forward-deployed-engineer
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Lab0
Lab0 is a Y Combinator (P26) startup building AI forward-deployed engineers (AI FDEs) that automate the entire post-sales delivery process for enterprise software - discovery, configuration, integration, testing and go-live. By running these phases inside the systems customers already use, such as ServiceNow, SAP, Salesforce, Workday and Jira, Lab0 aims to compress deployments that normally take six months into about ten days, turning consulting-heavy rollouts into a self-serve product.
Unisson
Unisson (YC W26) is a San Francisco startup building AI agents that act as hands-on product experts for customer-facing teams at B2B software companies. Its agents learn to use a client's product in about 15 minutes by exploring the interface and codebase, then work alongside implementation, customer success, and sales engineering teams inside Slack, email, and text to run onboarding, migrations, integrations, audits, and change management. Founded in 2026 by Varun Mathur and Tom Achache, the company charges only when its agents are actively doing work.
Jerod Nelsen
Jerod Nelsen is a forward-deployed engineer and deployment strategist working out of the Office of the CEO at Peregrine, the San Francisco data platform that Sequoia valued at $2.5 billion for untangling the disparate systems public safety agencies rely on. A 6'7" former Princeton volleyball captain who studied Operations Research and Financial Engineering, he graduated summa cum laude in 2022, added a master's from Penn in 2024, and passed through EY-Parthenon and Audax before landing at one of the fastest-scaling govtech companies in the country. He sits where the code meets the customer: turning tangled agency data into something an analyst can actually search.
Erin Price-Wright
Erin Price-Wright is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads the firm's American Dynamism practice alongside Katherine Boyle. Focused on AI for the physical world, she backs early-stage companies in robotics, energy, defense, manufacturing, and critical minerals. A Stanford and Oxford-trained mathematician who grew up on a reservation in Arizona, she spent most of her pre-investing career at Palantir - starting as a Forward Deployed Engineer and rising to Head of Product for its data analytics platform - before becoming a partner at Index Ventures. She joined a16z in April 2024 to focus on the energy and industrial AI side of America's technological renaissance.