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Podcast/Video Interviews by Stephen Ibaraki

A Chat with Will Taubenheim: Serial Founder, Tech Entrepreneur and AI expert - CEO Next Pillar, 4x NASA Award Winner

This week, Stephen Ibaraki has an exclusive interview with Will Taubenheim.

Will TaubenheimWill Taubenheim is an AI engineer, founder, and keynote speaker who builds autonomous systems for NASA, the U.S. Department of Defense, and enterprise operators, and now applies that operating playbook to acquiring and modernizing established service businesses at Next Pillar Capital.

Will grew up in Wisconsin around the trades and founded Lost Frame Development in 2018 - a game studio that became the engine for everything after. Lost Frame's owned VR IP (the Stranger & StrangerZ franchise) scaled past 2.5 million users across Steam, Meta Quest, and Fanatical, and Will served as technical lead on Escape the Backrooms, a co-op horror phenomenon with 130,000+ positive Steam reviews and millions of players - an IP universe A24 has since taken to film. Across five shipped game experiences, his portfolio reach exceeds 3 million players. That work earned an Epic Games MegaGrant for Battle Builders VR and, in 2022, Meta's Presence Platform Grant - Meta flew Will to headquarters to consult on Quest 3 development, a partnership that began with Luxe Casino, a stereoscopic VR platform he built on a custom Unreal Engine 5 pipeline. He later took 2nd place at Meta's NYC hackathon and was among the first to run UE 5.4 on Apple Vision Pro.

From games, Will moved to frontier hardware and defense. He won the NASA LunaRecycling Challenge - leading the winning submission from over 1,200 global entries with a digital-twin system for recycling lunar waste into 3D-printing feedstock, and followed it with a second NASA award for Phase 2 prototype development. His defense work includes AIRAS, an AI-integrated ballistic missile defense architecture for U.S. Navy destroyers; ARFAS, an autonomous wildfire-suppression system recognized by NAWCTSD and SERDP; the AIMS-Cert architecture down-selected by Air Force Global Strike Command for automated flight certification of additive-manufactured aircraft parts; and fire-detection training systems for the Naval Air Warfare Center. He presented at the I/ITSEC defense conference, and his healthcare work includes an AI-powered VR exposure-therapy platform built with UCF RESTORES for veterans and first responders with PTSD.

In parallel, Will works as a fractional CTO and AI engineer for founders and executive teams across healthcare, real estate, defense, and document intelligence, architecture, hands-on builds, and technical due diligence, taking companies from uncertain idea to working system in weeks. He co-founded RareOS, an AI operating system for the $462B buy/sell/trade industry (The Ventures Miami finalist), and is the author of a 248,000-word State of AI research report drawing on 200+ sources and 26 months of primary data collection. He keynotes nationally on AI strategy, AI & geopolitics, autonomous systems, and the future of work, recent engagements include the Entrepreneurs' Organization DC chapter, the Greater Brookfield Chamber of Commerce AI Summit, and an upcoming international industry-association keynote in Nashville - and he donates significant speaking work because practical AI literacy is the philanthropic lever he cares most about.

Today Will is Co-Founder and Managing Member, Technology & Capital at Next Pillar Capital, an AI-enabled acquisition platform for mandated building-compliance trade businesses, beginning in Tampa Bay. He architects the firm's proprietary AI stack, leads investor relationships, and directs technical diligence and post-acquisition value creation.

Will Taubenheim links:

https://willtaubenheim.com

https://nextpillarcapital.com

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TO WATCH THE VIDEO INTERVIEW, CLICK ON THIS MP4 file link