Bikky is a customer data platform built exclusively for large, multi-unit restaurant brands. It unifies data from point-of-sale systems, online ordering, payments, and loyalty programs into a single guest view, letting operators measure how every marketing, menu, and operational decision affects guest behavior, frequency, and lifetime value. Founded in 2017 and based in New York City, Bikky serves brands like Bojangles, Dave's Hot Chicken, MOD Pizza, and Robeks across thousands of locations.
Botify is an enterprise platform that helps large brands stay discoverable across search engines and AI assistants. Founded in Paris in 2012 and now headquartered in New York, it combines large-scale website crawling, server-log analysis, AI-driven recommendations and automation to protect and grow organic traffic. As search shifts toward AI answers and shopping agents, Botify has repositioned around 'agentic AI' visibility, serving 500+ brands including Marriott, Expedia, Farfetch, Macy's and The New York Times.
Compyl is a New York-based SaaS company that unifies governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) on a single platform. Founded in 2020 by former CISOs, it pulls evidence directly from more than 125 integrated systems, maps controls across 70+ frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA, and uses agentic AI to draft evidence, score vendors and answer security questionnaires while keeping humans in control of decisions. Compyl raised a $12M Series A in June 2025 to scale its AI-led platform for mid-market and enterprise security teams.
Default is a New York-based go-to-market software company building the data and infrastructure layer that revenue teams - and their AI agents - use to run sales, marketing, and operations. It began as an all-in-one inbound platform for lead routing, scheduling, forms, and enrichment, then rebuilt itself around a real-time revenue data layer and an AI agent named Dot that plans and executes GTM work across a company's connected CRM, marketing, and enrichment systems. Backed by 8VC, Craft Ventures, and Jack Altman with $20M in total funding, Default serves fast-growing companies including Perplexity, Cortex, Owner, and Airbyte.
Knox Systems is an Austin, Texas company that operates a pre-authorized, AI-managed federal cloud so that commercial SaaS vendors can reach FedRAMP authorization in roughly 90 days for about 90% less than the traditional cost. By running a shared, continuously monitored compliance boundary across AWS, Azure, and GCP, Knox lets customer applications inherit 60-80% of required security controls on day one, then automates evidence collection, documentation, and remediation. Founded in 2023 by Irina Denisenko, the company raised a $25M Series A in March 2026 and serves vendors such as Adobe, Celonis, OutSystems, Armis, and BigID across 15+ federal agency authorizations.
MDClone is a healthcare data company that lets clinicians, researchers, and analysts explore patient data without touching real patient records. Its ADAMS platform ingests structured and unstructured health-system data into a longitudinal database, then generates statistically faithful synthetic data that carries no risk to patient privacy. That combination turns months-long, IRB-heavy data requests into self-service exploration, letting front-line staff ask their own questions, run analyses, and share results across organizations. Founded in Israel in 2016 and used across the U.S., Canada, and 100% of the Israeli healthcare market, MDClone has raised roughly $112M to expand data-driven discovery in health systems, government, payers, and life sciences.
RapidCanvas is an Austin-based enterprise AI company that helps businesses move from concept to production-ready AI solutions in weeks rather than months. Founded in 2021 by veterans of Simility (acquired by PayPal), it pairs a proprietary agentic AI platform with human experts through what it calls the Hybrid Approach - AI agents automate data preparation, modeling and workflow execution while human specialists handle strategy and governance. The company targets non-technical business users across manufacturing, financial services, retail, energy and logistics, and has raised over $23.5M including a $16M Series A led by Peak XV Partners.
Tour24 is a Boston-based proptech company that gives apartment renters a self-guided way to tour multifamily communities on their own schedule - day or night, with or without a leasing agent present. Its mobile app combines curated audio/visual tour guides, Bluetooth-beacon room tracking, smart-lock access control and an analytics dashboard so property operators can keep leasing 'always open.' Founded in 2020 by serial proptech entrepreneur Georgianna W. Oliver, the platform now serves hundreds of thousands of units across roughly 2,000 U.S. properties and in 2025 added Tori, a conversational AI tour assistant.
Visitt is an AI-native commercial real estate property operations platform that consolidates work orders, preventive maintenance, inspections, tenant communications, compliance and finance into a single interface. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in New York, it serves owners, operators and onsite teams managing office, industrial, multifamily, retail and data-center portfolios. In January 2026 the company raised a $22M Series B led by Susquehanna Growth Equity, following a year in which it grew square footage under management by more than 900%.

Mehul Bhatt is co-founder and CEO of FloCareer, an interview-as-a-service HR tech platform that dispatches expert freelance interviewers (plus AI proctoring) to run structured technical screens for enterprises. A former Cisco solutions architect with a Master's from Illinois Institute of Technology, he spent 16 years as an individual contributor before starting the company with Mohit Jain. FloCareer raised a $5.7M Series A in October 2021 and has conducted more than one million interviews for 600+ clients across the US and India.
CoderPad is a San Francisco-based technical interview and assessment platform that lets engineering teams evaluate developers in a real, runnable coding environment instead of on a whiteboard. Founded in 2013 by ex-Google and Amazon engineer Vincent Woo, it pairs live collaborative interviews with asynchronous take-home screens across 40+ programming languages, and has hosted millions of technical interviews for thousands of companies. In 2021 it acquired CodinGame to add candidate assessments and a developer skill-building community.
Dataro is a predictive AI platform that helps nonprofit fundraising teams turn their existing donor data into ranked, day-to-day actions. It analyzes data inside a charity's CRM to score every donor, flag who is at risk of lapsing or ready to give, and recommend the next best step - so teams can prioritize the right supporters without increasing outreach. Used by more than 300 organizations across 20+ countries, including World Central Kitchen, Amnesty International, Save the Children and Greenpeace, Dataro raised a $14.28M Series A in February 2026 led by Blueprint Equity.
8090 is an AI-native software factory that helps regulated enterprises build and modernize production software using teams of people working alongside AI agents. Founded by Chamath Palihapitiya in January 2024 and headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, its flagship Software Factory platform runs the full software development lifecycle - from business intent to production code - through five modules (Refinery, Foundry, Planner, Assembler, Validator) while preserving the documentation, oversight and audit trails that regulated industries require. The company raised a $135M Series A led by Salesforce Ventures in June 2026, with Chamath stepping in as full-time CEO.
AutoRABIT is an enterprise DevSecOps and release-management platform built for the Salesforce ecosystem. It combines CI/CD automation (ARM), static code and security analysis (CodeScan), data and metadata backup and recovery (Vault), and security posture management (Guard) so teams in regulated industries - banking, financial services, healthcare, and government - can ship Salesforce changes quickly while keeping security and compliance intact. Founded in 2015 and bootstrapped for its first five years, the company is headquartered in San Francisco and serves customers including ABN AMRO, Cigna, and CyberArk.
GeoX is an Israeli-founded geospatial AI company that turns aerial imagery, satellite data and ground-level images into detailed 3D models of individual buildings. Insurers, reinsurers, banks and public agencies use its property database - covering roughly 160 million US properties and expanding across Europe, Japan and Australia - to assess roof condition, elevation and exposure to fires, floods and storms without sending anyone into the field. The company raised a $19M Series A in 2024 (led by Flashpoint), bringing total funding to $23M.
Patrick Anderson is Co-Founder and CTO of Moab, a New York based startup building a modern operating system for equipment rental and dealership businesses. He was previously Head of Core Engineering at Ramp, joining the fintech as its 11th employee. In February 2026 Moab emerged from stealth with $16M in combined Seed and Series A funding backed by Elad Gil and Ironspring Ventures.
Patrick Smith is a Boston-based software executive currently serving as Chief Revenue Officer at Onebeat, a retail inventory intelligence platform. A Providence College graduate with roots in enterprise supply-chain software, he has spent his career at the intersection of merchandising strategy and inventory optimization, with prior stops at ToolsGroup, antuit.ai, ESG, and Park City Group. He writes and speaks about the 'Retail Margin Spiral' and the 'Inventory Intelligence Loop,' arguing that softlines retailers must move from reactive planning to continuous, real-time decisioning.
Paul Szemerenyi is the CEO of Jones, an AI-powered insurance verification platform for the construction and real estate industries, appointed in January 2026 after co-founder Omri Stern moved to the board. He has more than 20 years running go-to-market at high-growth SaaS companies including Allbound (CEO), Bizzabo (CRO), Fuze, Appboy/Braze, AppSense and 1E, and before that served as an officer on nuclear submarines in the Royal Navy.
Rodolphe Barrere is the co-founder and CEO of Potloc, a Montreal-headquartered consumer research platform that pioneered survey sampling through social networks. Born in France, he moved to Quebec at 17 to study at HEC Montreal, worked briefly at LVMH in Paris and New York, and founded Potloc in 2014 with classmate Louis Delaoustre. He was named to the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe (Technology) list and has raised more than $90M for the company, which now serves consulting firms and private equity clients across offices in Montreal, New York, Paris, London and Dubai.
Shahar Chen is the CEO and co-founder of Aquant, a New York-based generative AI company that helps field-service teams diagnose and repair complex industrial equipment. He and co-founder Assaf Melochna launched Aquant in 2016 after Chen spent 14 years at ClickSoftware watching skilled technicians age out of the workforce faster than new ones came in. Aquant has raised $112.6M to date, including a $70M Series C in 2021.
Siva Lakshmanan is the CEO of DeepHow, a Detroit-based AI company that turns tribal shop-floor know-how into searchable, multilingual training video. He joined in November 2024 after running Antuit.ai through its acquisition by Zebra Technologies. His pitch is unglamorous by design: preserve the expertise of the retiring half of the manufacturing workforce before it walks out the door.
Stephanie Feraday is President and CEO of aPriori Technologies, a Concord, Massachusetts digital manufacturing simulation software company, where she has spent nearly 17 years steering the business from the 2009 financial crisis through a Series D funding round, turning cost and sustainability estimation for manufacturers into a cloud SaaS platform used across aerospace, automotive, and industrial sectors.
AthenaHQ is a San Francisco AI-search optimization platform that helps brands see, measure, and improve how they appear inside generative engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Founded in 2025 by ex-Google Search and DeepMind PM Andrew Yan and ex-ServiceNow engineer Alan Yao, the Y Combinator-backed company treats GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) as the successor to traditional SEO, analyzing millions of AI responses to tell companies whether AI models recommend them - and what to change if they don't.
Atlas is an AI-first customer support platform that pitches itself as a modern replacement for Intercom and Zendesk. It combines ticketing, an omnichannel inbox (chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, Slack Connect, Discord), session recording, customer timelines, a help center and AI agents (Autopilot and Copilot) so support teams can resolve issues faster by understanding customers more completely. Founded in 2021 by Jon O'Bryan and Rahul Asati and backed by Y Combinator (W22), Atlas is built around the idea that great support drives growth rather than being a cost center.
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite and a veteran SEO expert, breaks down answer engine optimization (AEO) - the practice of getting your product to show up inside answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. He explains why AEO is the second-biggest shift in his 18-year SEO career, how it differs from traditional SEO (the head and the tail are different), why being mentioned most often across citations matters more than ranking first, and shares a tactical seven-step playbook covering question research, tracking, landing pages, and off-site citation strategies across YouTube, Reddit, and affiliates. He also debunks widespread AEO misinformation and warns of the dangers of AI-generated content and model collapse.
Fleet is a San Francisco-based commuter benefits management platform that helps employers set up, run, and stay compliant with pre-tax and subsidized transportation programs. It manages all mobility spend in one place - pre-tax transit and parking, employer subsidies, government grants, and rewards - across transit, parking, bikes, e-bikes, scooters, rideshare, and vanpools. By integrating with 180+ HR and payroll systems, Fleet lets HR teams roll out commuter benefits quickly, meet local mandates in cities like NYC, LA, and the Bay Area, and nudge employees toward lower-carbon commutes.
Latent Knowledge is a New York-based AI company building LitView, a semantic search and literature-visualization tool that helps R&D teams and academic researchers discover, cluster, and map scientific literature beyond simple keyword matching. Founded in 2019 by James Reilly, the company uses applied natural language processing to surface hidden links between technical articles and speed up the research process across public and private data sources.
Pirros is an AI-powered content intelligence platform for architecture and engineering firms that lets designers find, compare, reuse and standardize Revit details and families across every project, team and office. Founded by former structural engineers Ari Baranian and Peter Johann, the Los Angeles company automatically ingests a firm's historical drawing sets and makes them searchable by geometry - no manual tagging - so designers stop digging through cluttered server folders and start reusing vetted work. Often described as 'GitHub for construction,' Pirros integrates directly with Revit and Autodesk ACC/BIM 360 and serves over 300 firms and 15,000+ users.
Redbird is a New York-based, AI-powered workflow automation and analytics platform that lets non-technical business teams connect their data, run analysis, and generate reports through a conversational, ChatGPT-like interface - no code required. Founded by the husband-and-wife team of Erin and Deren Tavgac (originally as Cube Analytics), the company builds AI agents that automate roughly 90% of the repetitive analytics, operations, and reporting work that normally clogs enterprise teams. Backed by Y Combinator and a $7.6M seed round led by B Capital, Redbird counts eight Fortune 50 companies among its customers.
Rentana is an AI-powered revenue intelligence platform for multifamily real estate owners and operators. It replaces spreadsheet-driven pricing with real-time, unit-level recommendations - optimizing rents, amenity values, marketing specials, and lease renewals in one platform. Founded in 2023 by a team out of Stripe, Airtable, Airbnb, and AppFolio and led by ex-Two Sigma investor Julie Blanc, Rentana raised a $5M seed round in 2025 and reports outcomes like millions in added property value and roughly 10 hours saved per property each week.