smart-infrastructure
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The Baltimore Firm That Waits for the Boring Part
For 35 years, a growth-equity shop outside Baltimore has skipped the seed-stage lottery and bought into companies once they already work - then rolled up its sleeves.
Siemens
The company Werner von Siemens started with a telegraph in 1847 now wants to be the operating system for the physical world - one factory, train, and power grid at a time.
PTS
PTS is a global, independent, employee-owned technology consultancy that designs the digital nervous system of buildings - connecting people, technology and space across workplaces, data centres, campuses and smart infrastructure. Founded in 1983 and headquartered in London, PTS advises on everything from audio-visual and networks to cyber and physical security, helping organisations transform their real estate through technology while improving user experience, wellbeing and sustainability.
Nathan Hanks
Nathan Hanks is the co-founder of BrightAI, a physical AI platform company that deploys IoT sensors and edge AI to monitor and optimize critical infrastructure for enterprises. Previously, he co-founded ReachLocal, scaling it to $500M in annual revenue and 2,200 employees before its NASDAQ IPO in 2010 and subsequent acquisition by Gannett in 2016. He also founded Music Audience Exchange (MAX), a music sponsorship technology platform. At BrightAI, Hanks and his team bootstrapped the company to $80M in revenue before raising a $15M seed round in November 2024 and a $51M Series A in July 2025, with the company now surpassing $100M in annual revenue and 250,000+ AI endpoints deployed.
Seyond
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.
Junwei Bao
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.