Heron Power is a Scotts Valley, California company building solid-state transformers - power electronics purpose-built for the modern electrical grid. Founded in 2025 by former Tesla powertrain and energy chief Drew Baglino, its flagship Heron Link converts medium-voltage electricity to usable low-voltage power in a modular, software-integrated package, replacing the century-old iron-core transformer. The company targets utility-scale solar, grid-scale batteries, and hyperscale AI data centers, and is building a 40-gigawatt US factory to meet a backlog of orders.
MatX is a Mountain View semiconductor company building chips designed exclusively for large language models. Founded in 2022 by ex-Google TPU engineers Reiner Pope and Mike Gunter, it aims to deliver an order-of-magnitude more performance-per-dollar for frontier model training and inference than current GPUs.

Sebastian Raschka is a German-born AI/ML researcher, educator, and author who has built one of the most trusted independent voices in the machine learning community. Through his Substack newsletter 'Ahead of AI' (184,000+ subscribers), bestselling books like 'Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch)', and 91,000+ starred GitHub repositories, he demystifies cutting-edge AI for practitioners worldwide. After a stint as an Assistant Professor at UW-Madison and a role as Staff Research Engineer at Lightning AI, he now runs RAIR Lab as an independent researcher, writer, and consultant.