Sydney M. Katz is Co-Founder and CTO at Valgo, a Y Combinator-backed company building algorithmic safety validation tools for autonomous systems across aviation, robotics, defense, and other safety-critical domains.

Sydney earned a PhD in Aerospace/Astronautics from Stanford University with a thesis on safe machine learning and completed postdoctoral research at Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory. Sydney also authored the textbook Algorithms for Validation and teaches Validation of Safety-Critical Systems at Stanford.

Sydney holds a Stanford PhD focused on designing and validating safety-critical decision-making systems using optimization, Bayesian inference, probabilistic model checking, neural network verification, and reachability analysis. Sydney has worked on FAA-certified collision avoidance systems at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and contributed to ACAS X development.

Prior to Valgo, Sydney worked at Reliable Robotics, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and NASA, gaining deep expertise in autonomous systems validation and certification. Valgo was founded in 2025 and is part of Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch, based in San Mateo, California.

Valgo's platform efficiently finds rare and realistic failure events in simulation at a fraction of the compute cost of existing approaches, accelerating autonomous systems development and certification. The company's black-box tools are agnostic to models and simulators, applicable across industries including autonomous vehicles, aviation, robotics, space, defense, energy, and finance.