' He spends roughly 4% of his waking hours in Waymo robotaxis, which he uses as a mobile office.