stanford-robotics
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Zinny Weli
Zinny Weli is the co-founder and CEO of RoboDock, a Y Combinator (W26) startup building robots that run the depots for autonomous and electric vehicle fleets - handling charging, plug-in, and post-trip inspection without human labor. A mechanical engineer trained at the University of Michigan and Stanford, she previously owned the charging system for Amazon's Astro home robot at Lab126 and led the autonomous charging tower for Zipline's delivery drones from concept to multi-city deployment. She started RoboDock with Celine Wang, whom she first met at Stanford as her teaching assistant.
Nicolai Ouporov
Nicolai 'Nic' Ouporov is Co-Founder and CEO of Fleet AI, a startup building reinforcement learning training environments - or 'RL gyms' - that let AI agents practice operating real software tools like Salesforce and Excel before deployment. Fleet raised ~$45M total and grew from $1M to $60M+ annualized revenue in under a year. Nic is also a 3x YoungArts Award winner in photography and visual arts, a former pre-professional ballet dancer trained at Boston Ballet and San Francisco Ballet, and a QuestBridge Scholar from Columbia University. He previously served as Founding Engineer at Respell (acquired by Salesforce in 2024) and published AI research at Stanford's Robotics and Embodied AI Lab.