Chorus
Chorus is building Melty, an open-source AI code-editor that plugs into VS Code and other IDEs so every chat with GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini, or a local model is turned into a signed Git commit and refactor. Founded in 2024 and HQ in San Francisco, the company is led by Brown-alumni duo Charlie Holtz (ex-Replicate growth) and Jackson de Campos (ex-Netflix ML-infra). Chorus graduated YC S24 and took Y Combinator’s standard $500k two-SAFE deal.
vabble.io
London-based fintech turning exporters’ invoices into tradable digital assets so small & mid-size suppliers in emerging markets can unlock working-capital instantly. Founded in 2021 by former bankers Pablo Terpolilli, Derek Hudson and ex-Goldman Sachs engineer Simon Knowles, the startup blends an AI-driven risk engine with a custom legal wrapper to sell receivables to institutional investors online. vabble has raised ≈ $1.5m across three rounds – most recently a $0.49m follow-on (Jul 2024) – from Creative Destruction Lab, Fuel Ventures, Hatcher+, MNL Nominees and Startupbootcamp Australia.
Vayu Robotics
Vayu Robotics develops lidar-free delivery robots that fuse plenoptic passive sensors with transformer-based mobility foundation models; founded 2022 and headquartered in Palo Alto. The ex-Velodyne/Apple/Lyft trio—Anand Gopalan, Mahesh Krishnamurthi, Nitish Srivastava—closed a $12.7m seed led by Khosla Ventures and Lockheed Martin Ventures on Oct 2023 and, on Jul 2024, debuted Vayu One, a 100-lb-payload robot (<20 mph) already under a 2,500-unit contract with a major e-commerce player.
Ndea
Ndea is a San-Francisco AI research lab co-founded in 2024 by François Chollet (creator of Keras) and Mike Knoop (Zapier co-founder). The team is pursuing “deep-learning-guided program synthesis” to build an AGI-grade “factory for rapid scientific advancement” that can invent and commercialize ideas across domains from drug discovery to space. Ndea operates fully remotely, has raised $43m seed in Dec 2024, and is recruiting a talent-dense program-synthesis research staff.
Aman Kishore
Former NVIDIA simulation lead and Sequoia-backed founder Aman Kishore is now building a new venture in stealth out of San Francisco. Kishore co-founded Mirage ML (LLM-for-3D assets), which was acquired by legal-AI platform Harvey in April 2024; he subsequently helped scale Harvey’s applied-research group. Earlier roles include robotics engineering at Apple. His personal site states he is “exploring and building my curiosities,” and recent private hiring signals show searches for founding ML-infra engineers. Currently in stealth 👻
Frédéric Renken
Frédéric Renken—first product hire at email-client Superhuman—has co-founded Lassie, a stealth fintech building modern back-office tools for the one-million independent doctors in the U.S. The On Deck Founder spotlight lists Renken as co-founder alongside CEO Steijn Pelle; an X thread from @fredericrenken confirms they are “reinventing antiquated financial workflows” for medical practices. Lassie has not yet announced external funding and is quietly recruiting founding engineers in San Francisco. Currently in stealth 👻
Frédéric Renken
Opennote
Opennote is building “the AI tutor that lives in your notes,” converting class slides and PDFs into personalised videos, quizzes and journal prompts right inside students’ existing note-files. Founded in 2024 by Toronto under-grads Abhi Arya, Rishi Srihari and Vedant Vyas, the team entered YC S25, hit 50 000 users pre-launch and relocated to San Francisco. An $850k pre-seed closed on Apr 2025 (Afore VC, friends-&-family syndicate) is the only disclosed funding to date. Opennote is hiring founding engineers and GTM leads as it readies a public beta for the 2025-26 academic year.
Opennote Team
Maria Pousa
María Pousa is a Barcelona-based marketing operator—ex-CMO of ad-verification giant Integral Ad Science and former Chief Growth Officer at ISPD—now building a new venture in stealth. Over a two-decade career she has scaled revenue and brand strategy at IAS, Mediaocean and Yahoo!, and was profiled by Forbes as a “trail-blazing Latina CMO”. Pousa’s LinkedIn headline switched to “Building Something New” in July 2025, and recent hiring signals show searches for founding GTM and product leads; no funding has been announced. Currently in stealth 👻
Maria Pousa
Nuntius
Nuntius is a YC S25 spin-out that promises to “eliminate stand-up”—its AI workspace bot ingests Gmail, Slack, GitHub, calendars and more, then auto-generates status updates, assigns tasks and keeps a living context map inside Slack. Co-founders Daniel Rupawalla (ex-founder, acquired by U.S. News) and Abhijay Rana (ML researcher) incorporated the company in 2025 in San Francisco; a $500k pre-seed from Y Combinator and Afore Capital closed on Jan 2025. The team is recruiting back-end/LLM engineers while running private pilots with early design partners.
Dynamics Lab
Building Mirage, the world’s first AI-native “world-model engine” that generates fully playable 3-D game worlds in real time from simple text or controller prompts. Founded in 2024 and headquartered in San Francisco, the team of ex-Google, NVIDIA, SEGA and Microsoft engineers publicly unveiled Mirage on 7 Jul 2025, releasing two browser demos—Urban Chaos (GTA-style) and Coastal Drift (Forza-style)—that let players add objects (“make it rain”, “spawn a flying car”) and watch them appear instantly. Dynamics Lab has not yet disclosed external funding but is hiring real-time graphics and world-model researchers to evolve Mirage from research preview to commercial engine.
Dash
Dash is building “ChatGPT with Hands,” an AI agent that plugs into Gmail, Slack, Notion, Linear, HubSpot and more to plan and execute full workflows—think drafting a “weekly team update,” enriching a new lead in HubSpot, then scheduling the follow-up call automatically. Founded in 2025 and based in SF, Dash’s 18- to 20-year-old founding trio—Pranjali Awasthi, Dhruv Roongta and Harsha Gaddipati—graduated from YC’s Summer-25 batch and took YC’s standard $500k pre-seed SAFE; they are now hiring founding engineers ahead of a public beta.
1x1
1x1 is building Project Horizon, a peer-to-peer drone-logistics network aimed at letting “consumers become value creators in the real world, not just online.” Founded in 2024 and operating out of New York City, the company is led by CEO Jacob Miller (D-U-N-S record) and remains entirely bootstrapped with no external capital disclosed. 1x1 is currently hiring founding engineers and robotics specialists ahead of a private pilot slated for late 2025.
Eric Liu
Eric Liu—ex-Software Engineer at Airplane and ex-Algorithm Developer at Hudson River Trading (PhD ML, CMU)—is launching a San-Francisco stealth startup that aims to enable natural-language programming. LinkedIn lists Liu as co-founder of a venture “building the future of natural language programming". No funding has been announced. Currently in stealth 👻
Eugenia Kuyda
Russian-born journalist-turned-entrepreneur Eugenia Kuyda founded Replika in 2017 after spinning the idea out of YC-backed Luka; the AI-companion app is run by a distributed team anchored in SF. Kuyda reported in August 2024 that Replika has surpassed 30m sign-ups, with ~25 % of users on paid plans under its freemium model . The company is preparing a major “Replika 2.0” relaunch—adding photorealistic avatars and upgraded conversational architecture—while Kuyda publicly explores the social and ethical frontier of AI-human relationships. Currently in stealth 👻
Quo Labs
Quo Labs is building agentic home robots for elder-care, founded in 2025 and based in San Francisco. Three 17-year-old founders relocated to the Bay Area after watching their own grandparents struggle with unaffordable care; they are now prototyping “robot caretakers for the elderly” and hiring robotics engineers while remaining fully bootstrapped.
Connor Sweeney
Connor Sweeney is an MIT-trained bio-engineer and former chief-of-staff to Lucy Guo at creator-platform Passes. He previously co-founded Robigo, whose engineered-microbe “molecular vigilante” biopesticides secured a $1.15m pre-seed round in 2021. June 2025 he tweeted that he had “recently started a new company,” signalling a fresh venture now operating in stealth mode. Based in SF, Sweeney continues to publish peer-reviewed work on deploying engineered microbes (Nature Microbiology, 2025) while angel-investing across climate-biotech startups. Currently in stealth 👻
Connor Sweeney
zero
Zero is an open-source, AI-native email client that re-prioritizes your inbox, summarizes multi-day threads, drafts context-aware replies, and lets you chat with your email. Founded in 2025 and now headquartered in San Francisco, the company was created by Nizar Abi Zaher and Adam Wazzan for YC’s Spring 2025 batch. Zero released its MIT-licensed codebase alongside a public beta at 0.email on July 2025 and has so far raised only Y Combinator’s standard $500k SAFE; the team is hiring full-stack and security engineers while nurturing a growing self-hosting community.
Jessy
Jessy is a San-Francisco-based crypto operator and investor now building a new company in stealth. Formerly Head of Ecosystem at Eigen Labs, Jessy transitioned in 2024 to become Director of Ecosystem at the non-profit Eigen Foundation while also serving as a Venture Partner at crypto-fund Nascent. X bio reads they are “exploring something new…”—a hint at the forthcoming venture. Jessy remains active in the modular-blockchain community, advising AVS partners and hosting the “13-Year-Old VC Hacker House” series spotlighted by The Defiant. Currently in stealth 👻
Gigiai
Gigiai is building an AI-powered “social-intelligence” network that plugs into your calendars, inboxes, and contacts to surface the right people at the right moment, before you even ask. Founded in 2023 and HQ in Paris, the company is led by Clara Gold and has already mapped 300k+ profiles across San Francisco and New York. In May 2023 it secured a $4.5m seed round backed by Sequoia Capital, OpenAI, Monashees and DST, positioning the startup to hire founding engineers and data scientists ahead of a private-beta launch later this year.
Sunil James
Sunil James is a San-Francisco security-infra veteran who co-founded Scytale (acquired by HPE in Feb 2020) and today serves as VP, GreenLake Cloud Platform Engineering at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Internal hiring signals tracked by Specter show James recruiting founding engineers under the banner “Building something new” – suggesting a fresh zero-trust identity venture now in stealth; no outside funding has been disclosed yet. Currently in stealth 👻
Factory
Factory builds “Droids,” autonomous AI agents that plan, write, test, review and ship code, founded in 2023 and headquartered in SF. Co-founders Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes closed a $15m series a on Jun 2024—led by Sequoia with Lux and Mantis—bringing total funding to $20m and valuing the company at $120m. Factory achieved SOC 2 in Apr 2024, went GA on May 2025, and listed on Microsoft Azure Marketplace on Jul 2025; its Droids now power teams at Bubble, Nav and MongoDB, and the startup is hiring for agent-orchestration and cloud-infra roles.
Factory
Brendan Falk
Brendan Falk is the founder & CEO of stealth-mode Zeus, which he announced on X in June 2025 upon leaving AWS; alongside co-founder Grant Gurvis he’s building an AI-driven workflow manager for software teams. Previously he co-founded Fig (YC ’20), acquired by Amazon Web Services in 2023, and then led Amazon’s AI tooling efforts within AWS. A Harvard Econ/CS alum based in San Francisco, Falk is now hiring founding-engineer and product roles while operating entirely in stealth. Currently in stealth 👻
Nozomio
Nozomio Labs is the one-person applied-AI lab behind Nia, an agentic co-pilot that enriches coding agents by indexing full code-bases and external docs via its MCP context layer. Solo founder Arlan Rakhmetzhanov (18) incorporated the company in 2025 after winning “Product of the Day” on Product Hunt and relocating from Kazakhstan to San Francisco. On May 2025 Nozomio closed an $842k pre-seed round—its first outside capital—from Andrena Ventures, Ventures Together and several operator-angels; the startup is now running stealth pilots with AI IDE partners while remaining a YC S25 alum.
Arlan Rakhmetzhanov
Delve
Delve is automating SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001 and GDPR audits with domain-specific AI agents, founded in 2023 and based in San Francisco. MIT-dropout duo Karun Kaushik (CEO) and Selin Kocalar launched from YC W24 and raised a $3.3m seed in Jan 2025 from Y Combinator, General Catalyst, FundersClub, Soma Capital and others. Rapid uptake—100 → 500+ paying customers in six months—drew inbound term-sheets, culminating in a $32m series a led by Insight Partners at a $300m valuation on Jul 2025; Fortune-500 CISOs joined as angels. Delve will use the capital to expand its agent framework and hire across compliance R&D and go-to-market.
Anton OsikaCEO, Lovable
