United StatesLior Tal
Lior Tal is not a founder in the conventional sense — he is the executive who re-founded the company. Cyngn was incorporated in 2013 as Cyanogen Inc., a venture-backed startup built to commercialize CyanogenMod, the popular open-source Android operating system. Tal's own path ran through Israeli tech: after the IDF and a law-and-business degree from Reichman University, he held roles at Odigo, DiskSites and Actimize (all later acquired), then co-founded Snaptu in 2007, a platform that brought smartphone-style apps to feature phones and grew to tens of millions of users before Facebook acquired it in 2011. He spent the next five years at Facebook as a director of international growth and partnerships. Tal joined Cyanogen as Chief Operating Officer in June 2016, as the mobile-OS business was failing, and became CEO that October when co-founder Kirt McMaster stepped down. He then executed one of tech's more unusual pivots: winding down the Android business, renaming the company Cyngn in May 2017, and redirecting it toward autonomous driving for industrial and commercial vehicles. Under his leadership Cyngn built the DriveMod autonomy stack for forklifts, tuggers and other industrial fleets, and he took the company public on Nasdaq (CYN) in October 2021, where he continues to serve as CEO and director.