10 Top AI Founders building the Autonomous Economy share their secrets

George Bandarian, General Partner at Untapped Ventures, brings 10 of his portfolio founders on stage at the 2026 Annual General Meeting in LA — the builders actually making the autonomous economy real across compute, robotics, AI models, longevity, and enterprise agents.

These are the stories of the founders in the trenches.

In this episode, we go deep into:

• The Compute Revolution: Why thermodynamic computing could deliver 10,000x energy efficiency gains over GPUs, what scientific quantum advantage actually means (and why Blue Qubit is one of only five companies to have achieved it), and why the current NVIDIA-dominated paradigm simply can't power a world of a billion robots
• The Convergence Layer: How on-device foundation models are bringing cloud-quality AI underground, into cars, phones, and factories where connectivity is zero, and why the safety layer for next-gen robotics matters more than the robot itself
• Longevity and the End of Pharma as We Know It: Why measuring aging coherence in real time could let us catch cardiovascular disease 20 years before it strikes, how decentralized citizen science is generating more trial data annually than all FDA drug trials combined, and the moonshot company scanning human brains cell by cell to create digital replicas of people
• Agentic Experiences at the Enterprise Edge: How AI-native companies are replacing McKinsey-style consulting, why autonomous agents achieved 58% supplier completion in 5 weeks versus 20–30% over two years manually, and what it really means when a single broker can generate 25x the revenue of a traditional one
• The Human-in-the-Loop Reality: Why enterprises expect perfection from agents but accept mistakes from humans, and how the best founders are managing that gap right now

Meet the Founders:

• Guillaume Verdon — Founder & CEO, Extropic
• Mathias Lechner — Co-Founder & CTO, Liquid AI
• Kasim Abdullahi — Head of GTM, Harper
• Philipp Wehn — Founder & CEO, Nexxa.ai
• Sarah Tang — Founder & CEO, Sluicebox
• Michael Andregg — Founder & CEO, Eon Systems
• Bruno Balen — Founder & CEO, ANI
• Jeff Chen — Founder & CEO, Radicle Science
• Andrew Singletary — Founder & CEO, 3Laws Robotics
• Hayk Tepanyan — Founder & CTO, BlueQubit

If you’re in the early innings of building something in AI, especially if you’re figuring things out from first principles—let’s chat: https://bit.ly/UntappedE17ytgb

Learn more about Untapped Ventures: https://untapped.ventures

Plus, connect with us here:

2. George Bandarian - https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgebandarian/

3. Untapped Ventures - https://www.linkedin.com/company/untappedventures/