seed-round
(7)
Abhilash Chowdhary
Abhilash Chowdhary is the co-founder and CEO of Crustdata (YC F24), a San Francisco company building real-time B2B data and a search layer for AI agents. A computer science graduate of IIIT Hyderabad, he spent over a decade as a robotics and data engineer at Yahoo, Adobe, Postmates X, and Serve Robotics before turning a bootstrapped side project into a company that raised a $6M seed round led by Y Combinator and A Capital.
Max Cao
Max Cao is the co-founder and CEO of Jacobi Robotics, an Emeryville, California startup building AI-first software that programs industrial robot arms up to 20x faster. A mechanical engineer trained at Imperial College London and UC Berkeley's BAIR Lab under Ken Goldberg, and a former McKinsey consultant, Cao left academia to attack a problem most people never see: the way robots are programmed has barely changed since the 1980s. Jacobi's motion-planning technology cuts deployment from a month to under a day, claims 1000x less compute, and handles the singularities that freeze robot arms mid-task. The company launched publicly in July 2024 with a $5M seed round led by Moxxie Ventures.
Nick Deveau
Nick Deveau is the co-founder and CEO of Grotto AI, a New York startup building real-time AI coaching for apartment leasing teams. A Stanford-trained AI engineer who helped build the technology behind EvolutionIQ's $730 million sale, Deveau now bets that humans, not bots, close the deals that matter most. His platform, Guidance, listens to leasing calls and tours, decodes what makes top agents great, and whispers that playbook to everyone else in real time. In February 2026 Grotto raised a $10 million seed round led by ICONIQ Capital.
Peter McKee
Peter McKee is the co-founder and CEO of Aeqium, a San Francisco compensation-management platform that pulls HR and finance teams out of spreadsheet chaos and into a controlled, data-driven system for planning salaries, bonuses, equity, and benefits. An MIT-trained engineer who led self-driving rider experience at Uber and was an early backend engineering manager at Braze, McKee also served as a US Army officer running battalion combat-engineer operations in Afghanistan. He started Aeqium in late 2020 to make pay fairer, faster, and less of a fire drill.
Samuel Adeyemo
Samuel Adeyemo is the co-founder and CEO of Duranta, a Seattle software company building AI tools that help landscapers and lawn care businesses measure properties, design projects, and win contracts. Born in Nairobi and trained in finance at JP Morgan before pivoting to climate tech, he previously co-founded Aurora Solar, the solar design platform that grew to a reported $2 billion valuation and powers a large share of the U.S. residential solar market. In 2025 he raised a $7 million seed round for Duranta, backed by Base10 Partners, Pear, and angels including GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. His through-line is taking the unglamorous back-office work of physical-world trades and turning it into software.
Steven Motta
Steven Motta is the co-founder and CEO of Waveful, an AI-powered social app for sharing passions, building communities and letting creators monetize their content. He wrote his first money-making code at age 9, shipping Minecraft mods that drew more than two million downloads, then designed the first version of Waveful at 16 with his older brother Dennis. By 2025 Waveful had crossed four million users, surpassed $1M in in-app purchases, and became one of the most downloaded social apps of the year. He was the youngest founder in his a16z Speedrun batch and closed a $2.1M seed round in September 2025.
Tript Singh Lamba
Tript Singh Lamba is the founder and CEO of ProductNow, an AI-native operating system for product teams that he built largely as a solo developer (with one intern) before raising a $6M seed round led by Sierra Ventures in July 2025. Over two decades he built flagship platforms at Microsoft, Google, and Expedia - helping launch Bing and the early core of Microsoft Messenger and Azure, co-founding Google's Ads AI personalization team, leading YouTube Ads through hypergrowth, and serving as SVP of Consumer Product at Expedia. His thesis: with AI accelerating engineering, the real bottleneck is no longer code but turning strategy into execution.