model-compression
(3)
General Instinct
General Instinct is a Y Combinator (Spring 2026) startup building inference infrastructure for physical AI. Its software distills, quantizes, and deploys large frontier models onto resource-constrained edge hardware - drones, robots, IoT devices, and old PCs - fully offline. The flagship product, Instinct Edge, takes a model, a target device, and a latency budget and returns an optimized offline runtime that hits that budget on hardware like Jetson, mobile NPUs, ARM CPUs, and Apple Neural Engine. The company also ships an open-source compression toolkit, InstinctRazor.
David Stout
David Stout is the co-founder and CEO of webAI, an Austin-based company building private, on-device artificial intelligence that runs on hardware people already own instead of centralized cloud data centers. Raised on a cattle ranch in northern Michigan, he taught himself to compress large AI models onto phones, laptops and edge hardware, and founded webAI in 2019 with Ethan Baird and Tyler Mauer. The company reached a $2.5 billion valuation in January 2026 on the thesis that the most valuable AI of the future will be sovereign, distributed and local rather than rented from Silicon Valley hyperscalers.
Animesh Koratana
Animesh Koratana is the founder and CEO of PlayerZero, an AI platform that acts as an immune system for large code bases, catching and fixing bugs before they ship. He started the company out of Stanford's DAWN lab, where he researched data-intensive machine learning systems under Matei Zaharia and Peter Bailis. In 2025 PlayerZero raised a $15M Series A led by Foundation Capital, backed by the CEOs of Dropbox, Figma, and Vercel. Koratana's bet is simple and contrarian: when AI writes most of the code, software quality becomes the hardest and most valuable problem in engineering.