The companies featured at the recent Bank of America Private Tech Trailblazers Conference point to where the next wave of AI growth is taking shape: specialized technology built around proprietary data, industry-specific workflows and, increasingly, purpose-built hardware. From restaurants and construction sites to hospitals, cross-border payments and defense, these companies are targeting defined problems where AI can produce measurable results.
That specialization is becoming more important as foundation models become increasingly interchangeable. Competitive advantage is shifting toward domain-specific data, vertical integration, trust and the capital required to build at scale. Companies controlling more of the stack, from GPU infrastructure and proprietary models to robotics and manufacturing, are betting that durability will matter more than novelty.
“The thing about AI is that specialized intelligence is a big story now,” said John Furrier, executive analyst at theCUBE Research. “It was a sleeper story about a year ago, but domain-specific data, these verticals have the necessary requirements because the GPUs want data, the systems want data, the intelligence comes out of the data, and that is the key.”
Furrier spoke with industry experts during the Bank of America Private Tech Trailblazers Conference 2026 in Palo Alto, California. The interviews covered humanoid and construction robotics, vertical AI agents in commerce, healthcare and finance, low-power AI chips, electric industrial vehicles and the capital markets funding all of it.
Here are nine standout insights from the event:
1. Bear Robotics adds humanoids to a fleet of 16,000 deployed robots.
Bear Robotics Inc. has about 16,000 autonomous mobile robots in the field, a backlog of about 4,000 and revenue that doubles every year, according to Bren Pierce, co-founder of Bear Robotics. Its core market is restaurants in Japan and Korea. It also serves care homes and casinos, and a partnership with LG is taking it into warehouses and factories. Pierce sold his humanoid startup, Kinisi, back to Bear, and the humanoids run on the same software base and cloud infrastructure as the mobile robots. Three things have cut work that once took six months down to days: foundation models that learn from a few hundred examples, onboard compute such as Nvidia Corp.’s Jetson Thor and coding with large language models. Tactile hands are still the missing piece, at about $30,000 per hand.
Check out theCUBE’s complete interview.
2. Construction robots work once the job site becomes semi-structured.
Labor makes up 55% to 60% of construction costs, and Address Robotics Ltd., which operates as All3, is building an integrated value chain to shrink that share, explained Rodion Shishkov, co-founder and chief executive officer of All3. Its software designs a building from the plot through permit-ready documents. A production layer then directs industrial robots to make one-of-a-kind elements at mass-production cost, and the company’s Mantis mobile robot assembles and finishes them on site. Because All3 designs the process as well as the robot, it can redesign the process to remove most corner cases instead of teaching robots to handle every one. After a seed round of about $25 million to $30 million, its first site is being prepared for a six-story co-living building on an odd, 11-sided plot.
Watch the full interview from theCUBE.
3. Proprietary models on proprietary data outperform off-the-shelf LLMs for Bloomreach.
The model layer is turning into a commodity, and the value is moving to vertical domains such as e-commerce and marketing, noted Raj De Datta, co-founder and CEO of Bloomreach Inc. Bloomreach uses about 100 models. Its Loomi AI engine, trained on 7 billion consumer profiles, produces models that perform five to 10 times better than out-of-the-box LLMs. Almost half of its customers already use an AI agent, the number using four agents has grown 23-fold in a year, and revenue is speeding up without any growth in headcount. Through its Loomi Connect offering, third-party agents can call the platform directly, and those calls are growing 83% month over month.
See theCUBE’s full coverage.
4. Electric trucks at diesel prices save fleets $30,000 a year on fuel.
Harbinger Motors Inc. sells electric and hybrid medium-duty vehicle platforms for the same price as diesel, and a typical parcel truck in California saves about $30,000 a year on fuel after charging costs, emphasized John Harris, co-founder and CEO of Harbinger. Its customers include FedEx Corp. and Thor Industries Inc., and the battery system it built for delivery trucks now powers Airstream travel trailers. Harbinger builds delivery trucks, RV chassis, energy storage systems and Army autonomous ground vehicles on the same production lines, and it only adds businesses that need no new capital spending. A partnership with American Rheinmetall is aimed at ground autonomy for defense, while Harbinger roughly doubles its output capacity every year.
Don’t miss the full interview on theCUBE.
5. Unconventional AI tapes out a chip in five months to cut AI power use 1,000x.
Unconventional Inc., which operates as Unconventional AI, is designing hardware and software together to reduce the power AI systems consume by about 1,000 times, highlighted Ali Esfahani, chief financial officer of Unconventional AI. Naveen Rao founded the company a year ago. It has raised about $540 million, grown from 14 employees in January to about 60 and taped out a chip at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. on June 1. That chip’s power numbers came in orders of magnitude below traditional systems. The approach computes with physics-based dynamics on standard semiconductor processes: the changing state of the system holds the memory, much as neural pathways do in the brain. The energy grid can only grow linearly, Esfahani argued, so today’s architectures can’t keep up.
Hear the full story on theCUBE.
6. Airwallex grows 60% a year by making global banking invisible.
Airwallex Pty Ltd. runs a global financial operating system that lets businesses open accounts, accept payments and issue cards in the world’s top 80 to 100 economies as if they were local, shared Irvin Sha, head of corporate development, capital markets and investor relations at Airwallex. The company was founded in Melbourne in 2015 and spent years building up more than 90 licenses, banking partnerships and card network connections. It now adds AI on top so customers’ agents can act for them. In agentic commerce, which Sha called a land grab, interoperability and accuracy that protect every party to a transaction will be essential. Airwallex raised about $960 million across its Series F, G and H rounds at a valuation of up to $11 billion and has about $1.4 billion in annual revenue run rate.
Catch the complete conversation on theCUBE.
7. Voice AI agents give patients the time a stretched healthcare system cannot.
Hippocratic AI Inc. builds voice agents that handle scheduling, pre-surgery preparation, follow-up after discharge and chronic disease management for health systems, payers and life sciences companies, all without diagnosing or prescribing, according to Shubhra Jain, chief business officer of Hippocratic AI. For safety, the system uses 31 models: one runs the conversation and 30 supervise it. Six health systems that invested in the company supplied 6 million real patient calls to fine-tune it. Because the agents aren’t measured on how quickly they end a call, they can build rapport using memory that carries across calls. In three years, the company has signed more than 60 enterprise clients, including five of the largest national payers.
Watch theCUBE’s full sit-down.
8. Private Tech Trailblazers highlights durability as AI companies weigh public markets.
The biggest change in the market is how much capital AI and robotics need, which means companies now go public at far greater scale, explained JD Moriarty (pictured), vice chairman and managing director, global head of TMT equity capital markets at Bank of America Corp. The bank tracks what it calls AI tailwind companies. Some of them were struggling two years ago and are now talking about going public. Public investors want durable, outsized growth above all, and for now scale is beating differentiation, as CoreWeave Inc. showed. In 2026, capital markets activity leans toward hardware and semiconductors rather than software, and the bank is focusing on integrated capital solutions that go beyond IPOs.
Explore theCUBE’s in-depth discussion.
9. CloudWalk automates 99% of customer support with agents running on its own GPUs.
CloudWalk Inc. serves more than 10 million active users through InfinitePay in Brazil, its new Pierre agent and JIM.com in the U.S., and has passed $2 billion in revenue with hundreds of millions in profit, noted Luis Silva, CEO and founder of CloudWalk. Half of those users talk to its agents every day, and the agents run on the company’s own cluster of hundreds of Nvidia Blackwell GPUs. Because CloudWalk is a regulated financial institution, it built guardrails into the core of its agents so they follow their owners’ instructions and rarely hallucinate when moving money. Agents now handle 99% of customer support, up from 65% 18 months ago, and the company brings in $2.7 million in revenue per employee.
Don’t miss the full segment on theCUBE.
Here’s more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Bank of America Private Tech Trailblazers Conference 2026: