Boardroom Media (CEO News)
At CEO (Boardroom Media) we track over 1,000,000 startups and over 5,000,000 people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top California based CEO’ operating in the Smart Cities space. If you think a CEO’ is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on [email protected]
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
Tracey Laden
Executive Assistant to the CEO of Plug and Play Tech Center
Tracey Laden is Executive Assistant to Saeed Amidi, CEO of Plug and Play Tech Center.
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About Plug and Play Tech Center: Plug and Play is an innovation platform bringing together startups and large corporations.
Kaan Gunay
Co-Founder & CEO of Firefly
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About Endeavor, Firefly: Firefly is a mobility based advertising and data platform that allows rideshare drivers to make money through digital advertising.
John-Michael Scott
CEO of GreenData.IO
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About BloxNexus, Future Think Labs, GreenData.IO, MonstRpreneur, NoLoBlox, Sandalwood Ventures: Venture Builder bringing Corporations & Startups expertise in startup mindset & operational execution, creating the Data Driven Enterprise.
Raghu Bala
Founder and CEO of NetObjex, Inc.
CEO, NetObjex Inc based in Southern California. Formerly with Yahoo, Infospace, Primedia, Source Interlink Media, PwC, and with 3 successful startup exits. Wharton MBA in Finance, MS in Computer Science from RPI, Ex-Columbia University Adjunct Lecturer, published author and major conferences including IoT India Congress, Google IO, and more. Bala has significant domain expertise in the media industry having led digital operations for 100 brands including MotorTrend, HotRod, Import Tuner, Automobile, Recoil, Shutterbug, and Slam. His responsibilities included managing digital assets across multiple mediums including web, mobile, video/YouTube channels, and social media. The portfolio of digital assets managed had a total visitor profile with monthly statistics of over 16M unique visitors and 100M pageviews. Bala also has deep expertise in search engine advertising and audience conversion from his stints at Infospace and Yahoo. Bala has been working on IoT since 2011 and has deep expertise in end to end IoT in multiple domains.
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About : NetObjex’s Matrix Digital Asset-as-a-Service (DAaaS) platform enables enterprises to manage their digital assets using IoT, AI, and DLT
Brian Barlow
Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners
Brian D. Barlow is a Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (“SIP”).
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About Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners: Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners applies innovative technology to urban infrastructure systems.
Faizaan Ghauri
Chief Executive Officer of WRLD
Faizaan Ghauri is the CEO of eeGeo, a 3D mapping platform for mobile, virtual and augmented reality. Faizaan is also Vice President of Strategy for NetSol Technologies. He leads a 100+ team of designers, developers and artists as co-founder of IFDS, a digital studio focused on Virtual and Augmented Reality as well as Mobile App Development. Prior to IFDS, Faizaan spent four years on the Product team of Vroozi, an eCommerce platform for Fortune 500 companies. Faizaan currently lives between Los Angeles, London and Lahore. He is a passionate evangelist and investor for the Pakistani tech community. He sits on the steering committee of Nspire, a Pakistani incubator focused on promoting disruptive startups abroad. He is an aesthete with a keen interest in fashion and music. The original plan was to be a poet. It still is.
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About Nspire, WRLD: A 3D cloud-based platform of real-world environments to create digital twins.
Jonny Simkin
CEO & Co-Founder of Swiftly
Jonny Simkin is the co-founder and CEO of Swiftly, a San Francisco-based technology company that has created an industry-leading big data platform to help public transit agencies improve their operational performance, service reliability, and real-time passenger information. Living in San Francisco and having experienced the challenges of urban mobility first hand, Jonny is on a mission to reduce urban congestion and carbon emissions in cities across the world. Prior to founding Swiftly, Jonny was the Director of Product at Rafter Inc., where he helped nearly 3 million students save over $700 million on college textbooks. Before Rafter, Jonny was the co-founder and CEO of SwoopThat and HubEdu (acquired in 2012), where he built a leading online textbook comparison engine. Jonny holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering with an Economics Concentration from Harvey Mudd College. In his spare time, he enjoys hockey, ping pong, tennis, and coffee.
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About Swiftly: Swiftly develops enterprise software that helps transit agencies and cities improve urban mobility.
Chris Carson
CEO & Co-Founder of Hayden AI
Chris Carson, is a global strategy, innovation, venture development expert, and thought-leader for disruptive and digital innovation. Chris cultivated his expertise over 20 years, working in various operations and engineering roles with technology-driven multinationals, startups, and consultancies, and now serves as the CEO of Hayden AI, an artificial intelligence technology company and smart city solutions provider. Chris has a strong technical background in artificial intelligence, computer vision, and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), as well as a decade of experience in leading globally distributed engineering teams and turning innovation into material business impact. Chris is a passionate leader who is experienced in driving growth through innovation and strong execution, and a relentless champion of Design Thinking and Lean Startup, who believes in the power of co-creation.
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About Hayden AI: World’s first autonomous traffic management platform
Sundip Doshi
Founder & CEO of AerNos, Inc.
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About AerNos, Inc.: Develops application specific nano gas sensors based on its breakthrough and proprietary AerN2S Technology to detect harmful gases.
Joe Distefano
Co-Founder & CEO of UrbanFootprint
Joe is Principal and Co-Founder of Calthorpe Analytics. He leverages 20 years of experience in land use and transportation planning in leading the development and deployment of the RapidFire and UrbanFootprint modeling platforms, new models and software tools that bring critical information to land use planning decisions, energy and water resource choices, and the environmental, public health, and social equity challenges of their times.
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About UrbanFootprint: Urban, climate & community resilience data platform providing critical intelligence to institutions investing in the world’s infrastructure
Doug Davenport
Founder & CEO of Prospect Silicon Valley
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About Prospect Silicon Valley: ProspectSV is a nonprofit urbantech innovation hub focused on solutions for sustainable, smart cities.
Morgan Conbere
Co-founder & CEO of Token Transit
Morgan Conbere is Founder & CEO at Token Transit.
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About Token Transit: Token Transit is a provider of a mobile ticket booking application intended to help riders pay for transit via a mobile application.
Steven Booth
CEO & Founder of Springboard Research
As CEO & Founder, Steve leads product development and sales for Springboard Research. Springboard Research provides predictive retail intelligence to the most innovative brands in the world, from Nike, and Westfield, to Macerich, the Gap, and Times Square. Springboard research specializes in providing retailers, shopping malls, and downtowns (Business Improvement Districts – BIDs) with actionable business intelligence developed through artificial intelligence and computer vision.
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About Springboard Research: Springboard Research provides predictive analytics for retailers, shopping malls, and downtowns using computer vision and AI.
David Lu
Co-Founder and CEO of Clarity Movement
David Lu is the co-founder and CEO of Clarity Movement Co, an environmental tech startup focused on changing how we understand the environment by deploying dense networks for real-timeair quality monitoring. Prior to starting Clarity, David was a key leader in the University of California’s Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign and worked alongside the Arctic Campaign Director at Greenpeace. Fueled by his everlasting passion for improving ourenvironment, namely mitigating climate change, David believes in using data driven approaches to address the issues arising in global environmental crises. David earned his BS in Atmospheric Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
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About Clarity Movement: Clarity Movement create solutions that empower communities to make more informed decisions and improve the quality of life.
Ron Efroni
Chief Executive Officer of Slyde Global
Ron Efroni, Gil Mishal, and Neria Nachum founded Slyde Global on August 1, 2016, since which he has been serving as its chief executive officer.
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About Slyde Global: Slyde Global provides a solution of many platforms based on cloud that solves numerous problems in the world of transportation to schools.
Rajendra N. Datta
Founder, President & CEO of Qulsar
MTM, Wharton • Entrepreneur + Intrapreneur • global marketing + business development • 12+ successful products • grew OEM business from $13M to $20M • speaker at multiple industry forums
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About Qulsar: End to end precision time sync for 5G, smart infrastructure, real time edge computing, datacenters and smart factories
Ali El Hariri
Co-Founder and CEO of Bulldozair
Construction engineer graduate of ESTP Paris (School of Civil Engineering). Before launching BulldozAIR , Ali was managing projects at Bouygues for 7 years while studying digitalization for teams working on the field.
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About Bulldozair: BulldozAIR is a construction project management platform for corporates that own real estate or industrial assets.
Germán Contreras
Founder and CEO of ConLuc
Germán Contreras is the founder and CEO of ConLuc.
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About ConLuc: We bring today a solution to face the problems today and tomorrow
James Alfano
Founder and CEO of Govlaunch
Prior to Govlaunch, James co-founded EfficientGov, a local government-focused media company which was acquired by Praetorian Digital in 2014. Before that, he spent six years at the Washington D.C.-based consulting firm Marlowe & Company helping over 50 cities and counties secure grant funding and navigate federal regulatory issues. James is a native Washingtonian and a graduate from Dartmouth College.
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About Govlaunch: Govlaunch is the the wiki for local government innovation®
Bradley Simpson
CEO / Creator of Vection Group, Inc.
Brad has over 20 years in the software business with 15 years at Braxton Technologies, a government contractor specializing in satellite command and control software and currently seven years leading Vection Group. He is a senior software engineer and a technology futurist. With many years working in the Joint Domain Command & Control space. As well, he is a SME (Subject Matter Expert) on geospatial alerting of wearable data. Brad is the author of two very significant patents: Highly Efficient and Parallel Data Transfer and Display, USPTO No: 9,665,267 and Geospatial Alerting (Push-notifications), USPTO No: 9,910,561
His proven track record of pulling together the right talent to create the right team, from software and business-minded professionals to creative and financial gurus, shines with the success he experienced at Braxton Technologies. He’s carried the same style of talent acquisition to Vection where he’s assembled a top-tier group of tech and business executives with a single goal, to make VG and their products globally recognized and successful.
His entrepreneurial vision and technical DNA have merged beautifully into SmartSync. SmartSync, a OS agnostic data ingestion hub that passively uploads from data devices, no user button-pushing! With your data being pushed to a human performance data management software.
When not tethered to his digital device, which is rare, Brad scans the consumer landscape for needed innovation that he thinks is missing on the consumer front. He is always ready to pounce on opportunities to create products and technologies to fill pressing needs. Brad attended Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and the University of Southern California.
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About Vection Group, Inc.: Vection Group is an ongoing cloud based streaming API software company. We provide B2B, B2C and B2M SaaS for the IoT, Smart Cities & others
Anuj Sachdeva
Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Clovity
Anuj is a seasoned entrepreneur and a technology visionary. Anuj has demonstrated history of growing start-ups, building large technology practices and incubating ideas from scratch to solid outcomes in global set-up across multiple continents. Anuj has solid industry knowledge of Telecoms, Retail, Fintech and Healthcare sector globally having worked with numerous enterprise CTO’s, CIO’s, CDO’s and Business Executives. Anuj has always been very passionate about disruptive technologies and how these are going be a game changer for global enterprises requiring serious transformation. In 2016, he joined Clovity as CEO, a next generation cutting edge solutions partner that enables enterprises on various aspects of IoT, Data including artificial intelligence (AL) and machine learning (ML), Cloud and Digital strategy. Under Anuj’s leadership, Clovity has doubled its size, revenue and Clovity is now the top solutions provider for IoT solutions across Retail, Healthcare and Fintech enterprises. Anuj is also advising multiple technology start-ups on how best to bridge the gap between technology and software as well as go-to market strategies.
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About Clovity: Thinking “IoT | Edge | Data | Cloud | Digital | Smart Cities Solution” – Think Clovity. Recognized as Top IoT Soln Provider for 2017 & 2018.
Miguel Martinez Cano
CEO & Co-Founder of Pronto
Miguel Martinez Cano is the CEO and Co-Founder at Pronto.
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About Pronto: Pronto is a fast-growing marketplace that provides ride-sharing and delivery services for second-tier cities in LATAM.
Jordan Justus
CEO and Co-founder of Automotus
Jordan Justus is the CEO and Co-founder of Automotus.
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About Automotus: Automotus uses first-of-its-kind computer vision technology to help cities, airports and fleets manage congestion and emissions at the curb.
Martin Dal
CEO of Spiio, Inc.
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About Spiio, Inc.: Saving every drop of water with in-ground soil data
Sumit Dhoopar
CEO and Co-Founder of AllianceAPI
Sumit is an accomplished entrepreneur and executive, with experience in the Antenna Technology, networking, storage, Cybersecurity, Cloud Infrastructure, and virtualization sectors. Currently Sumit serves as CEO of AllianceAPI Corp, a SaaS-based IoT system integrator. Sumit finished in MS electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2012 and recently completed his Executive MBA from University of San Franciso in May 2020
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About AllianceAPI: Enhanced Consumer Experience through Secured Global Connected IoT via AllianceAPI universal API
Shogo Numakura
CEO of Symmetry Dimensions
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About Symmetry Dimensions: Enriching Lives with Digital Twins
