Stefan Heck

Non-Executive Chairman of the Board Empiric Earth

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Dr. Stefan Heck founded Nauto in 2015 and spent eleven years building it into an AI fleet-safety platform that used in-cab and forward-facing vision to predict and prevent collisions for commercial vehicle fleets. In 2026 Nauto merged with the Israeli-founded dashcam and road-intelligence company Nexar; the combined business launched on 15 September 2026 as Empiric Earth, which licenses an independent record of how roads, vehicles and drivers actually behave and builds safety and prediction models on top of it. Heck moved from operating the business to governing it, serving as non-executive chairman of the combined company’s board while Nexar’s Zach Greenberger took the chief executive role. Before Nauto he was a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company, where he co-founded and led the firm’s global Cleantech and Sustainability practice, and a Consulting Professor at Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy.

Career Highlights

• Founded Nauto in 2015 and served as its Chief Executive Officer until the 2026 Nexar merger; Empiric Earth now lists him as non-executive chairman of its board.
• Named “AutoTech CEO of the Year” in the 2025 AutoTech Breakthrough Awards, following the company’s “Driver Safety Solution of the Year” award in 2023 and “Fleet Management Innovator of the Year” in 2024.
• Co-founded and led McKinsey & Company’s Cleantech and Sustainability practice as a Senior Partner, working with Global 100 technology, industrial, infrastructure, building-systems, retail, utility and energy companies across the US, China, Korea, Japan, India and Europe.
• Directed Stanford’s Energy Transformation Collaborative and was a research fellow at the Steyer-Taylor Center, a joint centre of Stanford’s business and law schools, alongside his consulting professorship at the Precourt Institute for Energy.
• Wrote “Resource Revolution: How to Capture the Biggest Business Opportunity in a Century”, and has served on the boards of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, GaN Systems and SRI International.

Professional Journey

Heck’s early career was at McKinsey & Company, where he became a Senior Partner and co-founded the firm’s Cleantech and Sustainability practice, leading it globally. The work spanned heavy industry, utilities, infrastructure and building systems across three continents, and produced the argument he later set out in “Resource Revolution” — that the largest business opportunity of the century lies in radically more productive use of physical resources.

He then moved to Stanford, serving as a Consulting Professor at the Precourt Institute for Energy, directing the Energy Transformation Collaborative and holding a research fellowship at the Steyer-Taylor Center at the university’s business and law schools. That period sat between the consulting career and the founding of a company, and gave him a research base in energy and transport systems.

Nauto was founded in 2015. Its premise was that most serious collisions are preventable if a system can read what is happening inside and outside the vehicle at the same time, and warn the driver before the event rather than record it afterwards. Under Heck the company built an AI dashcam and fleet-safety platform sold to commercial fleets across logistics, utilities, energy, food and beverage and field service, and accumulated more than a decade of recorded real-world driving. He was still serving as CEO in October 2025, when the company announced his AutoTech Breakthrough award.

In July 2026 Nauto and Nexar — also founded in 2015, and holder of a comparable road-observation record — announced a definitive agreement to merge, with BofA Securities advising Nauto and Fenwick & West acting as its legal counsel. The combined company launched as Empiric Earth on 15 September 2026, headquartered in New York with offices in Tel Aviv, Porto, Sunnyvale, Dublin and Tokyo, and holding a combined record of more than 10 billion miles of observed driving. Nexar’s Zach Greenberger became chief executive; Heck became non-executive chairman of the board, on which he sits alongside Reid Hoffman, Yann LeCun, Michael Eisenberg, Francis Suarez and Jen Vescio. He continues to serve as a director of SRI International, the Menlo Park research institute, and is an active angel investor.

Education

University of California, San Diego

PhD, Cognitive Science

Stanford University

B.S. with honors, Symbolic Systems