Panel: Emerging Applications of Mechatronics
Join us on June 2 at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman in San Francisco for an evening focused on where mechatronics is headed next, and what that means in real operating environments. This event brings together investors, operators and builders to discuss how advances in robotics, automation, and integrated hardware-software systems are moving from the lab into practical use.
The conversation will center on emerging applications of mechatronics across industries where reliability, safety, and efficiency matter most. Expect a grounded discussion about what it takes to deploy these systems in the field, the challenges teams face when turning promising technology into usable products, and where experienced operators are seeing real momentum.
A highlight of the evening will be a first look at Rovex's new patient transport robot.
This early preview will offer attendees a chance to learn more about the thinking behind the product, the problem it is designed to solve, and the role mechatronic systems can play in healthcare settings where workflow and patient experience are both critical.
Laurent Rains — Moderator
Managing Director of Alchemist Accelerator, Silicon Valley's flagship B2B accelerator, where he has helped 200+ early-stage startups from 30+ countries break into the US enterprise market. An exited founder himself (co-founded and scaled Monkeylectric to a successful exit across 20+ countries), Laurent has also operated inside Google — leading UX program management for Google Maps — and Autodesk, where he orchestrated the integration of 20+ acquired products into the Fusion 360 subscription platform, aligning 1,500 engineers globally. He works directly with founders on customer validation, enterprise sales, and investor readiness, and has built structured US market-entry programs with the Korean and Japanese governments and the Association of Central Asian States. Fluent in English, French, and Portuguese.
Megan Smith — CTO & Advisor, Robotics & AI Engineer
A technical founder and advisor who builds and scales advanced robotics platforms across aerospace, consumer robotics, and advanced manufacturing. Megan was Co-Founder & CTO of Overlay, a consumer robotics company applying makeup through tightly coupled perception and motion control, where she led end-to-end architecture across hardware, embedded systems, and software, and filed a provisional patent on the invention. She currently serves as a Robotics Advisor to ExLabs, supporting a $1.7M US Space Force Orbital Prime Phase II contract and a $1.9M TACFI award with US Space Systems Command developing in-space robotic capture and control systems. She is also a Venture Fellow at Alley Robotics Ventures. Earlier, she was the first full-time hire at Rugged Robotics and a mechanical engineer at Lockheed Martin (NASA Johnson — Orion docking mechanisms) and Northrop Grumman (in-space robotic assembly, NextSTEP-2 cis-lunar habitat). B.S. Mechanical Engineering, Purdue (Valedictorian).
Dr. David Crabb — Co-Founder & CEO, Rovex Technologies
Founder and CEO of Rovex Technologies Corporation, an AI-powered robotics company focused on hospital logistics. David is a board-certified emergency medicine physician and clinical informaticist who spent nearly a decade at the University of Florida College of Medicine, serving as Assistant Medical Director of the UF Health Gainesville Adult Emergency Department and, most recently, Director of Clinical Informatics and Data Integration in the Department of Emergency Medicine. He brings a rare combination of frontline clinical experience, health-system data integration expertise, and a builder's instinct for using robotics to fix the operational chokepoints inside hospitals. M.D. and Clinical Informatics Fellowship, University of Florida.
Aayush Agrawal — Founding Team and Head of Engineering, Cavalla Inc
Head of Engineering and a founding team member at Cavalla in the Bay Area, building the next generation of autonomous forklifts. He architects the company's core autonomy stack, spanning perception, localization, planning, and safety-critical systems, for deployment in live warehouses. Aayush holds a graduate degree from Carnegie Mellon and an undergraduate degree from IIT Madras. At CMU, he was a perception researcher at the AIRLab, contributed to BMW-funded robotics research at the CMU AV Center, and engineered systems for the DARPA Triage Challenge. He previously co-founded TelebortiX, a heavy-payload VTOL drone company serving the Indian defense market in middle-mile logistics, valued at over $30M. He also led a 50-engineer team developing fully indigenous L5 autonomous shuttles for IIT Madras's "Team Abhiyaan." His work has been adopted by industry leaders including Caterpillar, Harman, and Smith & Nephew.
Akshay Chalana — CEO & Co-Founder, Saphira AI
Co-founder and CEO of Saphira AI, a Y Combinator–backed company building an AI Safety and Security Engineer for hardware. Saphira automates threat analyses, risk assessments, failure mode analyses, and safety concept development to get autonomous, robotic, and other hardware products ISO/UL/CE certified by bodies like TÜV and Intertek in record time — covering standards from ISO 13849, 13482, and 26262 to IEC 61508, ANSI/RIA R15.06/R15.08, and UN R155. Before Saphira, Akshay was a Systems Software Engineer at Citadel Securities on the trade management side of the trading ecosystem, and a Software Engineer at Apple's ML Platform team building data infrastructure for machine learning. Earlier, he interned across Facebook (contributing to ONNX), Tesla (hardware test tooling and firmware), Doppler Labs (deep learning for audio), and ran the youth financial-literacy nonprofit MoneySen.se for eight years. B.S. in Computer Science (Data Science) and Mathematics (Philosophy), University of Washington; YC S24.