Emily Zhao specializes in the shift from digital to physical AI at Salesforce Ventures, publishing her own market maps and a detailed robotics evaluation framework built from conversations with over 50 founders and researchers, while pushing investors to judge robots on real performance like quality, throughput, and robustness rather than polished demos. Her investments span the full arc from AI infrastructure to robotics, including Anthropic, Hugging Face, Runway, and Dyna Robotics, reflecting a path that took her from investment banking and private equity into frontier AI and robotics, backed by seven months of fieldwork grounded in lessons from past robotics failures.