Tagged: seed-funded
27 results
Jon Carr-Harris
Jon Carr-Harris is the Founder & CEO of CRED, a San Francisco-based AI-powered predictive intelligence platform that raised $15M in seed funding in June 2025. CRED unifies data from 200+ integrations and 10,000+ external sources to deliver business predictions 60-90 days in advance with 92% claimed accuracy - giving enterprises the kind of forward-looking intelligence once reserved for hedge funds. A serial entrepreneur who advised Airbnb, Kik, and Khan Academy early in their growth, Carr-Harris built and exited Swish Labs (a global tech consulting ecosystem spanning 30+ countries) before founding CRED in 2023, which emerged from stealth with 25 enterprise clients and $100M+ in documented customer revenue impact.
Jim Williams
Jim Williams is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of MustHaveMenus, a Bend, Oregon-based platform serving 10,000+ restaurants, hotels, and food service businesses with cloud-based menu design, digital signage, and menu management tools. Before MustHaveMenus, he sold email-marketing startup MarketHome to ClickAction for $15 million in 1999, co-founded church-tech platform Sharefaith (acquired by Ministry Brands in 2018), and made an early angel investment in HotelTonight (acquired by Airbnb in 2019). An English major who started his first business at age 11, Williams embodies the accidental founder: perpetually optimistic, deeply curious about design, and committed to building software that solves genuinely unglamorous problems.
Joe Essenfeld
Joe Essenfeld is a serial entrepreneur and Co-Founder & CEO of FORA (fora.day), a New York-based AI communication intelligence platform that transforms unstructured enterprise meeting, email, and chat data into actionable leadership insights. He previously founded Jibe, a recruiting technology platform that raised $40M+ and was acquired by iCIMS in 2019, where he served in senior executive roles before launching FORA. FORA raised a $3.8M pre-seed round in January 2024 and counts Converge, GTM Fund, Zelkova, and Everywhere Ventures among its backers.
Jon Sibley
Jon Sibley is the Founder and CEO of TrueBuilt Software, an AI-native preconstruction platform headquartered in Huntington Beach, California. A former NCAA Division I water polo player at UC Berkeley and Team USA competitor, Sibley translated elite-sport discipline into enterprise software sales at Quid and Visa before founding TrueBuilt in July 2022. The company raised a $4 million seed round in 2023 led by Bienville Capital with participation from Fifth Wall, and in late 2025 acquired Capabuild — a mobile field documentation platform — driving a 124% revenue increase in three months post-close. TrueBuilt consolidates what was once a fragmented 6-8 tool preconstruction workflow into a single AI-powered platform serving general contractors and subcontractors.
Jonathan Sherry
Jonathan Sherry is the CEO and co-founder of Alium, a New York-based buyer intelligence platform that replaces pay-to-play analyst ratings with structured, AI-analyzed interviews from real enterprise practitioners. A Columbia MBA and Penn engineering grad, Sherry previously co-founded CB Insights alongside Anand Sanwal - building it from a near-shuttered startup in 2009 into the venture industry's premier market intelligence platform with 250+ employees and eight-figure revenue. Alium, which operated in stealth for four years before publicly launching in January 2025 with $7M in seed funding from Greycroft and Primary Venture Partners, has already conducted 1,000+ in-depth vendor performance interviews with decision-makers at companies including Walmart, Nike, Marriott, and Spotify.
Napkin AI
Napkin AI turns plain text into editable visuals - diagrams, flowcharts, infographics, mind maps - in about five seconds. Built by two ex-Google engineers who previously co-founded the children's learning platform Osmo, Napkin uses an orchestrator LLM and a 'design agency' of specialized sub-agents to do the work most knowledge workers used to outsource to a designer or a PowerPoint smart-art menu.
Amanda Greenberg
Amanda Greenberg is the CEO and co-founder of Balloon, a SaaS platform that eliminates groupthink and cognitive bias from team collaboration through anonymous idea submission and merit-based voting. A former public health researcher who developed behavior-change campaigns for the CDC, EPA, and DOE, Greenberg pivoted to tech entrepreneurship after observing how social dynamics suppress good decision-making in rooms full of smart people. She co-founded Balloon in 2015 with her husband and CTO Noah Bornstein, bootstrapped to a Fortune 50 client within 11 months, raised $2.6M in seed funding from investors including Jason Calacanis and Matt Mullenweg, and was named to Inc. Magazine's Female Founders 100 list in 2022. Balloon's advisory board includes Adam Grant, Amy Edmondson, and Daniel Pink.
Jay Dang
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.
Ahmed Reza
Ahmed Reza is the Founder and CEO of Yobi, an AI workforce platform that deploys synthetic agents to handle calls, texts, and social DMs for small businesses 24/7. A Milken Scholar at Cornell University who wrote image-processing software for NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, Reza went from child actor in Bangladesh to homeless student to serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. His previous ventures include Call Sumo (call tracking analytics) and Dental Web Now (AI dental marketing, acquired by NPI). Yobi raised a $2.37M seed round in 2023, reached $2.4M ARR by late 2025, and in 2026 partnered with Microsoft to develop a private foundation model for predictive behavioral intelligence.
Anya Cheng
Anya Cheng is the Founder & CEO of Taelor, an AI-powered men's clothing rental and styling subscription service that raised $5M+ and ranked #1 in U.S. menswear rentals by GQ. A Taiwanese-American first-generation immigrant who spent 15+ years at Target, McDonald's, eBay, and Meta (where she helped launch Facebook Shopping), she pivoted to entrepreneurship to solve a problem she saw everywhere: busy professional men who needed to look sharp but hated shopping. Taelor combines AI trend forecasting with human stylists to deliver curated wardrobes to subscribers, tackling fashion's 30% waste problem along the way. Cheng also teaches at Northwestern's Medill School and mentors at 500 Startups.
Brian Park
Brian Park is the CEO of Skillest, the world's leading remote sports coaching marketplace that connects athletes with elite coaches through asynchronous video analysis. A Silicon Valley veteran who was the 95th employee at Yahoo and co-founder of Yahoo! Messenger, Park pivoted to sports tech to democratize access to elite coaching - putting a world-class coach in every athlete's pocket. Under his leadership, Skillest has grown to 600+ coaches, 200,000+ golfers, and secured partnerships with Stephen Curry's UNDERRATED Golf and Arccos Golf, becoming the digital coaching standard in golf and expanding across multiple sports.
Hazim Mohamad
Hazim Mohamad is the Co-Founder and CEO of CoffeeSpace, a San Francisco-based AI-powered cofounder matching platform that functions like Tinder for entrepreneurs. After spending four years managing a $40 billion portfolio at the World Bank, he traded financial risk for startup risk - building a mobile-first platform that has amassed 25,000+ users and 2M+ swipes by connecting founders, early hires, and collaborators across the global startup ecosystem. CoffeeSpace raised $1M in pre-seed funding and was featured at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024.
Felix Fink
Felix Fink is the co-founder and CEO of RIIICO, a German deeptech startup building AI-powered 3D factory digital twins using LiDAR point cloud data. Founded in 2021 out of RWTH Aachen University, RIIICO transforms physical factory floors into collaborative, predictive digital environments in a fraction of the time traditional modeling takes. The company raised a $5M seed round in 2025 led by Pi Labs, won the Siemens Inventors of the Year 2024 award in the Open Innovation category, and counts Volvo, Porsche, Volkswagen, and Schaeffler among its customers. Fink drives product strategy with a philosophy of combining startup agility with deep industrial knowledge.
Kanav Hasija
Kanav Hasija is Co-Founder and CEO of MeltPlan, an AI-native preconstruction planning platform backed by Bessemer Venture Partners. A serial entrepreneur who co-built Innovaccer into a $3.2B healthcare data unicorn, he now applies the same data-platform playbook to construction — where fragmented planning and late-stage surprises cost billions annually. MeltPlan's tools (Melt Code, Melt Takeoff) bring AI-powered code compliance and quantity estimation to architects, contractors, and owners before the first shovel breaks ground.
Nathaniel Chu
Nathaniel Chu is the co-CEO and co-founder of Tezza Foods (now Plonts), an Oakland-based food company using ancient fermentation techniques and microbial science to make genuinely complex, stinky plant-based cheese from soy milk. Holding a PhD in microbiology from MIT and a BS from Brown University, Chu spent years studying gut microbiomes before pivoting to harness those same microbial principles in food. With $12M in seed funding led by Lowercarbon Capital, Plonts launched in August 2024 in New York City and San Francisco restaurants, offering a plant-based cheddar that actually ages, melts, and smells like the real thing.
Sid Manchkanti
Sid Manchkanti is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pulse, a production-grade document intelligence platform that converts complex unstructured documents into LLM-ready structured data. A Berkeley CS graduate with experience at NVIDIA and D.E. Shaw, he co-founded Pulse in 2024 after going through Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch. The company raised a $3.9M seed round led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and has processed over one billion pages for Fortune 100 enterprises across finance, healthcare, insurance, legal, and supply chain sectors.
Souvik Paul
Souvik Paul is the CEO and Founder of Aurie, a medtech company that built the first FDA De Novo-cleared reusable intermittent catheter system. A Harvard-educated designer and former J&J strategist, Paul was driven to start Aurie after witnessing a family member's struggle with catheter-associated infections following a spinal cord injury. His Oakland-based startup has raised $14.24M and is pioneering a no-touch, automatically disinfecting catheter system designed to transform care for the 600,000 Americans who rely on intermittent catheters.
Ambuj Kumar
Ambuj Kumar is the co-founder and CEO of Simbian, an AI-native security company building autonomous AI agents that run security operations 10x faster than human teams. A Gold Medalist from IIT Kanpur and Stanford EE graduate, he spent eight years designing NVIDIA's early GPUs before pivoting to security - where he invented Confidential Computing, raised $135M for Fortanix, and is now betting that AI agents can solve the industry's 3.5-million-person talent gap. With 100+ patents and recognition from IIT Kanpur's Distinguished Alumni Award 2025, Kumar stands at the intersection of the GPU revolution he helped build and the AI security era he is now shaping.
Karan Kanwar
Karan Kanwar is the co-founder and CEO of Wing Assistant, a managed virtual assistant marketplace that grew from his UC Irvine dorm room to over 1,000 employees across 8 countries and $20 million in annual revenue. Born in Mumbai and raised in Hong Kong, Kanwar speaks five languages, started coding at age 8, and previously consulted for Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and the United Nations before building Wing into one of the fastest-growing B2B staffing platforms in the US.
Michael Yan
Michael Yan is the co-founder and CEO of Simplify (YC W21), a San Francisco-based AI-powered job search platform that has helped over 1 million job seekers apply to roughly 100 million job openings. A Morgantown, West Virginia native, Yan dropped out of Stanford to build Simplify after recognizing that students everywhere were lost in the job application chaos. He previously engineered AI/ML systems at Meta, conducted research at MIT CSAIL, and interned at Harvard Medical School. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2023 (Consumer Technology), Yan has built a 181,000+ follower audience on LinkedIn by sharing brutally practical job search advice - including the URL hack that landed him offers at Meta and Microsoft. Simplify has raised $4.35M from Craft Ventures, Y Combinator, and Soma Capital.
Joseph Semrai
Joseph Semrai is a Thiel Fellow and serial AI builder who dropped out of Stanford at 20 to found Context, the world's first AI-native office suite. Context raised $11M in seed funding at a $70M valuation from Lux Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, and General Catalyst, and launched to automate an estimated 2.5 trillion hours of annual knowledge work. Before Context, Semrai built Friday - the world's first internet-connected LLM chatbot (later acquired by Andi Search) - and RealityGPT, a wearable GPT-4 device, as a Stanford freshman. He is known for assembling elite engineering teams and building AI products that reach millions of users.
Don Vaughn
Don Vaughn, Ph.D. is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ampa Health, a Palo Alto-based neurotechnology company building FDA-cleared portable TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) devices that compress 36 days of depression treatment into a single day. A Stanford-educated physicist turned UCLA neuroscientist, Vaughn has built a career at the intersection of brain science, machine learning, and accessibility - detoured, notably, through a DJ career that landed him a #28 iTunes Dance chart hit featuring Nick Lachey. His TEDx talk on neurohacking has surpassed one million views. Ampa raised an oversubscribed $8.5M pre-A round in October 2025, achieved FDA clearance for its Ampa One device in February 2025, and is targeting 5,000 patient remissions by end of 2026 - with a long-term audacious goal of a billion remissions in ten years.
Laurence Allen
Laurence Allen is the co-founder and CEO of Terranova, a Berkeley-based startup building autonomous terraforming robots that lift flood-prone land out of harm's way by injecting wood waste slurry deep underground. A UC Berkeley Mechanical Engineering graduate (2024) who conceived the idea during a 2021 SpaceX internship, Allen launched the company — originally called Levitree — to save his own hometown of San Rafael, California, which floods to waist depth several times a decade. Terranova closed a $7M seed round in late 2025 at a $25.1M valuation led by Congruent Ventures and Outlander, and can lift one acre of land by one foot per day at a fraction of the cost of traditional seawalls. Allen was named to the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Energy & Green Tech, took a leave from his Stanford master's program to scale Terranova full-time, and entered 2026 actively pursuing commercial elevation projects across the Bay Area for flood prevention, development, and wetland restoration.
Luke Wilson
Luke Wilson is the CEO and co-founder of ManageXR, the leading device management platform for enterprise XR (extended reality) deployments. A Stanford computer science graduate who designed and taught one of the university's first VR development courses as an undergraduate, Wilson built ManageXR out of a real operational problem: while deploying thousands of VR headsets to children's hospitals across the United States through his earlier venture Mighty Immersion, he found no viable management solution existed at scale. That gap became ManageXR, which raised a $4M seed round led by Rally Ventures in December 2021 and now serves 100+ enterprise customers across healthcare, training, education, and retail verticals.
Lily Clifford
Lily Clifford is the CEO and co-founder of Rime, a San Francisco-based voice AI company building enterprise-grade text-to-speech models with a linguistic edge. A Stanford NLP PhD dropout with a background in sociophonetics, she left academia in 2023 to prove that AI voices could sound like a friend rather than a voice actor. Rime now powers over 100 million phone conversations monthly for brands like Domino's and Wingstop, having raised $8.6M in total funding. Her counterintuitive thesis - that slightly 'bored' voices outperform perfectly polished ones - has become the foundation of a fast-growing enterprise voice platform.
Santhosh Purathepparambil
Santhosh Purathepparambil is Co-Founder and Chief AI Scientist at Discern Security, an AI-native security policy management platform he co-founded in 2023 alongside Sai Venkataraman and Rohan Puri. A Stanford School of Engineering alumnus, he previously served as Sr. Director of Engineering at McAfee, co-founded SecurityAdvisor (acquired by KnowBe4 in 2021 - the company that created the Human Detection and Response category), and was VP of Product Strategy at KnowBe4. At Discern, he architects AI agents that help Fortune 500 companies continuously monitor, assess, and optimize their security posture at machine speed, backed by $3M in seed funding from BoldCap, WestWave Capital, Cyber Mentor Fund, and Security Syndicate.
Tarun Gaur
Tarun Gaur is the Founder and CEO of qikfox Cybersecurity Systems, a San Mateo-based startup building what it calls the world's first browser with integrated decentralized identity and quantum-resistant cryptography. With 24+ years spanning Microsoft, Deloitte, and HP - and one successful exit (Tringapps, 500 employees, acquired 2018) - Gaur launched qikfox in 2019 after his mother was scammed online. Backed by Tim Draper with $1.1M in seed funding, qikfox charges $180/year for an invite-only premium browser targeting everyday consumers who want safety, security, and privacy baked into the foundation - not bolted on as an afterthought.