b2b-ai
(4)
Arcee AI
Arcee AI is a San Francisco-based open intelligence lab that builds small, efficient, US-made language models enterprises can own, customize and run inside their own infrastructure. Founded in 2023 by former Hugging Face and Roboflow operators, the company pioneered practical techniques like model merging (via its acquisition of mergekit) and Spectrum training, and has expanded from small language models into its own open-weight Arcee Foundation Model family, the Trinity mixture-of-experts models, and agentic products such as Arcee Conductor and Arcee Orchestra. Its pitch: smaller, domain-adapted models that rival frontier systems at a fraction of the cost while keeping data private.
Siva Surendira
Siva Surendira is the founder and CEO of Lyzr AI, a Jersey City-based enterprise agent infrastructure platform building what he calls an Agentic Operating System for Fortune 500 companies in finance, retail, and government. A two-time founder, he previously built PowerUpCloud (acquired by L&T in 2019) and started Lyzr in 2023. Lyzr raised an $8M Series A in 2025 followed by a $14.5M Series A+ in March 2026 led by Accenture Ventures, pushing valuation to about $250M.
Guide Labs
Guide Labs is a San Francisco AI research company building interpretable foundation models - large language and diffusion models that can reliably explain how they reach an answer, trace outputs back to their training data, and be steered without retraining. Founded in 2023 by machine-learning researcher Julius Adebayo and colleagues from the academic interpretability world, the company argues that the black-box status quo is a solvable engineering problem, not an unavoidable cost of scale. Its flagship open-source release, Steerling-8B, is pitched as the first large-scale inherently interpretable language model, and its Clarity platform packages interpretability tools for teams in regulated, high-stakes fields like lending, medicine, and drug discovery.
Troy Kirwin
Troy Kirwin is an Investment Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Cohort Lead for a16z speedrun, the firm's pre-seed accelerator program. A native New Yorker now based in San Francisco, he focuses on B2B AI and creative tech - including next-gen storytelling and design tools, marketing technology, 3D simulations, and vertical AI agents. Before a16z, he spent roughly 4.5 years as a Senior Manager at Unity Technologies, where he orchestrated over 20 acquisitions including Parsec and IronSource. He started his career as an investment banking analyst at Jefferies covering media and tech clients. His portfolio includes K-ID, Hedra, Backflip, Nunu.ai, and a dozen more.