Austin Russell founded Luminar Technologies at 16, built lidar hardware in his parents' garage, dropped out of Stanford after three months on a Thiel Fellowship, and briefly became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at 25 when Luminar went public in December 2020. His company's 1550nm lidar sensors were integrated into production vehicles from Volvo and Mercedes-Benz, representing a rare case of autonomous vehicle hardware reaching mass-market cars. After a highly publicized attempt to acquire Forbes magazine fell through in 2023, Russell resigned as Luminar's CEO in May 2025 following a board ethics inquiry, and the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2025.
Dan Ryan is the CEO and Co-Founder of VergeSense, the leading occupancy intelligence platform transforming how global enterprises manage their real estate. A serial entrepreneur with a track record in hardware-software integration, Ryan previously co-founded ByteLight (LED-based indoor positioning, acquired by Acuity Brands in 2015) before launching VergeSense in 2017 through Y Combinator. Under his leadership, VergeSense has grown to serve 200+ Fortune 500 companies across 140 million square feet in 50+ countries, raising $82.6 million including a $60M Series C in 2021. Ryan is based in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area and is recognized as a pioneer at the intersection of physical and digital worlds, building AI-powered tools that help companies make data-driven decisions about office space, sustainability, and hybrid work strategy.
Andrew Farah is the CEO and co-founder of Density, a San Francisco-based company that builds anonymous, privacy-first sensors to measure how physical spaces are actually used. What started in 2014 as a fix for a coffee shop line problem in upstate New York has grown into a $1B+ enterprise used by Fortune 500 companies across 1.25 billion square feet globally. Farah has raised over $217 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, and Altimeter Capital, and has built Density into what he calls 'Google Analytics for the built world.'
Timo Korpela is CEO of Haltian Inc. and VP of Sales for North America at Haltian, the Finnish IoT pioneer behind the Thingsee sensor platform and the 'Empathic Building' concept. Raised under the Northern Lights in Finnish Lapland and educated at Helsinki University of Technology, he bridges the precision of Nordic engineering with the deal-making culture of Silicon Valley. Operating from Palo Alto, he drives Haltian's North American growth - a market that accounts for roughly a third of the company's revenue - while negotiating global partnerships with Cisco, Microsoft, and healthcare systems across three continents.
Cédric Hutchings is a French serial entrepreneur and engineer who has spent two decades turning sensors into systems that change how the physical world gets understood. He co-founded Withings in 2008, building one of the first connected health companies from scratch to a €170M Nokia acquisition, then pivoted to co-found Outsight in 2019 - a Paris-based spatial intelligence company deploying 3D LiDAR software in airports, rail stations, and smart cities worldwide. Today, Outsight holds a $17.2M contract with Dallas Fort Worth Airport for the world's largest 3D LiDAR deployment, with installations at Charles de Gaulle and Rome Fiumicino airports among its growing portfolio.