applied-ai
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MDB builds apps. The contracts buy lunch.
At Berkeley, a student development club connects paid software work with an unusually practical education. The small details - a name game, a lunch vote, eleven project milestones - explain how.
mdg sells the reason to show up
A trade show can rent a hall. Earning a place in someone’s calendar is harder. mdg builds the research, campaigns and digital tools that turn professional interest into participation.
Metajive makes the complicated feel obvious
A printer subscription. An AI filmmaking tool. A mountain company finding its voice. The California agency behind them has learned that good design starts with a business question.
Vooban Quit Selling Advice - Then Made AI Earn Its Keep on the Factory Floor
The Quebec City firm bet that companies do not need another AI lecture. They need fewer broken machines, smarter routes and a proof of value before the expensive part begins.
A Five-Year-Old University Is Trying to Make the Business Degree Prove Itself
International Business University has gone from 11 graduates to nearly 700 in two years. Its wager is simple: a young school can earn trust faster if every course leaves evidence an employer can understand.
Phenom Turned a Recruiting App Into the AI Layer for How Big Companies Hire
The Philadelphia-area company escaped the point-solution trap by expanding from a mobile recruiting app into a talent operating layer used by more than 700 organizations. The bet is compelling at enterprise scale - and much harder to justify without the data, integration budget and change management to feed it.
Percheron’s $8 Billion Bet on the People Who Keep America Running
Percheron Capital is turning fragmented, hands-on trades into scaled service platforms. Its unusual tool kit pairs high-velocity M&A with engineers who build AI alongside the frontline.
The Austin VC Firm Betting AI Will Leave the Chat Window
ATX Venture Partners built its name backing Texas software. Its newer thesis is more specific: applied AI that moves through factories, clinics, financial rails and orbit - with operators close enough to help when the software meets the real world.
The Venture Fund That Turned the YC Alumni Group Chat Into an AI Investing Machine
Orange Collective has made a narrow bet with a wide network: let more than 150 YC alumni help spot the AI founders worth backing. The result is part venture fund, part expert panel and part software-assisted research desk.
The VC Firm That Wants Four Bets - and a Seat in the Engine Room
Companyon Ventures does not sell founders on a giant portfolio or a famous logo wall. It makes four new bets a year, then tries to turn the messy stretch between product-market fit and Series A into an operating discipline.
The AI Fund Hunting in One Square Mile
milemark•capital is making a concentrated bet: the next useful AI companies will come from founders who know an industry’s pain intimately - and from research hubs that can turn difficult science into durable businesses.
The Venture Firm That Bought a Hospital
General Catalyst spent 25 years turning startups into giants. Then it did something no venture firm had done before - it bought a hospital.
The Company That Runs on Boring: How Simplify Group Turned 17 Years of Health Insurance Plumbing Into an AI Portfolio
For 17 years, Simplify Healthcare quietly ran the paperwork behind 70-plus health plans. In late 2025 its founder folded that experience into a four-company group betting that operational scar tissue, not just models, is what makes enterprise AI actually work.
Blueshoe
Blueshoe is an AI-native law firm that pairs licensed attorneys with proprietary legal reasoning software to make quality legal help affordable and always-on for individuals and small businesses. Founded in 2025 by Harvard Law graduate Casey O'Grady and MIT-trained engineer Kai Yee Wan, the Y Combinator-backed company started as a legal-reasoning research platform piloted at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia law schools, then extended into a full-stack firm covering employment, housing, consumer, personal injury, and product-liability matters without billable hours.
Percepta
Percepta is a New York-based AI transformation company, wholly owned and incubated by venture firm General Catalyst, that embeds teams of researchers, engineers, and product managers directly inside large enterprises to move them past AI pilots and into AI-native operations. Founded in 2025 by CEO Hirsh Jain (a former Palantir SVP) and General Catalyst's Hemant Taneja, the company pairs applied engineering with a frontier research lab to rebuild core workflows in healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and government - working closely with founding partners Anthropic and AWS.
Fleet AI, Inc.
Fleet AI is an applied research lab building training gyms for AI agents - high-fidelity simulation environments that model real work so frontier models can practice, fail, and learn under human supervision. The company partners with AI labs, hyperscalers, and enterprises to develop the next generation of embodied, drop-in virtual assistants.
QBurst
QBurst is a global digital product engineering and consulting firm founded in 2004 in Trivandrum, India. It builds custom software, cloud platforms, data and AI solutions, and digital experiences for a blue-chip client base across the US, Japan, Europe, the Middle East, and South Africa. Now majority-owned by Multiples Alternate Asset Management after a ~USD 200 million 2025 deal, QBurst employs roughly 3,500 people across more than 20 cities and positions itself as a 'High AI-Q' partner blending human expertise with intelligent technology.