Merritt Jenkins is CEO and co-founder of Kodama Systems, which builds teleoperation and autonomy technology for forestry equipment. He and co-founder Matt Verminski started the company in 2021 to address labor shortages and safety risks in logging, letting operators run skidders remotely using satellite connectivity, video, and lidar. Jenkins holds a mechanical engineering degree from Dartmouth College and a master's in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, where he worked on agricultural robotics under professor George Kantor. Before Kodama, he was a mechanical engineer at QBotix, a solar robotics company.