BUILDERS

Doctronic became the first AI in the world legally licensed to practice medicine through Utah's AI Learning Lab regulatory sandbox in December 2025. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Matt Pavelle , Co-founder and Co-CEO of Doctronic, to learn how he and his co-founder (a physician) launched an AI-powered primary care chatbot in September 2023, validated demand through Facebook chronic c...

After building products at Microsoft (Xbox, Surface), a gaming startup acquired by Disney, Twilio, and Box, Vanessa Larco joined NEA where she led seed investments in Greenlight (debit card for kids), Majuri (C2C jewelry), and Limitless (acquired by Meta). She served on Robinhood's board for five and a half years through IPO and the GameStop crisis. In this conversation, Vanessa breaks down the sp...

Confirm uses organizational network analysis to surface hidden high performers and toxic actors that traditional performance reviews miss - identifying the quiet contributors everyone relies on and the problematic employees who manage up effectively. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with David Murray , Cofounder & CEO of Confirm , to dissect their most painful go-to-market lessons. Davi...

CalmWave is tackling ICU alarm fatigue—a problem where patients generate up to 1,600 alarms per day because clinicians lack data-driven guidance on setting vital sign thresholds. The company processes 32 million data points daily from a single 14-hospital system by fusing high-frequency vital signs from Philips InteliBridge with EMR data from Epic in real time. This represents 10 billion data poin...

i6 Group is connecting the fragmented aviation fuel ecosystem-airlines, fuel suppliers, and service providers-through a real-time digital platform that eliminates paper-based processes at over 260 airports worldwide. After launching with British Airways at Heathrow in 2015 and recently closing their Series B with German PE firm Itrium, i6 is proving that even heavily regulated, risk-averse industr...

Amplio operates a two-sided marketplace that helps manufacturers monetize surplus inventory and decommissioned industrial equipment rather than writing off assets or paying for disposal. The company has won contracts with GM and SpaceX despite competing against liquidators with 30-year local relationships. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Trey Closson , Co-Founder and CEO of Ampli...

Supersede manufactures structural building products from recycled industrial and agricultural plastic waste, creating drop-in replacements for plywood and OSB. What makes their approach notable isn't the environmental mission - it's the deliberate market sequencing strategy that let them reach the top 10 boat builders globally within months of launch. CEO and Co-Founder Sean Petterson , whose fath...

Chef Robotics has produced 80 million meals—more than all other food robotics companies combined. The company has cracked what dozens of well-funded startups couldn't: profitable deployment of AI-enabled robots in food manufacturing. In this episode of BUILDERS, Rajat Bhageria , Founder and CEO of Chef Robotics, reveals why he focused on manufacturing before restaurants, how a single contract term...

Parable is building an end-to-end intelligence platform that quantifies how organizations spend their collective time—the foundation for measuring real AI impact. With a thousand data connectors ingesting activity and log data across the enterprise software stack, Parable constructs proprietary knowledge graphs that size opportunities and measure outcomes in hard dollars, not adoption metrics. In...

F2 is the AI platform for private markets investors, automating due diligence and portfolio monitoring workflows with agentic AI. After building ARK into a digital banking platform that scaled from tens of millions to tens of billions in loan volume, Donald Muir developed AI technology to automate debt placement on ARK's marketplace. When upmarket institutional lenders requested access to the AI f...

Hubble Network is redefining what's possible in satellite connectivity by connecting standard Bluetooth chips to satellites over 500 kilometers away using advanced antenna arrays and digital beamforming. Founded in 2021 by Alex Haro (co-founder of Life360, which IPO'd in 2019 and grew to 80+ million monthly active users) and Ben Longmier (whose previous company's protocol became Amazon Sidewalk af...

Plantd is reinventing engineered lumber by replacing trees with rapidly renewable biomass, scaling manufacturing technology that costs 100x less than traditional OSB production. With customers including DR Horton and growing demand across furniture, RV, and international markets, Plantd has attracted partnerships throughout the building materials industry. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down w...

Axenya is rebuilding healthcare around chronic disease prevention through AI-powered continuous monitoring. Covering 100,000 lives in Brazil and processing 95 million clinical inferences monthly, the company pivoted from clinical technology provider to healthcare broker - achieving cash flow positive status before their Series A. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Mariano García-Valiño ,...

Turnstile is reimagining quote-to-cash for the modern B2B world, where negotiated agreements create operational chaos that standard pricing never does. After selling Second Measure to Bloomberg, co-founders Michael Babineau and Lillian Chou experienced the irony firsthand: running a data analytics company while managing their own revenue operations through spreadsheets and manual processes. That i...

Land Life is a technology-driven nature restoration company that restores landscapes degraded by wildfire, overfarming, and urbanization. The company combines proprietary remote sensing, machine learning algorithms, and hardware solutions to deliver end-to-end restoration projects spanning 40 years, monetized through voluntary and compliance carbon markets. With seven validated project design docu...

David Stifter spent 20 years as head of technology at Colony Capital, managing systems for a $60 billion private equity real estate firm. When a longtime AP specialist retired, the company lost its institutional knowledge for coding complex invoices across thousands of entities and tenant relationships. After a year evaluating RPA, template-based approaches, and early OCR solutions, David recogniz...

Datawizz is pioneering continuous reinforcement learning infrastructure for AI systems that need to evolve in production, not ossify after deployment. After building and exiting RapidAPI—which served 10 million developers and had at least one team at 75% of Fortune 500 companies using and paying for the platform—Founder and CEO Iddo Gino returned to building when he noticed a pattern: nearly every...

GreenLite delivers private construction plan review as an alternative to traditional city permitting processes. After spending six months testing both sides of the construction permitting transaction, the company identified owner-developers as their ICP and built a business model around Florida's privatization legislation—legislation that has now expanded to nine additional states including Texas,...

Aurelius Systems is tackling one of defense's most critical challenges: cost-effective counter-drone warfare. The company builds lightweight, edge-deployed laser weapon systems with 10-million-x marginal cost advantages over traditional interceptors—shooting down drones for approximately 10 cents versus $2 million per Sea Sparrow missile. With systems priced in hundreds of thousands rather than te...

Dexory builds data intelligence platforms for logistics, using autonomous robots to create digital twins of warehouse operations. With over $280 million raised through a recent preemptive Series C, the company has scaled from a bootstrapped startup to a full-stack robotics operation expanding across Europe and the US. In this episode of Category Visionaries, I sat down with Andrei Danescu , Founde...

Sparrow automates employee leave management—a compliance nightmare that consumes thousands of HR hours annually at companies with distributed workforces. With $64 million in total funding through their recent Series B, Sparrow has achieved 14x revenue growth between their Series A and Series B by solving what became an "insurmountable problem" as states, counties, and cities each passed conflictin...

Alex is an AI recruiter that autonomously handles phone screens, video interviews, and candidate communications at scale for enterprise talent teams and staffing firms. The company rebranded from Apriora after acquiring alex.com for over half a million dollars—a brand investment that immediately increased word-of-mouth referrals and inbound pipeline. In this episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with A...

Sure built the technology infrastructure enabling the world's biggest consumer brands to embed complex insurance products directly into their core transactions—from auto purchases to home loans. In this episode of BUILDERS, Wayne Slavin shares how Sure pivoted from a consumer mobile app to B2B infrastructure after insurance executives kept pulling engineers into boardrooms to see the backend, why...

Limelight is building the infrastructure layer for B2B creator marketing, processing payments and managing campaigns for companies spending six figures monthly on creator partnerships. With $2.1 million in funding from Signal to Noise Ratio, Ascend Ventures, Savion Ventures, and strategic angels including the head of AI at Amazon and the former Chief Product Officer at Lyft, Limelight powers creat...

Jane Technologies built real-time inventory streaming technology that connects cannabis dispensary point-of-sale systems to online ordering platforms—solving a technical problem that hadn't been cracked before in the space. As a West Point graduate and Apache helicopter pilot who found cannabis instrumental in his transition from military service, Socrates co-founded Jane with his brother (a compu...