BUILDERS

⁠ Avantos AI ⁠ is replacing the fragmented patchwork of CRMs, task managers, and paper-based workflows that financial services firms have relied on for decades with a single operating system for client management. Built on a knowledge graph and AI-native from the ground up, Avantos models the full complexity of financial relationships — client data, the service team, and the products clients hold...

Most AI finance startups are chasing the same crowded ground — invoice processing, AP automation, SMB-friendly dashboards. Nominal is doing something different. Guy Leibovitz , a three-time founder with two exits, is building AI agents that replace the full manual workload of controllers and accountants — and he's selling it into mid-market and enterprise companies that nobody else is seriousl...

Heavy equipment rental is a $100 billion market — and until recently, it ran almost entirely on pen and paper or legacy software built 30 to 40 years ago. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with ⁠Andy Feis⁠ , Co-Founder & CEO of ⁠Renterra⁠ , to learn how five years of management consulting across manufacturing, mining, logistics, and construction led him to one of the most overlooked...

Rembrand⁠ is building a new media category called in-content advertising — using AI to insert brand products seamlessly into existing video content, from social creator clips to premium TV shows and films, in a way viewers can't detect. The founding insight is blunt: ad industry executives were going home and paying to avoid their own product. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with...

Extend's model is built on a specific bet: that banks want to offer their SMB clients a better expense management product but won't build it themselves. Extend builds that product and sells it to the bank, who then distributes it to their business customers as their own offering. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with ⁠Guillaume Bouvard⁠ , Co-Founder, COO & CMO of Extend, to...

Akamai once made the decision to freeze its entire network for a full year. No changes. No deployments. No innovation. The cost of another major outage — like the ones that had already knocked critical services offline — was simply too high to justify any forward movement. ⁠Edward Tsinovoi⁠ was inside that decision. And what it revealed to him wasn't just an operational problem at Akamai. It w...

Vinci is building the foundation model for the physical world — starting with heat transfer in semiconductor and electronics engineering. Approximately three years into the journey, the team has shipped a product now in use by engineering teams at top-tier semiconductor and electronics companies. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with ⁠Hardik Kabaria⁠ , CEO and Co-Founder of ⁠Vinci , to...

Safebooks AI is building the infrastructure layer that makes agentic AI safe to operate inside the office of the CFO. Where most finance automation tools solve point problems — AP, AR, billing, reconciliation — Safebooks ingests data end to end across every system in a company's financial stack: CPQ, CRM, contract management, billing, ERP, and banking. Using graph AI technology, it normalizes...

Copper makes battery-equipped induction ranges that plug into a standard household outlet — no panel upgrades, no new circuits, no electrician. In a Los Angeles building renovation, that difference saved a developer $800,000. In a deal with the New York City Housing Authority, it unlocked a contract for 10,000 units. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Weldon Kennedy , Co-Founder &am...

Ed Brandman spent decades in global financial services before retiring in 2018. His last chapter before stepping away was at KKR — where he joined when the firm had just 390 people and left having helped build it into one of the most recognizable names in alternative assets. Five years later, a conversation with his son (now his co-founder) about the due diligence process pulled him back. That bec...

Reevo launched with an audacious compound thesis: tear out the Frankenstack of CRM, sequencing tools, conversation intelligence, data enrichment, and forecasting apps that buries revenue teams in busywork — and replace it with a single unified platform that powers the entire GTM motion from first outreach to closed-won and beyond. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with David Zhu , Co-Fo...

John Glasgow spent over a decade as the end customer of enterprise accounting software — at Adobe, Invoice2Go, and Bill.com — before deciding to build the ERP he always wished existed. After Invoice2Go was acquired for $625 million, he applied to Y Combinator with a newborn at home and a single conviction: the incumbents were 25–30 years old, the pain was acute, and nobody was building for the mod...

Medical coding is a mandatory workflow — no code, no claim, no payment. But the US isn't producing enough coders to keep up, payer-side complexity keeps growing, and hospital margins are already razor-thin. Arintra is building the AI infrastructure to take that workflow off the table entirely. In this episode of BUILDERS, CEO and Co-Founder Nitesh Shroff breaks down how Arintra is winning deal...

E-commerce hasn't fundamentally changed since 1996. Same homepage. Same nav tree. Same cart and checkout. Theo Satloff , Co-founder & CEO of Remark , is building from the inside out to change that — replacing the generic, one-size-fits-all brand website with a personalized, consultative shopping experience that adapts to the individual the moment they land on site. In this episode, Theo ge...

AIR is an eVTOL company on a path to making personal aviation a mass-market product — not a commercial fleet play. With a $35M+ order book, aircraft already delivered, and double-digit revenues projected for 2026, AIR is an outlier in a sector where most well-funded competitors have yet to generate meaningful revenue. On this episode of BUILDERS, we spoke with ⁠Rani Plaut⁠ , CEO and Co-Founder of...

OpenHands⁠ is the largest open source platform for agentic software development — giving engineering teams AI automation for the maintenance work that consumes developer cycles without requiring creative judgment: dependency updates, vulnerability remediation, unit test coverage, and code review. In this episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with ⁠Robert Brennan⁠ , Co-Founder and CEO of OpenHands, to d...

Frugal⁠ is building the engineering-layer that FinOps dashboards never could. Where existing tools tell you what you're spending, Frugal embeds cost visibility directly into the software development lifecycle — so engineers make better cost decisions before the bill arrives, not 30 days after. In this episode of BUILDERS, four-time founder ⁠Michael Weider⁠ breaks down why AI is quietly destroy...

Roughly 90% of the world's goods move by sea on vessels powered by technology that, in many cases, hasn't meaningfully advanced since the textbooks Mike Carter studied at Kings Point — which were printed in the 1960s. Mike and his co-founder Steven grew up together in the mountains of North Carolina, spent careers at offshore drilling contractors and energy majors like Shell, and eventuall...

Blue Current⁠ spent a decade doing what most battery startups won't: staying in the lab until the chemistry was genuinely ready. Founded with a single North Star — build a safer battery, whatever that takes — the company scrapped its original technology after early cells literally caught fire, rebuilt around silicon as an active anode material in a fully dry architecture, and emerged with a ba...

Motif is building a browser-based, AI-native design system for architects, engineers, and general contractors — bringing a notoriously complex, desktop-heavy workflow into the modern era. In this episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with ⁠Amar Hanspal⁠ , CEO of ⁠Motif⁠ , to talk about the GTM decisions that shaped Motif's early traction: how they identified the right ICP, why they went PLG, what i...

Cyber insurance was bleeding money across Europe — and the industry knew it. Loss ratios were unsustainable because carriers were pricing risk they didn't actually understand. Vincenz Klemm , CEO and Co-Founder of Baobab , saw that as a systems problem, not a market problem. His solution: build an insurer that maps a company's external attack surface before underwriting, retrieves leaked c...

Most AI companies in 2023 raced to own a vertical. EverWorker made the opposite bet — build a horizontal platform that lets anyone create agents for any purpose, no code required. In this episode of BUILDERS, Anton Antich , CPO and Co-Founder of EverWorker , gets into what it actually takes to sell AI inside enterprises that are stuck between the hype and the reality, why he's making the case...

Yutori is building web agents — AI that can monitor, navigate, and eventually act on the web on your behalf. Their first product, Scouts, launched in beta in June 2024 with one deliberate constraint: read-only web monitoring. No booking, no form-filling, no write actions. Just signal extraction from the open web. That narrow framing, paired with a $25K launch video that went viral on Twitter, drov...

Andromeda is building social humanoid robots designed to solve the loneliness epidemic among the elderly. Its flagship robot, Abby, is already deployed in nursing homes across Australia — speaking 90 languages, building ongoing relationships with residents, and filling a care gap that human staff simply don't have the capacity to address. In this episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Grace Bro...

Every year, more than half of private student loan applicants get declined. Not because they're unserious about their education — but because they narrowly miss a credit cutoff. For upperclassmen and grad students already deep into a degree, that rejection often means dropping out. Jen O'Donald spent 13 years at Sallie Mae, most recently running product, watching this gap go unsolved. So s...