Introducing the 2026 Long Journey Residents

We're excited to share the 11 founders who'll be participating in the Long Journey Residency at Edge Esmeralda 2026.

This is year two of the program, a month-long launchpad for builders chasing ideas that feel too early, too weird, or too ambitious for traditional investors. It runs with Long Journey, whose team has collectively backed 30+ unicorns.

From orbital refueling to ocean robotics, AI memory systems to renewable data centers in the Philippines, physics-grade reasoning to clinical trial intelligence, this year's residents are tackling frontier problems across AI, space, climate, biotech, education, and the built environment.

Over the next month, they'll live and build together in Healdsburg, supported by Long Journey mentors, founder dinners, and the full Edge Esmeralda village. Last year's cohort produced multi-million dollar follow-on rounds and a handful of teams that came together inside the residency itself.

We're excited to see what they build.

Andy Rapista

Andy is building renewable-powered AI data centers in the Philippines, starting with a 100 MW utility-scale solar plant and tapping into geothermal next (the Philippines is the world's third-largest geothermal producer). She sees the climate crisis and the AI buildout as the same problem: racing to power the future with the fuels of the past.

The company traces back to last year's Edge Esmeralda, where she built a working solar panel prototype during the residency. The prototype worked, and the conviction to build the company in earnest came with it.

Previously Chief of Staff at SF Compute and an early employee at Notion, where she built Notion for Startups, SMB, Nonprofit, and Education. She helps lead Notion Angel Group, runs MAD Earth Foundation (3 million trees planted with indigenous tribes in the Philippines, plus coral reef restoration), and was a UN World Oceans Day featured poet. Andy uses film, poetry, and sport to push climate action.

Find her on X: @andyrapista

Annie Zhang

Annie is building Selfish, a social network that makes the essence of people legible and fosters high-resonance connections.

Previously, Annie led 0→1 consumer social bets at Facebook and Roblox, building apps like Hobbi and Catchup to digital concerts, fashion shows, and watch parties in the metaverse. She is obsessed with how we find language for our internal worlds, and what becomes possible when you can name the intangible.

Find her on X: @anni3zhang

Casey Silverstein

Casey is building tools that make the built environment feel as dynamic and ornate as the worlds we craft in games and films. His work transfers the knowledge of the world's last master craftspeople, before it dies with them, into the machines that will build the next century.

Previously he oversaw the fabrication of complex artworks across the US and Europe, and built hardware and software systems that let a single untrained cook produce restaurant-quality meals in a mobile kitchen.

Clement Sutjiatma

Clement is building sea robots to make offshore operations safer, cheaper, and more scalable. He aims to grow the ocean's GDP by leveraging autonomy and robotics to supercharge the maritime workforce.

Clement grew up surfing and diving across archipelagic Indonesia, and previously led mission-critical work at Palantir and Chainlink.

Dishita Bhasin

Dishita is a Product Manager and Computer Science graduate building toward the external memory layer of the human mind. With 4+ years of experience at YC-backed startups, she was most recently the sole PM at Extern, where she led full product strategy, platform rebuild, and a business model transition that grew the company to $1M+ ARR.

She has built and shipped multiple 0-to-1 AI products across voice interfaces, contextual memory systems, and multimodal intelligence. She has published peer-reviewed research, co-authored Microsoft Learn's Data Science for Beginners curriculum (34K+ GitHub stars), and is a Generation Google Scholar (APAC).

Find her on X: @dishitarocks

Helen Huang

Helen is exploring how we quantify judgment, taste, and character in an age of AI. With Trove, she's helping people showcase their human edge through play: a new kind of profile built from how people act, not just what they say.

Find her on X: @heyohelen

Herbie Bradley

Herbie is a final-year PhD student at Cambridge studying synthetic data generation with LLMs. He was previously part of the founding technical staff at the UK AI Security Institute, working on policy, infrastructure, and helping to build the team.

Liz Wells

Liz is building Omnalis, a protocol intelligence platform that catches cross-document conflicts in clinical trial submissions before they reach the FDA, preventing the holds and amendments that delay therapies by months and cost sponsors hundreds of thousands of dollars.

At Edge Esmeralda, she'll run Omnalis as a living field lab, using structured sessions and human-in-the-loop workflows with builders and scientists to strengthen protocol intelligence models. Liz co-designed the first MPH concentration in Healthcare AI at Brown University, and her work has centered on the impact of policy on advancing innovations that improve access to patients and public health.

Find her on X: @TheTechBioGirl

Miller Norris

Miller is a 19-year-old entrepreneur who dropped out of school to go all in on San Francisco and build toward changing the broken system of education. He's building in fintech and plans to close his first round shortly after the residency ends.

Find him on X: @MillerNorris3

Richa Sharma

Richa is building QEM Labs, the training grounds for superhuman physics reasoning and the verification layer for the scientific intelligence emerging from frontier AI.

Her thesis: human intuition evolved on the African savanna to track prey across three dimensions, not to reason about eleven-dimensional spacetime. So far, physics has depended on genetic lottery tickets (Einstein, Newton, Witten) appearing once a century to drag us forward. QEM Labs replaces the wait: a membrane that diffuses frontier intelligence from siloed institutions to anyone hungry enough to reach for the stars.

Find her on X: @richa_lq

Richard Nederlander

Richard is building the gas stations of orbit. Spargo Space develops propellant depots and autonomous docking software for the emerging in-space refueling market, with an ISS flight demo scheduled mid-2026 via NASA Astrobee.

Previously Radiation Effects Engineer at Blue Origin and Senior Space Environments Engineer at Aegis Aerospace (NASA KSC). Published in IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science. Payload 30-Under-30. PhD in ECE from Vanderbilt, BA in Astrophysics from Columbia.

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Want to follow their progress? We'll be sharing updates from the Long Journey cohort throughout the month. Make sure to follow along on X @JoinEdgeCity.

— The Edge Esmeralda Team ☀️

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