smart-cities
(28)
Anahita Poonegar Makes Trust Legible
A Cornell-trained planner became the translator, marketer, and operator behind Intertrust's shift from digital rights to data governance - while building its India business from the ground up.
The Modem That Refuses to Stay Put: Hojun Kim’s Bet on Software-Defined Roads
After years designing chips, Hojun Kim is trying to make road infrastructure age more like software: upgradeable, interoperable and ready for the next radio standard.
Nikhil Bharadwaj Put the Cloud on Notice
The Xeal co-founder learned EV charging’s least glamorous lesson in concrete garages: if the network disappears, the product cannot. His answer was to move the essential work closer to the plug.
Chuan Yu Is Designing the City From the Chassis Up
The architect behind PIX Moving does not begin with the car. He begins with the street, the neighborhood, and a stubborn question: what if useful spaces could come to us?
Leila Dillon
Leila Dillon has built a career explaining the systems most people notice only when they fail - from sensor-equipped city bins to the energy infrastructure beneath schools, governments and businesses.
Chirag Jain
Chirag Jain is the co-founder and CEO of Get My Parking, a smart parking technology company he started in 2015 with Rasik Pansare after the two met on the Jagriti Yatra train journey across India. An IIT Madras graduate who spent two years in the automotive industry, Jain set out to digitize the largely unorganized parking sector with affordable, white-labeled, IoT-driven software. Under his leadership Get My Parking has grown to serve tens of millions of parking transactions across more than a dozen countries, raised multiple rounds of venture funding, and pushed into AI-powered products like license plate recognition and the AVA voice support agent. He was named to Business World's Disrupt 40 Under 40 in 2017.
Eyal Feder-Levy
Eyal Feder-Levy is the co-founder and CEO of Zencity, a govtech company that uses AI to turn millions of resident interactions into actionable insight for local governments. An urban planner by training who came up through nonprofit community work in South Tel Aviv, he started Zencity in 2015 to give cities a routine 'finger on the pulse' of their communities. Under his leadership the company has raised roughly $93M, works across six countries, and serves hundreds of government agencies reaching hundreds of millions of residents.
Tashinga Musiyazviriyo
Tashinga Musiyazviriyo is the Founder and CEO of The Singular, a Johannesburg-based digital transformation company building purpose-driven IoT, AI, and private 5G network solutions across industries including mining, telecommunications, manufacturing, smart cities, and healthcare. With a career forged inside Ericsson's core network engineering teams and a deep grounding in mobile network design and performance, Tashinga brings both technical precision and entrepreneurial drive to the challenge of connecting Africa's industries to the future.
Chris Foreman
Chris Foreman is the co-founder and CEO of Marketplace.city, a Chicago-based govtech platform that helps local governments find, validate, and buy new technology with the help of real pricing, contract, and outcome data. Before building Marketplace.city, he scaled AvePoint's Americas business from a small team to more than 1,200 employees across 15 countries and launched its public-sector subsidiary, where the company won three straight Microsoft Partner of the Year awards. A Northwestern political science graduate, he has spent 15-plus years in enterprise software and now spends his days trying to drag government buying out of the PDF era.
Nicholas D'Andre
Nicholas D'Andre is the CEO and co-founder of GridMatrix, a San Francisco-founded software company that turns a city's existing traffic cameras and sensors into a real-time, AI-driven nervous system for roads, tunnels, ports and airports. A supply-chain operator turned infrastructure entrepreneur, he spent years buying sensors and RF components at Apple and forecasting demand at Amazon and Google before deciding the bigger problem was the analog infrastructure those devices lived inside. GridMatrix was selected from more than 150 global startups by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and now runs on landmarks like the Lincoln and Holland tunnels and the George Washington Bridge, spotting near-misses, congestion and emissions before they become headlines.
Sam Richardson
Sam Richardson is the CEO of Volley Automation, a robotics and software company that uses AI-enabled automated guided vehicles to densify parking garages, fitting up to twice as many cars in smaller footprints. A former Hamilton College quarterback turned channel-sales and operations leader at companies like Hewlett-Packard, Fellowes Brands and SGS & Co, he now runs Volley from a 35,000-square-foot research and demo facility the company opened in Denver in 2026 after relocating from South San Francisco. Based in Nashville, he is steering robotic parking projects across New York, Tennessee, Florida, California and Massachusetts.
Anthony Chow
Anthony Chow is the CEO and co-founder of igloo (igloohome), a Singapore-built smart access company whose Bluetooth locks open without Wi-Fi using time-sensitive PIN codes. What began as an Airbnb host's annoyance over after-midnight key handoffs became a company that has issued more than 20 million digital credentials, sold locks in 90-plus countries, and even sent a batch of locks to space. A data scientist turned hardware founder, Chow trades on a simple, stubborn idea: a world without keys.
Brian Barlow
Brian Barlow is the co-founder and co-CEO of Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP), the Alphabet spinout that owns, operates, and invests in next-generation energy, mobility, water, and digital infrastructure. He brings three decades of private equity, venture capital, and infrastructure investing - including a stint inside Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs and an early seat at Michael Burry's Scion Capital - to the question of how to fund and build the infrastructure cities actually need. SIP launched in 2020 with a $400 million backing from Google and has since seeded ventures like Renew Home and AMP Robotics.
David Block-Schachter
David Block-Schachter is the Chief Business Officer at Transit, the multimodal trip-planning and fare-payment app used in cities across North America and Europe. A car-free MIT transportation PhD who started his career designing websites for American Express and IBM, he co-founded the microtransit startup Bridj, ran customer technology as CTO of the MBTA, and now helps transit agencies turn rider data into faster buses and simpler fares. His through-line: use technology and data to make public transit work better for everyone.
Georgios Pipelidis
Georgios Pipelidis is the co-founder and CEO of Ariadne, a Munich-born company that turns the anonymous radio signals leaking from smartphones into privacy-first analytics about how people move through airports, stores and stations - no cameras, no apps, no network connection required. A computer scientist with a PhD in artificial intelligence from the Technical University of Munich, he turned an academic project on indoor positioning - one that beat Google, IBM, Samsung, Cisco and Sony at a 2018 global competition - into a company operating sensors in hundreds of locations worldwide, backed by a $7M Series A.
Alain Samaha
Alain Samaha is President & CEO of Teletrac Navman and President of Alternative Energy & Sustainable Fleets at Vontier, bringing over 20 years of technology leadership to the intersection of IoT, AI, and fleet management. A Stanford-trained aeronautical engineer turned enterprise software executive, he previously held senior roles at Trimble including President of the Utilities and Public Administration group. At Teletrac Navman - a global telematics SaaS leader with ~850 employees and $245M in annual revenue - Samaha is steering the company's push into AI-powered fleet safety, multi-energy transition, and a 'single pane of glass' platform vision for fleet operators worldwide.
Keith Southard
Keith Southard runs Allied Telesis, the San Jose-headquartered networking company building switches, routers and software-defined infrastructure used everywhere from US military bases overseas to smart-city deployments. He took over as CEO of Allied Telesis Capital Corporation in 2008 and has stayed at the controls ever since, quietly steering a 1,900-person company through the awkward transition from hardware vendor to network-automation outfit.
Matthew Rosenthal
Matthew Rosenthal is CEO and Co-Founder of SewerAI, the AI-powered platform transforming how cities inspect and manage underground sewer infrastructure. A Carnegie Mellon-trained engineer who worked at Fitbit and founded Centosette (acquired 2010), Rosenthal pivoted into sewer tech after recognizing that one million miles of U.S. pipes were being assessed with 20-year-old software. SewerAI's Pioneer platform and AutoCode AI have now processed over 135 million feet of sewer inspection footage, slashing inspection costs by 40-70% and saving municipalities tens of millions of dollars. In June 2024, Rosenthal closed a $15M Series B led by Innovius Capital, bringing total funding to $18.5M.
Karl Meyer
Karl Meyer is General Partner and Managing Director, Head of Global Portfolio Operations at Digital Alpha, an alternative asset manager focused on digital infrastructure - the backbone of the digital economy spanning next-generation networks, cloud, and IoT/Smart Cities. Bringing two decades of enterprise technology experience from Cisco, Kleiner Perkins, HPE, and Incorta, Meyer joined Digital Alpha in October 2021 to build a world-class operations function and drive measurable value creation across the firm's portfolio companies. He currently serves on the boards of Energybox and PacketFabric, where his enterprise software and go-to-market expertise helps portfolio companies scale into Global 2,000 accounts.
Jim Adler
Jim Adler is the Founder and General Partner of Toyota Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Toyota with $800M+ in assets under management and 90+ portfolio companies. A rocket-engineer-turned-serial-entrepreneur, Adler built the fund from a $100M seed in 2017 into a powerhouse backing frontier technologies in AI, autonomy, robotics, climate tech, and mobility. Known for his 'geek, suit, wonk' identity, he bridges deep technical expertise with sharp investment philosophy, insisting financial returns must precede strategic ones.
Jozsef Kovacs
Jozsef Kovacs was the co-founder and CEO of Commsignia, the world's largest company fully dedicated to Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication technology. Born in Hungary and trained as a computer scientist and PhD researcher in cooperative intelligent transportation systems, he co-founded Commsignia in 2012 alongside fellow researchers from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Under his leadership, Commsignia deployed V2X technology across 130+ intersections in Las Vegas, secured partnerships with Volkswagen, Audi, Ford, and major OEMs, raised $26M+ in venture funding, and expanded to 20+ countries. Kovacs passed away in late 2021, leaving behind a company that continues to lead the global V2X industry.
Marty Sprinzen
Marty Sprinzen is the co-founder and CEO of VANTIQ, a Walnut Creek, California-based platform company building real-time AI orchestration and agentic AI systems for mission-critical environments. A serial entrepreneur with a BSEE from Cooper Union (class of 1970), he previously co-founded Forte Software, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems for over $1 billion in 2000. After a 15-year hiatus spent flying planes, skiing, and sailing a Russian nuclear icebreaker to the North Pole, he returned to found VANTIQ in 2015 with a mission to apply software to the world's toughest challenges - from disaster response and healthcare to smart cities and defense.
David Lu
David Lu is the co-founder and CEO of Clarity Movement Co., a Berkeley-based climate tech company that deploys hyperlocal air quality monitoring networks across 85+ countries. Growing up in smog-choked Shanghai and arriving to California's startling blue skies as a teenager, he turned personal contrast into a global mission. Clarity's tissue-box-sized solar-powered sensors have recorded over 500 million measurements, informed London's low-emission zones, and earned Lu a spot on TIME's 100 Most Influential Climate Leaders of 2025.
Regina Clewlow
Regina Clewlow is a transportation scientist turned CEO who co-founded Populus, the urban curb and mobility management platform that became the operating system for city streets - helping over 100 cities worldwide manage the explosive growth of scooters, bikes, delivery fleets, and autonomous vehicles. Armed with a PhD from MIT and deep research roots at Stanford and UC Berkeley, Clewlow bridged academia and industry to turn GPS data and curb regulations into digital intelligence for cities. Populus was acquired by IPS Group in November 2025, cementing its place as the infrastructure layer between cities and the mobility economy.
Cédric Hutchings
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.
Jay Nath
Jay Nath is Co-CEO and co-founder of Authorium, an AI-powered government procurement and document workflow platform that processes over $50 billion in government transactions. Before Authorium, he served as San Francisco's first Chief Innovation Officer for nearly a decade, where he created landmark programs including Startup in Residence (STIR), Civic Bridge, and Open311 — the nation's first read-write open data standard for 311 systems, adopted by over 50 cities worldwide. Recognized by the Obama White House as a Champion of Change, Nath has spent his career bridging the gap between Silicon Valley agility and the scale of public sector impact.
Whitney Rockley
Whitney Rockley is the co-founder and managing partner of McRock Capital, Canada's leading venture capital firm focused exclusively on Industrial IoT and digital industrial transformation. With over 25 years in venture capital, she made history as the first woman to chair the Canadian Venture Capital & Private Equity Association (CVCA) in its 43-year history and was appointed to the Order of Canada in December 2025 for her pioneering work in venture capital and championing diversity and inclusion across the industry.
Gwendolyn Carpenter
Gwendolyn Carpenter is the Head of Artificial Intelligence Division at the European Investment Bank (EIB), where she defines and executes the Group's AI strategy, builds its enterprise AI platform, and leads EU AI Act compliance efforts. A veteran European policy practitioner, she has shaped digital innovation agendas across smart cities, social innovation research, and cybercrime policy - most recently turning her expertise toward the frontier challenge of governing AI inside one of the world's largest development finance institutions.