Stanford alumni pulse, Sep. 21–28: a $117M gas-turbine launch, a $350M data round and two financial-services moves

The week of Sep. 21–28, 2026 produced four verified developments from Stanford's engineering, computer science and business school network, involving five people. A mechanical engineering graduate brought a gas-turbine company out of stealth with $117 million behind it. Snorkel AI, a training-data company founded out of a Stanford lab, raised $350 million. Ascensus hired a computer science graduate as its chief product officer. Two business school alumni closed a $3.5 million round for Mona, a platform that helps small businesses find credit. 1234

Parallax came out of stealth on Sep. 24 with $117 million raised to date. Eclipse co-led a $42 million seed round with Lux Capital, Founders Fund and Valor, and Greylock and General Catalyst led a $75 million Series A. 15

The machine Parallax is building is a roughly 10-megawatt gas turbine sized for a data center that makes its own power on site. It runs at a lower combustion temperature than utility and aircraft turbines do. That costs some fuel efficiency and lets the company build the two hardest parts to source out of the design: single-crystal blades, cast by two suppliers worldwide, and a rhenium superalloy with global supply of about 60 tons a year. Parallax 3D-prints the core, taking a part count that runs past 2,000 in a conventional turbine down to a handful, and it plans a prototype by the end of 2026, testing next year and deliveries in 2028. 15

Grid connections for large data centers take years, and the major turbine makers quote delivery dates that slip into the 2030s. Parallax's bet is that a cheaper, less efficient turbine that ships in a container reaches a data center sooner than a high-efficiency machine that a buyer waits years for. 15

Carl Schoeller, the founder and chief executive, has built hardware before. He co-founded Theseus, which sells software that lets drones navigate when GPS is jammed or spoofed, after three engineers built a GPS-free drone at a February 2024 hackathon and the post about it went viral; he was Theseus's chief executive, and his profile lists a year as a lead mechanical engineer at Until before he started Parallax in March 2026. 89

He was a Stanford senior when that hackathon happened. 10 Stanford's directory lists him in the Mechanical Engineering department, and his LinkedIn profile gives a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering completed in 2024. 911 For an applicant weighing hardware work against software, this is a short path made visible: a 2024 engineering graduate moved from defense drone software into power generation, and the round was raised before the company shipped a unit, on the strength of the founder's record and the design. Parallax is currently building its manufacturing headquarters in California. 5

Snorkel AI raised $350 million in a Series E that values the company at $3.5 billion, announced on Sep. 22. Insight Partners and S32 led the round, with existing investors including Addition, Greylock and Wells Fargo also participating. 2 The valuation sits close to three times the $1.3 billion the company carried when it raised $100 million in May 2025. 2

Two figures for the company's growth were published on the same day, and they differ. Reuters reported that Snorkel said its annualized revenue run rate had crossed $350 million, from about $20 million a year earlier. TechCrunch reported the same measure at $375 million, an eighteenfold increase over 12 months. Both figures come from the company. 212

The business has changed shape, which is where the growth is coming from. Snorkel started by selling software that automates data labeling and now sells finished datasets and reinforcement-learning environments, drawing on a network of tens of thousands of specialists in fields such as coding, law and medicine, with models handling much of the quality checking. 212

Alex Ratner has run Snorkel since it launched commercially in 2019, and this week's news is a funding milestone for the company. He holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford, awarded in 2019, and the company grew out of four years of research by him and his team at a Stanford AI lab. 1213 Ratner told Reuters the money will pay for researchers and engineers, an expanded enterprise and government business, support for third-party model evaluations, and new industries and data types, and the company expects to reach profitability this year. 2

Ascensus announced on Sep. 22 that John Shapiro joined the company as chief product officer and as a member of its executive leadership team, reporting to chief executive Nick Good. 3

Shapiro arrives from Lightspeed Commerce, where he was also chief product officer, and he held product leadership roles earlier at Wayfair, Intuit and Adobe. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a bachelor's degree in computer science from Stanford. 3

Ascensus administers the savings machinery behind other institutions: qualified and nonqualified retirement plans, third-party retirement plan administration, 529 education and ABLE savings programs, corporate- and bank-owned life insurance, and fiduciary services. The company says it supports more than 16 million savers and oversees more than $1.3 trillion in assets under administration as of Aug. 3, 2026. 3

The move keeps the same title and changes the industry. Shapiro ran product for a commerce platform; he now runs product for a regulated savings administrator, where the users are plan sponsors, state programs and financial institutions. For an applicant mapping where a Stanford computer science degree can lead, the destination here is a financial-services firm: the product organization Shapiro now leads sits behind savings programs that more than 16 million people use. 3

Mona announced an oversubscribed $3.5 million round on Sep. 28, led by Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, the venture firm of former Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and Tom Bernthal. Alumni Ventures, Wisdom Ventures and angel investors including former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt participated, and the Mastercard Strive USA Innovation Fund also backs the company. 414

The product gives a small business owner one application and matches it to loans, grants and government programs, then pairs the software with human coaching. Mona says it has supported thousands of small businesses and that its early users cluster in Chicago, Detroit, Jacksonville, New York City and San Francisco. 4

Andrew Leon Hanna and Anny Dow met at Stanford, and both hold MBAs from the business school; Hanna is listed by the school as MBA '22, and Dow, Mona's chief product officer, holds an MBA from Stanford GSB. 4715 For an applicant reading the network, this entry is a seed-sized round closed by two GSB graduates with a fund run by a former Meta executive leading it and a former Google chief executive among the angels. 4

Four developments, five people, three disclosed rounds adding to about $470 million, and one executive appointment. Two of the four are career moves: Schoeller started a company, and Shapiro changed employers. The other two are funding milestones at companies whose leaders stayed in their roles. 1234

Three fields make the entries comparable across weeks. The first is how much money moved and at what stage: Eclipse's $42 million seed, Parallax's $75 million Series A inside a $117 million total, Snorkel's $350 million Series E, and Mona's $3.5 million round. The second is the sector: power equipment for data centers, training data for AI labs, retirement and savings administration, and credit access for small businesses. The third is how much operating experience each person carried into the moment. Schoeller had already co-founded a defense hardware company; Ratner has run Snorkel for seven years; Shapiro brought product leadership from four software companies; Hanna and Dow each hold a GSB MBA, and their earlier work sits in law and in product design. 234578

Four items describe this week, and each stands on its own facts: where one person went, what one company raised, what one team announced. Two of the four companies already sell to customers and two are earlier than that, so a reader watching where the network lands in energy, AI data or financial services will need several more weeks before the balance between those industries shows up in the count.