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Apurva Shah Builds Worlds Where Robots Can Fail First
After two decades making digital worlds believable, the former Pixar technical leader is using simulation to make machines more dependable in the real one.
Steve Xie
Steve Xie is the founder and CEO of Lightwheel, a physical AI infrastructure company building simulation and synthetic data systems that teach robots to learn and operate in the real world. A physicist by training with a Columbia PhD, he led autonomous driving simulation at Cruise, NVIDIA, and NIO before starting Lightwheel in 2023. The company supplies SimReady 3D assets, egocentric human data, and robot evaluation tools to labs including NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, and Figure, and raised roughly $137.5 million in 2026 to expand its data and evaluation infrastructure.
Duality AI
Duality AI is a San Mateo-based simulation software company behind Falcon, a digital twin platform built on Unreal Engine. Falcon lets engineers create photorealistic, physics-accurate virtual replicas of robots, sensors, and environments, then generate the labeled synthetic data used to train and validate AI vision and autonomy models - closing the gap between simulation and the real world. Founded in 2018 by Pixar graphics veteran Apurva Shah and robotics pioneer Mike Taylor, Duality serves customers including DARPA, the U.S. Army, Honeywell, and P&G.
Lightwheel
Lightwheel is a Physical AI infrastructure company building the data layer that teaches robots to work in the real world. It produces physically accurate SimReady 3D assets, egocentric human demonstration data, and evaluation platforms so robots can learn safely and cheaply in simulation before they are deployed. Founded in 2023 by former autonomous-driving-simulation lead Steve Xie, Lightwheel partners with NVIDIA and supplies simulation assets and synthetic datasets to leading robotics teams.