Astrocade is an AI-powered social gaming platform that lets anyone build, remix, share and play casual games from natural-language prompts - no coding required. A coordinated team of generative AI agents handle art, sound, mechanics and UI, turning a sentence into a playable game in minutes. Co-founded by AI researchers Amir and Ali Sadeghian alongside Stanford's Fei-Fei Li, the company is backed by Sequoia, Google, NVIDIA and others.
Kaon (formerly FlowGPT) is a San Francisco AI-native content lab building consumer AI experiences. After scaling FlowGPT into a 4M+ monthly user prompt marketplace, the team shifted gravity to Emochi - an AI character roleplay app that has climbed into the top tier of consumer AI with millions of monthly users. Founded in 2023 by UC Berkeley dropout Jay Dang and co-founder Lifan Wang, the company raised $10M led by Goodwater Capital and DCM in early 2024 and added a strategic round backed by B Capital and Redpoint in 2025.
Please (formerly MultiOn) is a Palo Alto consumer AI company building a thinking reminders and planning app that captures ideas, connects the dots between them, and nudges users at the right moment so they never miss a thing.
Jason Paul is Vice President of GeForce Platform Marketing at NVIDIA, where he has worked since 2003. Over more than two decades, he has led the marketing and launch of every major GeForce GPU generation, pioneered NVIDIA's SHIELD gaming ecosystem, championed GameWorks VR, and now spearheads the company's consumer AI push connecting RTX hardware to over 100 million Windows users. Educated at UCLA and Stanford (MBA), Paul sits at the crossroads of gaming hardware, software platforms, and the emerging era of on-device AI.
Alex Mashrabov is the CEO and co-founder of Higgsfield AI, a $1.3B AI video generation unicorn that went from $0 to $50M ARR in five months. A 2x ACM ICPC World Finals competitive programmer who began coding at 10, he previously co-founded AI Factory — acquired by Snap for $166M in 2020 — and later served as Snap's Head of Generative AI. Born in Andijan, Uzbekistan, and trained at Moscow's elite MIPT, he is now building Higgsfield into the infrastructure layer for AI video creation, targeting the moment when most social media video is AI-generated.

Jay Dang (Jiacheng Dang) is the co-founder and CEO of Kaon (formerly FlowGPT), an AI-native content platform he launched in January 2023 just two days after founding the company - at age 20 during his freshman year at UC Berkeley. He subsequently dropped out to lead FlowGPT full-time, growing the platform to 3+ million monthly active users and 100,000+ AI applications across 110 countries before raising a $10M pre-Series A round in February 2024 led by Goodwater Capital and DCM Ventures. Under his leadership, the company rebranded to Kaon and launched Emochi, an AI storytelling app that reached #12 globally with 12.3M monthly active users by April 2026.

Connor Zwick is the CEO and co-founder of Speak, an AI-powered language learning platform that crossed $1 billion in valuation and $100 million in annualized revenue in 2024. A Thiel Fellow who dropped out of Harvard, Zwick built his first app at age 13 and sold Flashcards+ to Chegg as a teenager. He founded Speak in 2016 with Andrew Hsu, and spent years living between San Francisco and Seoul to perfect AI conversation technology for English learners. Today Speak counts over 15 million downloads, backing from OpenAI and Accel, and enterprise customers including KPMG and HD Hyundai.

Anish Acharya is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) who led the firm's consumer fintech and consumer AI investing for five-plus years before announcing his departure in 2025/2026 to build again. A University of Waterloo computer engineering grad, he co-founded SocialDeck (acquired by Google in 2010) and Snowball (acquired by Credit Karma in 2015), where he then rose to GM overseeing a platform of 100M+ members. Known for coining the 'Era of Abundance' consumer AI thesis, writing 'Disposable Software,' and spending weekends spinning deep house records under his DJ alias 'illscience,' Acharya occupies a rare space where operator intuition, engineering rigor, and cultural ear collide.

Founders, Inc. (f.inc) is a 42,000 sq ft campus, community, and first-check fund at Fort Mason in San Francisco — built for the wildly ambitious founders solving hard problems at the edge of what's possible. Not a traditional VC and not a time-boxed accelerator, it combines pre-seed investment (up to $250K), a dedicated workspace with hardware labs and media studios, daily meals, and an indefinite community of 80+ builders. Founded in 2020 by serial builder Furqan Rydhan, it has backed 100+ companies across AI, AR/VR, Web3, and hardware — including thirdweb, buildspace, LiveKit, and Sync Labs. Featured in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.