Founded in 1927 to keep radios from frying, Littelfuse now makes the fuses, semiconductors and sensors that quietly protect everything from EV chargers to data centers - a $2.4 billion business built on parts most people never see.
Everyone chasing smart-building glory wanted to control the thermostat. Microshare went after the mousetrap, the toilet paper roll, and the mop - and built a business on the parts of a building nobody wants to think about.
Dwyer Instruments has been making the little pressure gauges bolted to industrial walls since 1931. In 2022 it swallowed OMEGA Engineering - a company twice its public profile - and became a measurement conglomerate hiding in plain sight.
It is one of the largest companies most people have never heard of - the connector and sensor maker behind your car, your factory floor, and the AI data centers everyone else is busy hyping.
Emerson spent a century making the machinery of modern life. Now it is assembling something harder to see: the digital nervous system for factories, power grids and process plants.
After spinning off aerospace and advanced materials, Honeywell is smaller, sharper and focused on one difficult job: teaching the physical world to run with less waste, fewer surprises and more autonomy.
Overdrive IOT is a Singapore-headquartered industrial IoT company that connects and monitors physical assets - vehicles, equipment, facilities and people - in real time on a single cloud platform. Founded in 2015 by Aston Chia and Zen Chin, it uses a mix of sensors, connectivity technologies and mesh networking to automate data sensing, then turns that data into tracking, alerting and command-centre visualisation for clients across aviation, logistics, construction and public services in Asia. Customers include Changi Airport, Sentosa, NTU, FedEx and Singapore's Ministry of Manpower. The company raised a US$2.9M Series A from Tin Men Capital.
Bulzi, Inc. (styled Bulzī, pronounced 'bulls-eye') is a dual-use technology company that uses edge-AI and Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to deliver situational awareness, security, and safety solutions. Originally built to measure out-of-home advertising audiences by passively detecting nearby mobile devices, Bulzi adapted its RF-sensing platform for defense and public-safety missions with roughly $2M in SBIR funding from the U.S. Air Force and Army. Its products span passive C5ISR sensing (SAFER), base access control (z-BASE), and medical-grade vital-signs monitoring (BioSCOUT), serving warfighters and first responders alongside commercial advertising customers.
sensiBel is a Norwegian semiconductor company that makes optical MEMS microphones - tiny chip-scale devices that use a laser and photodetector to sense a diaphragm's motion instead of the electrical (capacitive) method used in almost every microphone for the past century. Its flagship SBM100B is billed as the world's first production optical MEMS microphone, delivering studio-grade specs (80 dBA SNR, 146 dB acoustic overload point, 132 dB dynamic range) in a package small enough for earbuds, laptops and microphone arrays. Spun out of Norwegian research institute SINTEF in 2017, sensiBel sells to audio, consumer-electronics and pro-audio manufacturers and counts Sennheiser among its investors.
Loadstar Sensors is a Fremont, California maker of digital force and weight sensors that invented the world's first USB load cell. Its capacitive load cells, wireless interfaces and companion software let engineers plug a sensor into a PC, phone or the cloud and read forces in seconds - no signal-conditioning expertise required. Founded in 2003 by Wharton MBA Div Harish, the company says it has served more than 10,000 customers across 85+ countries and holds 20+ patents, and it manufactures in the US.
Earth Force Technologies is a San Francisco climate-tech company modernizing wildfire prevention. It builds precision-forestry sensors, in-cabin tablets, and a web portal that give crews real-time, tree-level guidance during fuel-treatment work and let administrators oversee far more acres from a desk. By combining teleoperated machinery, jobsite connectivity, and automated reporting, the company aims to make landscape-scale forest treatments faster, safer, and cheaper - so states, federal agencies, and conservation districts can reduce catastrophic fire risk at the pace the crisis demands.
Justin Dawe is the founder and CEO of Earth Force Technologies, a San Francisco climate-tech company building in-cabin sensor tablets and a web portal that give forestry operators real-time, tree-level guidance for wildfire prevention and forest restoration. A Stanford-trained engineer and Harvard MBA, he has spent more than two decades in climate and mobility ventures, including roles as CEO of Scoot Networks, VP of New Ventures at Bird, and founding CEO of C12 Energy. Earth Force has raised about $8.6M in seed funding from BOLD Capital Partners, Alley Robotics Ventures, and others.
Matter Intelligence is a remote sensing and AI company building the world's first sub-meter hyperspectral and thermal satellite sensors paired with a foundational 'Large World Model' that lets machines understand the physical world at a molecular level. Founded by former NASA JPL engineers, the El Segundo startup emerged from stealth in October 2024 with $12M in seed funding to deploy sensors across satellites, drones, and aircraft for agriculture, defense, energy, and environmental monitoring.
TDK InvenSense designs the tiny MEMS sensors that let machines feel the physical world - motion, sound, pressure and ultrasound. Founded in San Jose in 2003 and acquired by Japan's TDK Corporation in 2017, it pioneered the integrated 6-axis IMU and ships motion, microphone and ultrasonic sensors into smartphones, wearables, drones, cars, robots and industrial systems. Its work pairs CMOS-MEMS hardware with proprietary fusion firmware and increasingly edge AI, turning raw physics into usable signals for billions of devices.
ACEINNA is a Massachusetts-based MEMS sensor company building high-performance, low-cost inertial measurement units (IMUs), GNSS/RTK precision-navigation systems, current sensors, and flow sensors. Spun out of MEMSIC in 2017 with a roughly $50M investment, ACEINNA is best known for its open-source OpenIMU platform and for shipping centimeter-accurate positioning solutions for autonomous vehicles and ADAS at a fraction of the price of legacy systems.
Artis, LLC (Advanced Real-Time Information Systems) is a Herndon, Virginia defense and technology developer that builds systems for problems measured in microseconds. Founded in 1999 by Keith Brendley, the company is best known for active protection systems for military vehicles - Iron Curtain and its third-generation successor, Sentinel - that detect and defeat incoming rockets, missiles and drone-borne threats in fractions of a second. Beyond defense, Artis applies its high-speed sensing and parallel-processing work to highway worker safety, 3D imaging and pedestrian monitoring.
BrightAI is a Palo Alto-based physical AI company building Stateful OS, a platform that pairs edge sensors, robots, and multimodal AI models to monitor, inspect, and maintain critical infrastructure - pipes, power grids, HVAC systems, and more. Co-founded in 2019 by SmartThings creator Alex Hawkinson, the company crossed $80M in revenue while bootstrapped before raising a $51M Series A in July 2025.

Calyx (formerly BioInspira) is a Berkeley-based agtech company that combines AI-powered computer vision with proprietary phage-based biosensors to help poultry farmers monitor flock weight, environmental conditions, and gas levels in real time. Founded in 2014 by UC Berkeley bioengineering alumni, the company's platform integrates overhead cameras, multi-gas sensors, and cloud analytics to give broiler producers continuous, data-driven visibility into flock health and harvest timing — with 98.4% accuracy in predicting chicken weight across more than 17 million validated birds.
Seyond (formerly Innovusion) is a Sunnyvale-based maker of image-grade LiDAR sensors and perception software for autonomous vehicles, ADAS, smart infrastructure, robotics and industrial applications. Best known as the long-range LiDAR supplier behind NIO's ET7, ET5 and ES7, the company has shipped more than 250,000 Falcon units and is pushing solid-state designs into mass production.
Joseph Bousaba is the CEO of InvenSense and General Manager of TDK Corporation's MEMS Sensors Business Group, leading a global powerhouse in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) sensing solutions. With over 18 years of senior leadership in the semiconductor industry - spanning Philips Semiconductors, Qualcomm Atheros, and Qualcomm - he stepped into the top role at InvenSense in October 2024, bringing a track record of building multi-hundred-million-dollar businesses at the intersection of motion, sound, and AI-driven sensing.
Vishnu Sridhar is the Cofounder and CEO of Matter Intelligence, a deep-tech startup building ultraspectral satellite sensors and geospatial AI to map the planet at molecular resolution. A Queens-raised Indian American engineer, Sridhar spent years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as Cognizant Engineer for the SuperCam instrument aboard the Mars Perseverance rover and as Flight Director for the Opportunity rover before pivoting to commercialize the same sensor physics for Earth. Matter Intelligence emerged from stealth in October 2024 with $12M in seed funding backed by Lowercarbon Capital, Toyota Ventures, and Mark Cuban, building toward EARTH-1, a satellite that will deliver more than 500x the information density of existing sensors.
Junwei Bao is the co-founder and CEO of Seyond (formerly Innovusion), a Silicon Valley-founded LiDAR company that went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2025. With a PhD in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley and a physics background from Peking University, Bao spent nearly two decades building precision optical sensors before pivoting to autonomous-driving hardware. He co-founded Timbre Technologies - the company that invented OCD (optical critical dimension) scatterometry, a kind of microscale LiDAR for semiconductors - then led Baidu's autonomous driving hardware division before founding Innovusion in 2016. Under his leadership, Seyond delivered 230,000 automotive-grade LiDAR units in 2024 and holds a 12.8% global ADAS LiDAR market share, ranking fourth worldwide.