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Ratson Morad Has Spent a Career Turning Difficult Physics Into Repeatable Manufacturing
Before smartglasses, Ratson Morad worked on MRI systems, 300 mm wafer tools and solar modules. The industries changed; his practical question did not: how do you make difficult technology reliably, repeatedly and at scale?
Sankar Jayaram
Sankar (Jay) Jayaram is the co-founder and CEO of Quintar, a Santa Clara startup building augmented reality experiences for live sports. A former Washington State University engineering professor who founded the school's virtual reality lab in 1994, he co-founded VOKE with his wife Uma Jayaram, sold it to Intel in 2016, and served as CTO of Intel Sports before spinning out Quintar in 2021. Quintar became the official AR developer for the PGA Tour and shipped PGA Tour Vision for Apple Vision Pro.
Kshitij Marwah
Kshitij Marwah is an Indian deep-tech entrepreneur who founded Tesseract, an MIT Media Lab spin-off building extended reality hardware and software in India. Acquired by Reliance in 2019, Tesseract became Jio Tesseract and shipped consumer XR products including JioDive, JioGlass and JioFrames. A former head of the MIT Media Lab India Initiative, he is an MIT Technology Review TR35 honoree (2017), a Forbes 30 Under 30 (2018) awardee and a TED speaker working at the intersection of AI, optics and immersive design.
Aditya Vishwanath
Aditya Vishwanath is the co-founder and CEO of Inspirit, a Palo Alto edtech company that brings virtual and augmented reality into middle and high school STEM classrooms. A Georgia Tech computer scientist turned Stanford learning-sciences PhD, he built Inspirit to be the bridge between cutting-edge academic research and the everyday teacher. Before Inspirit he co-founded MakerGhat, a network of makerspaces for youth in low-income Mumbai neighborhoods. He is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, Schmidt Futures Fellow, Ashoka Fellow, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in education.
Bernard Yee
Bernard 'Bernie' Yee is the CEO and co-founder of Windup Minds, a Seattle-based independent VR/MR studio building 'Stay: Forever Home,' a mixed-reality virtual pet named Ember. A games-industry lifer who started as a journalist and trained as a lawyer, Yee has produced or shaped some of the most influential titles in gaming - Plants vs. Zombies 2 and Peggle 2 at PopCap, Destiny at Bungie, Rock Band at Harmonix, EverQuest at Sony Online - before spending nearly a decade at Oculus/Meta Reality Labs producing landmark VR experiences like Dreamdeck, Toybox, First Contact and First Steps. His thesis: XR is uniquely capable of making a digital creature feel real, and a game can make you feel loved.
Derek Belch
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
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
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
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.