Deeptech & space startups in San Francisco

Will Marshall, Robbie Schingler, Chris Boshuizen

Founded 2010, Planet operates the largest fleet of Earth-imaging satellites, delivering near-daily global imagery and geospatial analytics to commercial, government and defense customers. Public on NYSE (PL)...

Chad Rigetti (founder); Subodh Kulkarni (CEO)

Founded 2013, Rigetti builds superconducting quantum computers and operates them via its cloud (QCS). Public on Nasdaq (RGTI), it held ~$600M in cash/investments as of Nov 2025, took a $35M strategic investm...

John Gedmark, Ryan McLinko

Founded 2015, Astranis builds small, low-cost geostationary (MicroGEO) communications satellites to deliver broadband to underserved regions. It raised a $187M Series C in 2025 (Khosla Ventures, Founders Fun...

Andrew Feldman, Gary Lauterbach, Sean Lie

Founded 2015, Cerebras makes the Wafer-Scale Engine — the largest AI chip ever built — and sells AI training/inference systems and cloud. It closed a ~$1.1B round (Sept 2025) at a ~$23B valuation, reported ~...

Sid Sheth, Sudeep Bhoja

Founded 2019, d-Matrix builds digital in-memory-compute (DIMC) chips (Corsair platform) targeting cost- and energy-efficient generative-AI inference. It raised $275M (Nov 2025) at a ~$2B valuation, and its C...

Gavin Uberti, Chris Zhu, Robert Wachen

Founded 2022, Etched builds Sohu — a transformer-specialized ASIC that hard-wires the transformer architecture into silicon for dramatically faster/cheaper inference. It reportedly secured ~$500M in early 20...

Brett Adcock

Founded 2022, Figure is the most-funded pure-play humanoid robotics company (~$1.9B raised). Its Figure 03 humanoid, launched October 2025 and redesigned for high-volume manufacturing and home use, was named...

Jonathan Ross, Douglas Wightman

Founded 2016 by an ex-Google TPU engineer, Groq builds LPU inference chips optimized for low-latency LLM serving via GroqCloud. After raising at a ~$6.9B valuation in 2025, it became the landmark AI-chip dea...

Dave Ferguson, Jiajun Zhu

Founded 2016 by ex-Waymo engineers, Nuro builds autonomous driving systems, having shifted from its own delivery pods to licensing its 'Nuro Driver' L4 stack. Its 2025 Series E raised ~$203M (Uber, Nvidia) a...

Karol Hausman, Sergey Levine, Lachy Groom

Founded 2024, Physical Intelligence builds general-purpose foundation models (pi-zero) that let a single AI transfer manipulation skills across different robot bodies — folding laundry, assembling electronic...

Jeremy O'Brien, Terry Rudolph, Mark Thompson, Pete Shadbolt

Founded 2016, PsiQuantum is building a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer using photonic qubits fabricated on standard semiconductor processes (with GlobalFoundries). It closed a ~$1B round (Sept 2...

Rodrigo Liang, Kunle Olukotun, Christopher Ré

Founded 2017 out of Stanford, SambaNova builds reconfigurable dataflow (RDU) AI chips and full-stack systems for enterprise/government AI inference and training. It has raised over $1.1B (Series D at a ~$5B ...

Alexandr Wang & Lucy Guo

Founded 2016; data-labeling and data-engine platform for training AI/ML models and a major government/defense AI contractor. In Jun 2025 Meta took a ~49% stake for ~$14.3B, valuing Scale at ~$29B, and co-fou...

Adam Bry, Abraham Bachrach, Matt Donahoe

Founded 2014, Skydio is the largest US drone maker. After exiting consumer drones in 2023 it pivoted to defense, public safety and enterprise autonomy; over half of its $1.2B in bookings now come from defens...

Kyle Vogt, Paril Jain, Luke Holoubek

Founded 2024 by Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt, The Bot Company builds household robots to automate chores. It closed a $150M Series B in March 2025 led by Greenoaks at a $2B post-money valuation, raising ~$300...

(Alphabet; John Krafcik/Tekedra Mawakana, Dmitri Dolgov)

Alphabet's autonomous-driving unit (spun out of Google's self-driving project, 2016) operates commercial robotaxi service across SF, the Peninsula/Silicon Valley and beyond, including freeways as of late 202...

Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, Keenan Wyrobek, Will Hetzler

Founded 2014, Zipline operates the world's largest autonomous drone-delivery network for medical supplies, food and retail across the US and Africa. It surpassed 2 million deliveries in January 2026 and rais...

Charles Wuischpard (CEO), founders Alex Wright-Gladstein, Chen Sun, Mark Wade

Founded 2015, Ayar Labs makes optical I/O (co-packaged silicon photonics 'TeraPHY' chiplets) to move data between AI chips at far higher bandwidth and lower power than copper. Backed by AMD Ventures and NVID...

Pierre-Damien Vaujour, Alex Greenberg

Founded 2017, Loft Orbital offers 'space infrastructure as a service' — its standardized satellite buses (and Condosat model) let any customer fly a payload without building a satellite. It raised $170M (Jan...

Reiner Pope, Mike Gunter

Founded 2023 by ex-Google engineers, MatX designs chips purpose-built for the largest LLMs, prioritizing throughput for frontier AI labs. It raised a $500M Series B in early 2026 led by Jane Street and Situa...

Brett Granberg, Nini Moorhead, Scott Sanders

Founded 2019, Vannevar Labs builds AI-powered intelligence and non-kinetic capabilities — turning foreign open-source communications into real-time actionable intelligence for the US military and allies. It ...

Baiju Bhatt

Founded 2024 by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, Aetherflux (recently renamed Cowboy Space Corporation) is developing space-based solar power — LEO satellites that beam energy to Earth via infrared lasers. ...

Ben Bloom, Rob Hays (CEO)

Founded 2018, Atom Computing builds neutral-atom quantum computers and demonstrated a >1,000-qubit system. Playground Global led its earlier Series B; in late 2025 it was in talks to join the federal quantum...

Jonny Dyer, Reuben Rohrschneider, Dan McCleese

Founded 2021, Muon Space designs and operates end-to-end small-satellite constellations for climate, weather and defense/commercial Earth-observation missions. It closed a ~$146M Series B (initial 2024 + $89...

(stealth-emerged 2024/25)

An early-stage advanced-manufacturing startup developing next-generation chip-fabrication machines, aiming to make the most powerful chips up to ~15x faster and to reshore advanced fabrication capacity to th...

physical AI for food manufacturing

San Francisco company providing AI-enabled meal-assembly robots to food manufacturers on a robotics-as-a-service model; robots have completed 70M+ servings across the US and Canada. A rare Bay Area foodtech/...

workforce management (HR + IT + finance)

Founded 2016 in San Francisco by Parker Conrad and Prasanna Sankar. Unifies HR, IT and finance (payroll, devices, apps, spend) on one employee-data platform. Raised a $450M Series G in May 2025 at a $16.8B v...