Cognex

Holds a B.S.E.E. from Northeastern University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from MIT, where he later lectured on human visual perception. While on the Electrical Engineering faculty at Tufts University, he founded Cognex in 1981 with $86,000 of personal savings, recruiting two MIT graduate students to pioneer machine vision for industrial inspection. He served as CEO for 30 years until 2011, took the company public on Nasdaq in 1989, and was named Inc. magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year in 1990.