ut-austin
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Sam Dai
Sam Dai is the co-founder and CEO of Enpower Greentech, a battery cell maker building semi-solid-state, lithium-metal, and silicon-rich cells. Trained as a physicist at Tsinghua and a materials scientist at UT Austin under Nobel laureate John B. Goodenough, he started the company in 2012 with fellow post-doc Che Yong. The company has shipped over 3 million solid-state cells, holds more than 100 patents, and runs facilities across the US, China, Japan, and Germany. Dai was selected for Unreasonable Impact Asia Pacific 2024.
Vahid Saadat
Vahid Saadat is a serial medical device entrepreneur and co-founder and co-CEO of Inquis Medical, a Menlo Park, California company building the AVENTUS Thrombectomy System for treating venous thromboembolic disease and pulmonary embolism. With more than 25 years in medtech and over 200 issued and pending patents, he has founded or led a string of companies including Voyage Medical, USGI Medical, AngioTrax, Baxano and Arrinex (maker of ClariFix, later acquired by Stryker). He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and runs Inquis alongside co-CEO Mojgan Saadat.
Jasson Casey
Jasson Casey is the CEO and cofounder of Beyond Identity, a New York-based identity security company that builds passwordless, phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication designed to make identity-based attacks impossible. An engineer with a PhD from Texas A&M and more than two decades in security and networking, Casey has held senior technical leadership roles at IronNet Cybersecurity and SecurityScorecard, founded the software-defined networking ventures Flowgrammable and Compiled Networks, and served as a cybersecurity fellow at CSIS. He now argues that flaws in identity systems, not passwords alone, are the root cause of modern breaches and that cryptographically device-bound credentials are the way to stop phishing, credential theft, and AI deepfakes at the source.
Jeff Cardenas
Jeff Cardenas is the co-founder and CEO of Apptronik, an Austin-based robotics company building Apollo, a general-purpose AI-powered humanoid robot. He spun the company out of the University of Texas Human Centered Robotics Lab in 2016 and has since raised close to $1 billion, secured a strategic partnership with Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics, and positioned the company among the small handful of credible US humanoid players. He frames the race to build practical humanoids as the 'space race of our time.'
Jon Stephens
Jon Stephens is the CEO and co-founder of Veridise, an Austin-based blockchain security firm that brings academic formal verification to smart contract and zero-knowledge audits. A computer science PhD researcher at UT Austin, he built tools like SmartPulse and Zequal that grew out of his work on formally reasoning about programs, and turned that research into a company that has audited protocols including RISC Zero, Succinct, Semaphore, vLayer and Ankr. His mission is to make everyday users secure without asking them to think about security at all.
Jose Bethancourt
Jose Bethancourt is the co-founder and CEO of Method Financial, an API platform that lets fintechs and lenders connect to and manage consumers' liability accounts - credit cards, student loans, auto loans and mortgages - using only a phone number. Raised near the Texas-Mexico border in one of the poorest counties in the U.S., he studied computer science and business at UT Austin, co-founded the student-loan startup GradJoy through Y Combinator's Summer 2019 batch, then pivoted the team's account-connectivity frustrations into Method in 2021. Method now serves more than 80 fintech clients including SoFi, Robinhood and Credit Karma, has processed over $500 million in payments, and raised a $41.5M Series B in January 2025 led by Emergence Capital. Bethancourt was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Finance list in 2026.
Katherine Allen
Katherine Allen is the co-founder and CEO of Flo Recruit (branded as Flo), an Austin-based vertical SaaS company that builds recruiting and hiring software for the legal industry. She started the company as an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, went through Y Combinator in 2019, and left school to build Flo full time with co-founder Atreya Misra. Today Flo partners with more than 125 law firms, including close to 70% of the AmLaw 100, and over 100 law schools serving 25,000-plus students, and has raised roughly $5.5 million-plus across seed and a 2025 Series A round.
Michael Lind
Michael Lind is an American writer, columnist, and professor who has spent three decades refusing to sit in either political team's section. A fifth-generation Texan who began on the right at the Heritage Foundation and migrated toward New Deal economic nationalism, he co-founded the New America Foundation in 1999, wrote for The New Yorker, Harper's and The New Republic, and now teaches at the LBJ School at UT Austin while writing a column for Tablet. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including The New Class War, Land of Promise and Hell to Pay, all of them circling one question: who actually runs the country, and what do they owe the people who don't.
Nagraj Kashyap
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.