Skild AI is a Pittsburgh-based robotics company building the Skild Brain, a single general-purpose foundation model designed to control any robot - quadrupeds, humanoids, tabletop arms, mobile manipulators - across many tasks without bespoke retraining. Founded in 2023 by former Carnegie Mellon professors Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta, the company trains on a mix of large-scale simulation, internet video, teleoperation and real-world deployment data. After a $1.4B Series C in January 2026, Skild AI is valued at over $14 billion.
Ling Wu is the founder and CEO of TBCASoft, the Silicon Valley company behind HIVEX, a blockchain-based cross-border payment network that has connected over 1.5 billion mobile payment users worldwide. A mathematician, physicist and engineer by training, Wu spent years at Oracle and BroadVision before betting that the world's telecom carriers - not banks - would become the rails for global digital money. He co-founded the SoftBank-backed Carrier Blockchain Study Group, raised $25M from Naver and SoftBank, and is now pushing regulated stablecoins into instant cross-border settlement through a 2025 partnership with Singapore's StraitsX.
Wag! Group Co. is an American pet-care technology company whose app connects pet parents with a vetted network of independent dog walkers, sitters, trainers and drop-in caregivers across thousands of U.S. cities. Founded in 2015 and now publicly traded (Nasdaq: PET), Wag! has expanded from on-demand dog walks into a broader pet-services platform spanning wellness and pet insurance comparison, premium membership, and pet food and treats.
Albert Wang is the co-founder and CEO of PatPat, a direct-to-consumer children's and family apparel brand he built from a mobile app in 2014 into a global platform serving 21 million customers across 140 countries. A Carnegie Mellon-trained engineer and former Oracle founding member, Wang spotted the gap in affordable, stylish kids' clothing when he and his co-founder Ken Gao both became fathers the same year. PatPat has raised over $465 million in funding, including a $160 million Series D2 from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in 2021, and has pioneered innovations like Go-Glow light-up apparel technology.
Anil Dharni is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sense, a San Francisco-based AI-powered talent engagement platform that serves over 1,000 organizations. Before reshaping how companies hire, he co-founded Funzio, the mobile gaming studio behind 'Crime City' and 'Modern War,' which sold to GREE for $210 million in 2012. At Sense, backed by SoftBank with $106 million raised and a $500M valuation, he is on a mission to humanize the contingent workforce and make candidates feel genuinely valued through AI, automation, and omnichannel communication.
Deepak Diwakar is the Co-Founder and COO of Mindtickle, the AI-powered revenue enablement platform that became a $1.2B unicorn in 2021. An IIT Bombay computer science graduate and former machine learning engineer at PubMatic, Diwakar built Mindtickle's technology infrastructure from the ground up, helping transform how enterprise sales teams learn, practice, and perform. Under his watch, Mindtickle raised $281M in total funding, hit $118M+ in revenue, and earned recognition as a Forrester Wave Leader in Revenue Enablement Platforms.
Guru Hariharan is the Founder and CEO of CommerceIQ, a unicorn-valued AI platform that helps 2,200+ consumer brands - from Nestle to Kellogg's - automate and optimize their retail ecommerce operations across Amazon, Walmart, and other major retailers. A veteran of Amazon and eBay, he co-invented the Amazon Selling Coach, sold his first company Boomerang Commerce's analytics unit to Lowe's in 2019, and pivoted to build CommerceIQ into a $136.6M ARR business by 2024. In May 2025, he launched AllyAI, a suite of agentic AI teammates purpose-built for retail - a product he describes as pioneering the next era of algorithmic commerce.
Larry Liu is the Founder and CEO of Weee!, North America's largest and fastest-growing Asian online grocery platform. Born in Wuhan, China, he came to the US via an Intel engineering role in 2003, earned an MBA from UC Davis in 2008, and launched Weee! in 2015 after noticing Chinese immigrants using WeChat to organize group grocery buys. He built the company from a Bay Area WeChat group into a $4.1 billion unicorn with $1 billion in annual revenue, delivering 1 million orders per month across 40+ states and serving seven ethnic cuisines including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, Indian, and Hispanic communities.
Matt Campbell is the CEO and Co-Founder of Terabase Energy, a Berkeley-based company building the digital and automation platform for utility-scale solar. After 15 years at SunPower working across 200+ projects in 20 countries, he launched Terabase from his basement during the pandemic in 2019 - and within three months had secured an 800 MW project in Qatar. Today, backed by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Breakthrough Energy Ventures with $207M raised, Terabase's Terafab robotic assembly line is deploying solar at 2-minute cycle times, targeting 24/7 autonomous construction and a future where solar hits one cent per kilowatt-hour.
Moawia Eldeeb is the CEO and Co-Founder of Tempo, a San Francisco-based AI-powered home fitness company that raised $316M and uses 3D sensors and computer vision to deliver real-time form correction and personalized training. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, he immigrated to the US at age 9, dropped out of school in 6th grade to work 12-hour shifts at a pizza restaurant, survived homelessness in a Harlem shelter, and put himself through Columbia University by working as a personal trainer - before building one of the most-funded fitness tech startups in history.
Ricardo Amper is the Founder and CEO of Incode Technologies, a San Francisco-based AI-powered identity verification unicorn valued at $1.25 billion. A Mexican-born serial entrepreneur with two prior exits totaling ~$200 million, Amper built Incode from a near-failed social media startup into a global leader in biometric authentication and KYC/AML compliance — processing over 4 billion identity checks for clients including Citi, Nubank, Ford Credit, and government agencies. He is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer contributor, a champion of Gen Z hiring, and the driving force behind Incode's DeepSight deepfake-detection platform.
Terabase Energy is a Berkeley, California company building the digital and automation backbone for utility-scale solar construction. Its flagship Terafab automated field factory and Construct software platform are designed to slash the cost and time of building solar power plants at terawatt scale.
Weee! is North America's largest online ethnic grocer, delivering Asian and Hispanic groceries direct to homes across the United States. Founded in 2015 by Larry Liu as a WeChat group-buying experiment, it has grown into a vertically integrated platform with a $4.1B valuation and more than $1B in annualized revenue.
Nagraj Kashyap is co-founder and General Partner of Touring Capital, a San Francisco-based venture firm that closed a $330 million Fund I in September 2025 focused on AI-powered SaaS companies at the early-growth stage. He brings 20+ years of venture capital experience, having previously founded Qualcomm Ventures (2003), launched M12 (Microsoft's venture arm, 2016), and served as Managing Partner at SoftBank Vision Fund II. His portfolio includes breakout companies such as Zoom, Waze (10x return, acquired by Google), Xiaomi, Cloudflare, Fitbit, Kahoot!, Livongo, and Outreach.
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.
Sath Nelakonda is the CEO and CTO of Cinarra Systems, a SoftBank company that turns mobile network signals into privacy-safe advertising and venue analytics. A co-founder of the company since 2013, he came out of the deep plumbing of the internet - IP/MPLS routing at TiMetra, then Alcatel-Lucent, then Juniper - and now runs an ad-tech outfit built on telco-grade data.
Joel Hyatt is Chairman, CEO, and Co-Founder of Globality, Inc., an AI-powered autonomous sourcing platform serving Fortune 500 enterprises. A serial entrepreneur who pioneered affordable legal services through Hyatt Legal Services in the 1970s and co-founded Current TV with Al Gore in 2005 (sold to Al Jazeera for $500M in 2013), Hyatt has spent five decades disrupting incumbent industries. Globality, founded in 2015 with co-founder Lior Delgo, has raised $357M and deploys AI agents to help enterprises reduce procurement costs by 10-20% while capturing 60-90% operational efficiency gains.
Vikas J. Parekh is a Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, where he helps oversee the SoftBank Vision Fund's investment activities. He focuses on enterprise technology, healthcare, and AI investments. Parekh serves on the board of Symbotic (NASDAQ: SYM), a warehouse automation company, and has been involved with SoftBank's investments in companies like Cohesity. He previously worked at Morgan Stanley and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.
On March 31, 2026, OpenAI closed the largest private funding round in history — $122 billion in committed capital at a post-money valuation of $852 billion. Anchored by Amazon ($50B), Nvidia ($30B), and SoftBank ($30B), with continued participation from Microsoft and a sweeping syndicate of global institutions, the round dwarfs every prior private tech raise and cements OpenAI as the world's most valuable startup by a wide margin. The company is generating $2 billion in monthly revenue, counting 900 million weekly ChatGPT users, and is widely expected to pursue an IPO.