Derek Belch is the founder and CEO of STRIVR, the enterprise virtual reality training company he spun out of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab in 2014. A former Stanford kicker turned graduate assistant football coach, Belch built a VR prototype to give quarterbacks mental reps off the field, then pivoted the company from sports to the Fortune 1000. STRIVR has since trained more than a million workers in VR for clients including Walmart, Verizon, Bank of America and the NFL, and has raised roughly $87.5 million through a Series B.
Michael Deng is the founder, Chairman, President, and CEO of ArcSoft, a Fremont, California-based computer vision and AI imaging company he started in 1994 with $150,000 from family and friends. Over three decades, he built ArcSoft into a global leader powering the cameras of Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, Sony, and dozens more, then pivoted to automotive AI vision - driver monitoring, ADAS, and in-cabin sensing. When ArcSoft listed on Shanghai's STAR Market in 2021, Deng became a billionaire with a stake valued at roughly $1.1 billion. Today he's steering the company into AI glasses, XR headsets, robotics, and AIGC creative tools.
Cayden Pierce is the CEO and co-founder of Mentra, a San Francisco startup building MentraOS - the open-source operating system for AI smart glasses. Described as 'the Android for smart glasses,' MentraOS lets developers write one app and deploy it across any pair of smart glasses. A self-described transhumanist hacker, Pierce built his first DIY smart glasses prototype in his dorm room, worked with smart glasses inventor Steve Mann at the University of Toronto, researched proactive AI wearable agents at MIT Media Lab under Pattie Maes, converted a 40-year-old RV into a mobile hacker lab, and dropped out of MIT in 2024 to launch Mentra. The company raised an $8 million seed round backed by the co-founders of Android, YouTube, and Pebble, plus Y Combinator, Amazon, and Toyota Ventures.
Luke Wilson is the CEO and co-founder of ManageXR, the leading device management platform for enterprise XR (extended reality) deployments. A Stanford computer science graduate who designed and taught one of the university's first VR development courses as an undergraduate, Wilson built ManageXR out of a real operational problem: while deploying thousands of VR headsets to children's hospitals across the United States through his earlier venture Mighty Immersion, he found no viable management solution existed at scale. That gap became ManageXR, which raised a $4M seed round led by Rally Ventures in December 2021 and now serves 100+ enterprise customers across healthcare, training, education, and retail verticals.