Hard Tech Venture Summit, From Silicon Valley to Boston: Systems as the Foundation of Physical AI

A month ago, the Hard Tech Venture Summit gathered founders, investors, and industry partners at SRI in Menlo Park. The Silicon Valley edition was developed in collaboration with the IEEE Systems Council – Industry Committee, which helped frame the event around systems-level thinking rather than isolated technologies.

The format was intentionally simple: one hundred vetted attendees, early-stage hardware startups pitching to a room of investors including Bosch Capital, Althing Ventures, Monozukuri Ventures, and others, combined with roundtable sessions designed to get people out of pitch mode and into real technical and commercial discussion. That mix ended up working better than expected. Conversations quickly moved away from “slide-deck narratives” and into practical constraints, especially around scale, manufacturing, and infrastructure dependencies.

One theme kept resurfacing: systems.

As discussions evolved, it became clear that the real constraint isn’t any single technology, but how complex hard-tech systems are composed, integrated, and scaled. Whether in energy infrastructure, photonics, RF, or robotics, the bottleneck shows up at the system level — where hardware, software, manufacturing, supply chains, and regulatory realities all intersect. AI infrastructure is a good example: the challenge is no longer just compute, but the full end-to-end system that delivers, distributes, and sustains it under real-world constraints. Within that framing, photonics and power electronics were repeatedly highlighted not as standalone solutions, but as enabling layers inside larger engineered systems.

Robotics and automation discussions followed a similar pattern. The framing has moved away from “replacing humans” toward systems where humans and machines share tasks in more deliberate, workflow-oriented ways.

Those conversations now pick up again in Boston.

On June 10–11, the Summit moves to the Thomas M. Menino Convention and Exhibition Center, co-located with IMS2026 — the IEEE International Microwave Symposium — under the leadership of Joanne Wong, Past President of IEEE Entrepreneurship and Secretary of the IEEE Systems Council. The Boston edition is further supported by the IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society, a member society of the Systems Council, reinforcing the event’s alignment with systems-level innovation across RF, microwave, and broader hard-tech architectures.

Over 8,000 RF and microwave professionals will be in Boston that week, which makes this edition feel less like a standalone startup event and more like a convergence point between deep engineering communities and venture ecosystems.

The series wraps in Toronto on October 20–21.

Hardware is hard. The window is still open.

Registration: https://entrepreneurship.ieee.org/venturesummitboston