yield-optimization
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Akanksha Jagwani Is Teaching Chip Factories to See Trouble Coming
The SixSense co-founder turned a stubborn factory bottleneck into an AI system that helps engineers catch defects early, recover yield, and learn from every wafer.
EX.CO
EX.CO is a machine learning-driven video technology platform that helps publishers and media owners run, manage, and monetize video across web, mobile, CTV, and DOOH. Founded in 2012 as the interactive-content company Playbuzz and rebranded to EX.CO in 2019, the New York-based, Disney-backed company now offers an online video platform (OVP), a CMS, player technology, and an LLM-powered recommendation and yield engine used by publishers including Advance Local, Hearst Newspapers, The Arena Group, and Ziff Davis.
Aizon
Aizon is a San Francisco-based software company that builds AI solutions exclusively for pharmaceutical and biotech manufacturing. Its GxP-compliant platform ingests structured and unstructured production data to run electronic batch records, real-time process monitoring, predictive analytics and, increasingly, agentic AI that helps quality and operations teams cut deviations, improve yield and speed batch review. Formerly known as Bigfinite and founded in 2014, the company has raised roughly $45 million and counts pharma names such as Grifols and Curia among its users.
FloVision Solutions
FloVision Solutions builds AI-powered sensors that bolt onto food processing lines to measure yield, monitor quality, and track staff performance in real time. Founded in 2020 by Rian McDonnell and Elise Weimholt, the South Bend, Indiana company helps beef and poultry processors recover lost yield and cut waste at the source. Its compact vision, depth, and load-cell sensors have scanned over 23.2 million kilograms of food across North America, Europe, and Australia, with customers reporting up to 1.5% yield recovery and as much as 15x ROI. In July 2025 it raised an $8.7M Series A led by Insight Partners.
Rian Mc Donnell
Rian Mc Donnell is the founder and CEO of FloVision Solutions, an AI company putting cameras and sensors on meat-processing lines so beef and poultry plants can see exactly where yield and quality slip away. He grew up around beef processing in rural Ireland, studied mechanical and manufacturing engineering at Trinity College Dublin (with a year at UC Berkeley), and built the company out of a Trinity student project before moving it to the United States via Notre Dame's ESTEEM program and SOSV's IndieBio. Now headquartered in South Bend, Indiana, FloVision has analyzed more than 23 million kilograms of food and raised an $8.7M Series A led by Insight Partners in 2025.
Instrumental Inc.
Instrumental is a manufacturing AI and data platform that helps brands like Meta, NVIDIA, Cisco, and Bose catch defects on the factory floor by aggregating images and signals from production lines and running discovery-driven machine learning on them. Founded by ex-Apple engineers, the company turns the noisy, siloed world of high-mix electronics assembly into a searchable, controllable dataset.
ZeeMee
ZeeMee is a higher education technology platform that bridges the gap between college-bound students and institutions through authentic community and behavioral intelligence. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Redwood City, California, ZeeMee gives students a social space to showcase their personalities beyond transcripts while giving colleges AI-powered insights that predict enrollment intent with up to 98% accuracy. With 2.6M+ active student users, 300+ institutional partners, and a 4.7-star app rating, ZeeMee has quietly become one of the most influential platforms in college enrollment - helping students find roommates, discover campus culture, and connect with admissions teams before ever setting foot on campus.
John Kibarian
John Kibarian is the co-founder, President, and CEO of PDF Solutions (NASDAQ: PDFS), a Santa Clara-based semiconductor analytics company he has helmed for over 35 years. Armed with a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon, Kibarian started building yield-improvement algorithms while still a researcher at SEMATECH - then turned those algorithms into a company. Today PDF Solutions generates $219 million in annual revenue helping chipmakers, test facilities, and battery manufacturers squeeze more quality out of every wafer, with flagship products like the Exensio Analytics Platform and the Sapience Manufacturing Hub driving AI-powered collaboration across global semiconductor supply chains.
Maxx Lobo
Maxx Lobo is the Chief Executive Officer of Ask Media Group, the IAC-owned digital media and performance marketing company behind Ask.com and other properties reaching 245 million people monthly. A two-decade veteran of ad-tech, cloud infrastructure, and digital media, Lobo rose through the ranks as CTO and COO/President before taking the top role in 2025. Under his operational leadership, Ask Media Group tripled its EBITDA from $50 million to over $100 million in four years, cementing his reputation as one of the more quietly effective operators in the digital media landscape.
Vanessa Didyk
Vanessa Roth Didyk is the CEO of ZeeMee, a social platform serving 2.6 million college-bound students across 3,000+ institutions. A serial edtech entrepreneur with 16+ years in the field, she founded Scholar's Station at UC Berkeley, sold it, built a tutoring marketplace at Rev.com, ran MathElf, then took over a struggling ZeeMee in 2018 and turned it into a top-10 App Store social networking app used by roughly 1 in 3 US college freshmen annually.