Tagged: startups
30 results
Zouhair Belkoura
Zouhair Belkoura is the founder and CEO of Keepsafe, a San Francisco company that builds a family of consumer privacy apps used by tens of millions of people worldwide. A former electrical engineering PhD who researched mobile video coding, he has built Keepsafe around the idea that privacy is a form of freedom and that ordinary people deserve simple tools to control their personal photos, messages, and browsing. He is a frequent writer and speaker on the difference between abstract data privacy and the content privacy that actually matters to people's daily lives.
Cristina Vila Vives
Cristina Vila Vives is the founder and CEO of Cledara, a SaaS spend-management platform that gives companies visibility and control over their software subscriptions. After more than a decade running operations teams in the financial industry, she launched Cledara in 2018 to solve a problem she kept seeing firsthand: companies losing money and time to a sprawling, unmanaged stack of software. Cledara now serves over a thousand customers across Europe and the United States, and Forbes has named her among the business leaders changing the world.
The Data Was Locked in a Vault. Subsalt Found a Way to Share It Without Opening the Door.
This Microsoft customer story details how healthcare technology startup Subsalt built a HIPAA-compliant synthetic data sandbox on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Fabric to help medical researchers and students at UT Southwestern Medical Center access real-quality clinical data in days instead of months, accelerating research outcomes while safeguarding patient privacy.
COLABS
COLABS is a flexible workspace and community platform that provides fully serviced offices, coworking space, and back-office support for startups, scaling companies, and enterprise teams. Founded in Pakistan in 2019 by twin brothers Omar and Ali Shah, it operates more than 500,000 square feet across 10+ locations serving over 5,000 members, and in April 2026 opened a 4,000-square-meter flagship campus in the Al-Narjis district of northern Riyadh to anchor its expansion into Saudi Arabia.
Fez Zafar
Fez Zafar is Chief of Staff at Mercor, the AI talent marketplace that vets, matches, and pays experts powering frontier AI labs. A 2024 Harvard graduate who was elected First Marshal of his class, he helped scale Mercor through one of the fastest revenue ramps on record and now leads hiring and cross-functional operations across its San Francisco and New York teams. Before Mercor he was an analyst at Village Global, a research assistant to economist Larry Summers, and a campus builder known for comedy, community events, and a student interview podcast.
Jonathan Cornelissen
Jonathan Cornelissen is a Belgian entrepreneur, PhD in financial econometrics, and the co-founder and founding CEO of DataCamp, the online data science education platform he started in 2013. Frustrated while teaching himself R during his doctorate, he built DataCamp to make data skills accessible through interactive, browser-based courses. Over six years as CEO he grew it to more than 10 million learners, 200,000 paying subscribers, 2,500 enterprise customers and over $50 million in annual recurring revenue. He authored an introductory R course completed by over a million learners. Since stepping back from the CEO role he has focused on angel investing across education, AI and crypto, and writes about company building, hiring and startup equity.
How My Company Built an AI App So Good We Sold It for $650 Million
In this Y Combinator Startup School talk, Jake Heller, co-founder and CEO of Casetext, explains how his team stopped everything at $20M in revenue to build CoCounsel, the first AI assistant for lawyers, on early access to GPT-4 — a bet that led to a $650 million acquisition by Thomson Reuters. He lays out a practical playbook across three areas: how to pick an idea (target jobs people already pay for, in categories of assist, replace, or do the previously unthinkable), how to actually build reliable AI (map exactly what a professional does, turn each step into prompts or plain code, and grind on evaluations until you pass 97-99% of tests), and how to market and sell it (build a genuinely great product first, price to value, build trust with head-to-head comparisons, and watch out for pilots that never convert to real revenue).
Inside Clay: What Is a Go-To-Market Engineer?
In this episode of 'Stories of Scale,' a host spends a full day inside Clay, the $5 billion New York startup that coined the term 'go-to-market engineer,' to figure out what this fast-growing role actually is. Shadowing Everett Berry, Clay's Head of GTM Engineering, along with teammates like Spencer, Varun (co-founder), and George, the video unpacks how GTM engineers blend engineering, marketing, and sales to build automated systems that find, understand, and reach customers. It also reveals Clay's two-team 'flywheel' — an internal pipeline team and a forward-deployed customer-facing team — that helped the company scale from five years of near-zero revenue to over $100 million and 16,000+ customers.
How the Best Startups Really Begin — YC Office Hours
In this episode of Y Combinator's Office Hours, a rotating cast of YC group partners pulls back the curtain on how legendary startups actually began. Using real interview memories of companies like Solugen, CaptivateIQ, Amplitude, Segment, Brex, Jeeves and Nourish, the partners argue that companies such as Airbnb, Stripe and Dropbox looked indistinguishable from every other early-stage startup on day zero. The through-line: greatness comes not from a magical origin but from tens of thousands of decisions, a bias for action, obstinate conviction, clear and honest communication, and the willingness to pivot until you build something people want.
The AI-Native Empire: ElevenLabs and Legora on the All-In Stage
Recorded live at the RAISE Summit inside the Louvre, this two-part All-In Podcast conversation, hosted by Jason Calacanis, features ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski and Legora founder and CEO Max Junestrand. Staniszewski details how ElevenLabs raced from a research project to roughly $600 million in annual revenue in under three years, why the company runs on small engineer-embedded teams with zero product managers, how it protects voices from impersonation while paying creators over $22 million, and how it out-competes frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic on voice. Junestrand explains how Legora is compressing the trillion-dollar legal-services market with AI agents, growing 50% quarter-over-quarter for seven straight quarters, deploying 'forward-deployed lawyers,' and disrupting legacy players like LexisNexis and Westlaw.
David Senra breaks down Peter Thiel's Zero to One
In this episode of the Founders podcast, David Senra revisits Peter Thiel and Blake Masters' book 'Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future' after a four-year gap, deliberately re-reading a fresh copy so his old highlights wouldn't influence him. He argues the book isn't a how-to manual but a prompt for your own thinking, whose central message is that founders should aim to build a 'creative monopoly'—a business so good no one else can offer a close substitute. Threading examples from Apple, Amazon, PayPal, Polaroid, Howard Hughes, and Steve Jobs, Senra explores Thiel's key ideas: thinking from first principles, the contrarian question, secrets, the power law, durability over growth, sales and distribution as product design, and the irreplaceable value of the founder.
Monaco
Monaco is an AI-native sales platform - billed as 'the first revenue engine for startups' - that replaces the usual patchwork of CRM, outbound tools, and pipeline software with a single system. Founded in 2025 by former Brex CRO Sam Blond alongside his brother Brian Blond, Abishek Viswanathan, and Malay Desai, Monaco builds a company's total addressable market, runs outbound, captures every call and email, and manages pipeline using AI agents paired with embedded human sales experts. It launched from stealth in February 2026 and, three months later, raised a $50M Series B led by Benchmark, pushing total funding past $85M.
Paraform
Paraform is a San Francisco recruiting platform that connects companies with a network of 10,000+ independent recruiters and pairs them with custom AI agents to fill hard roles fast. Instead of betting that software alone can screen resumes, Paraform keeps humans in the loop and gives them AI tools plus white-glove operational support, handling intake calls, hiring-manager feedback, and payments. Companies like Palantir, Rippling, Cursor, and Cognition use it to meet candidates in days rather than months. Founded in 2022 by John Kim and Jeffrey Li, the company has raised $65M total, most recently a $40M Series B led by Scale Venture Partners in March 2026.
AI Will Answer for You. YesPress Decides What It Says.
YesPress is an AI newsroom: a publishing engine that turns a company's raw material into structured, citable stories published on a branded newsroom of its own, so generative engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini understand and retrieve the company when it matters. Where traditional PR chases headlines and GEO dashboards measure visibility, YesPress publishes the source material AI actually reads — consistently — so visibility compounds through citation and trust.
Michael Hershfield
Michael Hershfield is the founder and CEO of Accrue, a New York fintech that lets retailers embed FDIC-insured, brand-customized savings wallets inside their shopping experience. He built the company around a simple flip of buy-now-pay-later: save first, then spend. Before Accrue, he was SVP of Sales at WeWork and COO at Nucleus, with earlier operating stints across Kitchensurfing, Sailthru, Howcast, and his own ticketing startup LiveStub.
Nima Roohi Sefidmazgi
Nima Roohi Sefidmazgi is co-founder and CEO of Blooming Health, a New York City startup that uses AI to automate outreach, screening, and referrals for social care - the food, transportation, and support services that sit outside the doctor's office but often decide how a person actually fares. He is a former global data science lead with a decade in machine learning for healthcare and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He started the company in East Harlem in 2020 after becoming a full-time caregiver for his mother-in-law during the pandemic; it has since raised $32.5M, including a $26M Series A led by Insight Partners in April 2025, and operates across 25 states.
Ray Dargham
Ray Dargham is the co-founder and CEO of Step, the Dubai-born media and events company behind the Step Conference, a startup and tech festival that grew from about 100 people in a co-working space in 2012 into an 8,000-plus attendee gathering that now travels between Dubai, Riyadh and San Francisco. He also runs the digital publishers StepFeed and YallaFeed, founded the brand-tech shop Spiderfrogs, and hosts the Maté podcast for MENA founders. Forbes put him on its 30 Under 30 cover in 2018.
Sam Seely
Sam Seely is the co-founder and CEO of Knock, a New York-based notification infrastructure company that turned the tedious plumbing of transactional email, push, SMS and in-app messages into an API and workflow engine used by Vercel, Amplitude and others. He and CTO Chris Bell, who met at Frame.io, launched Knock in 2021 and raised a $12M Series A led by Craft Ventures in February 2024, bringing total funding to $18M.
Averi
Averi is a New York-based AI content engine for startups that blends generative-AI agents with a curated marketplace of vetted US marketing experts. The platform researches, drafts, publishes and optimizes content in one workflow - handling strategy, SEO/GEO, competitor tracking and analytics while keeping humans in creative control. Founded in 2023 by Zack Holland, Averi raised a $2M pre-seed in 2024 and a $3M seed in 2025, and reports roughly $2.1M in revenue with a small team of around a dozen people.
Complete
Complete is a San Francisco-based compensation management platform that helps startups and scaling companies design, model, and communicate employee pay - covering salary, equity, bonuses, and benefits. Founded in 2022 by Rani Mavram and Zack Field, the Y Combinator-backed company replaces spreadsheets with interactive offer letters, total rewards statements, salary bands, and AI-driven scenario planning through its Compy agent, integrating across ATS, HRIS, and cap table systems.
David Senra
In this episode, podcaster and biography obsessive David Senra (host of the 'Founders' podcast) sits down with Brian Halligan (HubSpot co-founder and Sequoia partner) to distill what more than 400 studied founders have in common. Senra argues the single defining trait is extreme focus bordering on obsession, captured in his maxim 'mute the world and then build your own.' The wide-ranging conversation covers founder archetypes, the influence of fathers, why co-founder duos rarely endure, disagreeableness versus taste, the myth of the broken-home genius, whether AI is genuinely a different kind of platform shift, and the sobering finding that of the 400+ founders Senra has studied, only about three had genuinely well-balanced lives.
Salesforce Has a Newsroom. Now Your Series B Does Too.
YesPress Newsroom gives growth-stage companies the same always-on publishing engine that Fortune 500 firms run — without the massive comms team. It turns launches, hires, partnerships, transcripts, and founder interviews into editorial stories engineered to be cited by journalists, analysts, and AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Plans start free to claim, with full newsrooms from $750/month.
Plane
Plane (formerly Pilot) is a San Francisco-based global payroll, HR, and compliance platform that lets fast-growing companies pay U.S. employees, international employees, and contractors from a single system. Founded in 2017 out of Y Combinator's Winter 2017 batch, Plane runs domestic payroll, hires people abroad through employer-of-record services, and pays contractors in 240+ countries and 130+ currencies - pitching itself as the easiest-to-set-up multi-country payroll tool, with an unusual approach of charging foreign-exchange fees at cost rather than marking them up.
Kamir Kothari
Kamir Kothari is the co-founder and CEO of Inspira Education, an admissions platform pairing students with top-tier consultants for medical, legal, and business school applications. Before starting Inspira in 2020 with Arush Chandna, he held investing and operating roles at Social Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, LendingHome, and The Parthenon Group, after studying finance and economics at Oxford.
Josh Payne
Josh Payne is a builder and musician based in the Bay Area, founder of Coframe, an AI company building 'living interfaces' - websites that rewrite and redesign themselves in real time via a single script tag. Before Coframe he co-founded Autograph, a $2B+ company backed by a16z, and AccessBell, acquired by Tata Group. He holds 20+ patents and papers across AI, quantum computing, and information security, created the early coding agent GPT-Migrate that briefly topped GitHub trending, and guest-lectures on LLM code generation at Stanford, where he earned three degrees. He is also a working timpanist and jazz drummer who has performed with Josh Redman and So Percussion.
Holloway
Holloway is a San Francisco-based digital publisher of book-length, expert-written guides on the practical realities of work - raising venture capital, equity compensation, technical recruiting, remote teams, and more. Each guide is searchable down to the paragraph, annotated by editors, and updated over time so the page never goes stale the way a printed book does.
YesPress
YesPress is an AI-native publishing platform that builds one authoritative, claimable page for the people, companies, and products shaping how we work, build, and live. Its tagline - 'Remarkable People, Exceptional Stories!' - frames long-read profiles and deep dives, while its companion Newsroom product lets founders, executives, and organizations keep a continuously updated, correctable record that AI systems and search engines surface accurately. Operated by UK-registered Source Platforms Ltd, YesPress positions itself at the intersection of editorial storytelling and generative-engine optimization.
Laurence Allen
Laurence Allen, co-founder and CEO of Terranova, explains how his startup lifts land out of flood zones by injecting slurries of waste wood chips deep underground, an inexpensive, scalable alternative to seawalls, levees, and demolition. Drawing on a 1970s Venice mudjacking experiment and powered by autonomous robots and AI geology modeling, Terranova aims to be 'the anti-subsidence,' protecting whole communities and critical infrastructure. Allen also reflects on his formative internship at SpaceX, his maker upbringing, the intensity of deep-tech founding, and his vision for licensing the technology to contractors worldwide.
Hikari Senju
Hikari Senju is the founder and CEO of Omneky, a San Francisco generative AI platform that creates, analyzes, and optimizes personalized ad creative at scale. A Harvard computer scientist and son of celebrated Nihonga painter Hiroshi Senju, he began building in generative AI in 2018, five years before ChatGPT made the field mainstream. His mission is to lower the cost of effective advertising so that any founder with a compelling idea can reach customers without a million-dollar budget. Omneky has raised over $13 million from investors including SoftBank and AIX Ventures, and in 2024-2025 Senju pivoted the company toward agentic AI that autonomously plans and runs campaigns across Meta, Google, and TikTok.
Robert Schiller
Robert Schiller is the CEO of Impairment Science, Inc., the Cambridge, Massachusetts company behind DRUID, a smartphone app that measures cognitive and motor impairment in under three minutes through four game-like tasks. A repeat startup operator who has taken two high-tech companies public, Schiller runs a business built on a simple idea: instead of testing what is in your blood, test how your brain and body are actually performing right now. Under his leadership, DRUID has grown from a viral consumer download into Druid Enterprise, a workplace-safety platform used to gauge readiness for duty across fleets, public-safety departments, and employers.