AI-Native

🚀 Apply to Nebius for Startups: https://www.nebius.com/startups

🎧 Explore more episodes: https://www.nebius.com/startups/podcast

Alex Ren is the Founding Partner of Fellows Fund and the organizer of Fellows Forum. A former entrepreneur, Alex has spent the last decade building a high-quality community of AI leaders, researchers, and tech executives—bridging the gap between deep technology and venture capital.

In this conversation, Alex explains how Fellows Fund is rethinking the traditional VC model through a “fellowship” of 36 AI leaders who provide hands-on support and industry access to startups.

He shares his core investment philosophy—“traction is all you need”—and why founders must operate aggressively to stay ahead in today’s “Wild West” era of AI.

We also dive into the three technologies Alex believes will be most disruptive in 2026:

• AI-generated coding

• Video generation

• Physical AI in robotics

👤 About the Guest

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexchengmingren

X: https://x.com/AlexFellowsFund

Fellows Fund: https://www.fellowsfundvc.com/

Fellows Fund LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fellows-fund

🚀  About Nebius for Startups

Nebius for Startups partners with leading AI founders building for scale—providing GPU credits, hands-on engineering support, and a global ecosystem to accelerate growth.

Reduce infrastructure bottlenecks, avoid scaling missteps, and move faster.

👉 Apply now: https://www.nebius.com/startups

🌐 About Nebius

Website: https://www.nebius.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nebius

X: https://x.com/nebiusai

In this episode, host Anubhav Maheshwari speaks with Lukas Pankau, co-founder and CEO of Industrial Next, an award winner from the NEAS Robotics and Physical AI Summit and Awards competition. 

Lukas shares how his and co-founder Alan’s experience at Tesla during the Model 3 ramp inspired them to bring modern autonomy and intelligence into factories, where industrial robots are typically pre-programmed and lack contextual understanding. He explains Industrial Next’s vision of an “AI autopilot for a factory,” including the need for deeper robot control than many manufacturers currently expose, the importance of integrating with legacy factory systems, and cases where the company provides hardware alongside optimized software. 

Lukas also describes how improved line visibility and data can transform productivity, supply-chain responsiveness, and even enable more localized, modular manufacturing—reducing waste from scrapped production lines and supporting reshoring for cost and national security reasons. He closes with near-term goals of running a fully designed production line with their equipment, ongoing hiring needs across AI and engineering roles, and his success metric: being able to buy electronics built locally at a lower price than today.

More about Lukas:

Lukas Pankau is the Co-Founder and CEO (sometimes referred to as co-CEO or CTO in various sources) of Industrial Next (also styled as IndustrialNext or industrialnext.ai), a startup focused on autonomous manufacturing, robotics, and AI-driven production systems, particularly for industries like electric vehicles (EV) and general manufacturing.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukaspankau/

Company Website: https://industrialnext.ai/

For more information about Nebius, head to Nebius.com

Follow us on X @nebius.ai

Curious about the latest in autonomous systems? In this episode of The Nubius for Startups podcast (special series from the Nebius Robotics and Physical AI Summit and awards competition), host Anubhav Maheshwari speaks with Mustafa Bal, co-founder and CEO of Nomadic ML.

In recent years, the realm of autonomous systems has experienced rapid evolution and innovation, paving the way for groundbreaking changes in how these systems interact with the world around them. At the forefront of this transformative wave is Nomadic ML, co-founded by Mustafa Bal. This pioneering company is setting new standards in the development and deployment of autonomous technologies, and its journey is nothing short of fascinating.

Bal shares his background in ML infrastructure at Snowflake and Microsoft’s AI frameworks team (including work on open-source libraries like DeepSpeed, ONNX Runtime, and PyTorch, and early work around GPT-3 and Azure ML), and explains how Nomadic ML evolved from a general ML tuning solution into a vision AI data layer focused on automating data labeling for autonomous systems.

The conversation centers on identifying long-tail edge cases in operational video and multi-sensor data (dash cam, LiDAR, and logs), using a constellation of open and closed multimodal models, and adding internal innovations to improve contextual motion understanding across video chunks.

They cover the tradeoffs between open vs. closed models (capabilities, inference costs, token pricing), fine-tuning and feedback loops driven by engineers accepting/rejecting/editing surfaced events, and the importance of reaching 95%+ accuracy while minimizing human involvement to optional verification. 

Learn how they're transforming the landscape with human-level insights in data processing. Listen now! 

Find out more about Mustafa:

Mustafa Bal is the co-founder and CEO of NomadicML (also stylized as Nomadic ML), a San Francisco-based AI company focused on visual AI for physical autonomy. The company specializes in semantic video understanding, turning raw video footage (e.g., from autonomous vehicles, robotics, and fleets) into structured datasets, edge case detection, and actionable insights using generative AI and video-language models to accelerate autonomy development.

Find out more:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mstfbl 

GitHub: https://github.com/mstfbl 

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=LUPy_-IAAAAJ 

Company Website: https://www.nomadicml.com 

For more information about Nebius, head to Nebius.com

Follow us on X @nebius.ai 

Sean Mitchell is the Vice President of Customer Operations at Gather AI, where he has spent the last six years scaling the company from its early advisory stages through to its Series B funding. With a deep focus on customer experience, Sean bridges the gap between complex robotics and the practical, high-stakes needs of modern warehouse managers.

In this episode, we sit down with Sean to discuss how Gather AI is transforming "the black box" of the warehouse using autonomous drones and Vision AI. We explore the company’s fascinating origin story rooted in Carnegie Mellon PhD research and military-grade autonomous helicopters. We also discuss how they’ve successfully pivoted that tech to help retailers and manufacturers never lose a pallet again. Sean explains why they choose off-the-shelf hardware over custom robots, the challenges of flying drones in -30°F freezers, and his vision for a future where a fully digitized warehouse is the industry standard.

Find out more:

Sean Mitchell is the Vice President of Customer Operations at Gather AI.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seantmitchell/

X (Twitter): https://x.com/gather_ai (or @gather_ai)

Company website: https://www.gather.ai/

For more information about Nebius head to Nebius.com

Follow us on X @nebius.ai

Matt Schwartz is a biomedical engineer and the CEO and Founder of Virgo. Before launching Virgo in 2017, he served as a product manager at Intuitive Surgical, where he worked on the Da Vinci Robotic surgery system.

Inside the Episode In this episode, Matt sits down to discuss how Virgo has captured the world’s largest dataset of gastrointestinal endoscopy videos, now totaling over 3 million procedures. Matt shares the founding story of the company, the challenges of convincing hospitals to embrace cloud storage, and the technical hurdles of building "EndoDINO," a self-supervised AI foundation model for endoscopic imaging.

The conversation explores the massive potential for AI to detect signals for chronic kidney, liver, and cardiovascular diseases that are currently undetectable to the human eye. Matt also breaks down how Virgo is partnering with pharmaceutical companies to accelerate clinical trials and his ultimate goal: making video recording the default standard of care for every procedure.

Find out more:

Matt Schwartz is the CEO and Founder of Virgo.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mzschwartz88/

X (Twitter): https://x.com/virgosvs (or @virgosvs)

Company website: https://virgosvs.com/

For more information about Nebius head to Nebius.com

Follow us on X @nebius.ai

In this episode of The Nebius for Startups podcast special series from the Nebius Robotics and Physical AI Summit and Awards, Anubhav Maheshwari speaks with Kangwook Lee (KW), Chief Business Officer of RLWRLD, an award winner in the foundation models, robot brains, and runtime category.

Dive into how they are revolutionizing the robotics industry with their innovative approach to dexterous hand manipulation and humanoid integration. From collaborations with leading East Asian companies to preparing a global expansion, Real World's story is a testament to the potential of combining cutting-edge technology with strategic partnerships. Discover the key challenges and milestones they've tackled along the way. Listen now and stay ahead in the robotics revolution! 

#Robotics #AI #Innovation #StartupJourney .

Find out more about KW:

Kangwook Lee serves as the Chief Business Officer at RLWRLD Inc, a company focused on building real-world intelligence and revolutionizing robotics through Robotics Foundation Models (RFM) and physical AI technologies. 

The company, launched with significant seed funding (around 21 billion KRW in 2025), has partnerships with major manufacturers in South Korea and Japan and has achieved recognition, including 1st place in Foundation Models, Robot Brains & Runtime at the 2025 Nebius Robotics & Physical AI Awards.

LinkedIn: https://kr.linkedin.com/in/kangwook 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kangwook 

Company website: https://www.rlwrld.ai/ 

X (Twitter): https://x.com/RLWRLD_ai (or @RLWRLD_ai)

For more information about Nebius, head to Nebius.com

Follow us on X @nebius.ai