Honghao Deng is the CEO and co-founder of Butlr, a San Francisco-based Physical AI company that uses anonymous thermal sensors to understand how spaces are occupied - without cameras or personal data. A Harvard GSD MDes graduate and MIT Media Lab researcher, Deng spun Butlr out of MIT in 2019 alongside co-founder Jiani Zeng. The company has raised over $105M in venture funding, deployed 30,000+ sensors across 22 countries, and processes 1 billion data points daily. Deng is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree (2022), a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, and the inventor of 'Illusory Material' - a multi-material 3D printing breakthrough named one of TIME Magazine's 100 Best Inventions of 2021.
Hermann Tribukait is the co-founder and CEO of Atinary Technologies, a Lausanne- and Silicon Valley-based deeptech startup that built SDLabs — a no-code AI/ML platform compressing years of R&D into days. A Harvard-trained economist who helped coin the term 'Self-Driving Labs®' in 2017, Tribukait has channeled a career spent brokering $200M+ in global R&D partnerships into software that lets machines design experiments, learn from results, and iterate without human bias getting in the way. Atinary's tools are now used in pharma, biotech, chemicals, and climate tech, with a physical self-driving lab open in Boston since early 2026.