The Upstarts Podcast

Materials science hasn’t changed much in 150 years. Radical AI CEO Joseph Krause wants to change that. In a big new lab in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard, the startup founder is looking to change that. He’s building a “next-gen” approach that he says makes other autonomous labs look like hand-free driving mode on a car, compared to a fully self-driving Waymo. It’s an approach that plenty of corporate scient...

First at West Point and then as an officer in the U.S. Army Rangers, Brian Elliott always sought out the hardest, highest-impact challenge. “You can do hard things that don’t have impact, but you can’t do things that have impact that aren’t hard,” he says. Now Elliott is taking the same approach at Blitzy, the Boston-based startup he co-founded with Harvard Business School classmate Sid Pardeshi i...

Writer’s May Habib: On VC Bias, Token Maxing’, And The Customers Anthropic And OpenAI Leave Behind Fortune 500 boards are in weekend crisis meetings about adopting AI. Many have nothing to show for it, despite spending millions with the big AI labs. "Anthropic and OpenAI salespeople walk in like heroes, get a contract, and leave to literally never be seen again,” says Writer CEO May Habib. That’s...

Salespeople have a problem: they only spend 21% of their time actually selling to customers. Founder Jaleh Rezaei set out to fix that – and business was booming. Her startup, Mutiny, reached $10 million-plus in revenue for software that helped take some of the busywork out of the sales process. “When you start a company, the expectation is failure,” she says. “It’s really hard to accept that you’r...

Ever since neurosurgeon Alex Ksendzovsky was in college, he’s been captivated by an idea worthy of a mad scientist: turning brain cell ‘wetware’ into ‘software’ that can make predictions and help train AI. It sounds like science fiction, but at Ksenzovsky’s startup The Biological Computing Co., or TBC, the founder swears it’s already reality. A model improved with algorithms derived from a process...

When Vanta co-founder Christina Cacioppo first pitched investors on compliance software, she faced a frosty reception. It wasn’t a viable product category, she was told. They’d sell for peanuts within a couple of months. No one actually wanted to work on compliance. But Cacioppo had felt the pain first-hand. She was convinced: software could prove the perfect painkiller for fellow startups to hand...

If you could fix the genetic lottery to ensure your baby was born healthy, would you? For entrepreneur Noor Siddiqui, there's no question. Ever since her mother started to lose her vision as the result of a genetic condition, she’s dreamed of solving the problem through better genetic testing. And at Orchid, the startup she founded in 2019, she now offers a novel approach to genetic testing that c...

The ChatGPT craze was still years away when Chilean-born Cris Valenzuela co-founded Runway to tinker on visual AI models with two classmates at an NYU lab in 2018. Back then, investors weren't sold — not just on video AI, but on generative AI altogether. "There's always doubt when you get 50 rejections," Valenzuela says. "I've realized that building something special, you have to be able and willi...

When Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz's parents struggled to navigate Medicare—faxes, phone calls, even a trip to the Social Security office—he figured someone had built a better way. Nobody had. So, in 2020, he co-founded Chapter: a startup focused on connecting Americans to better Medicare plans, saving seniors thousands of dollars per year. Among legacy healthcare players, that hasn’t made him many fans....

A self-described "shy nerd" from rural Ontario, Aidan Gomez doesn't like to scream his startup’s name from the rooftops. But the co-author of the landmark ‘Attention Is All You Need’ paper is quietly building one of AI's most important infrastructure companies — one focused on bringing its benefits to the wider world outside Silicon Valley. Toronto-based Cohere works with major enterprises and G7...

When it comes to calling customer support, startup CEO Jesse Zhang knows your pain.  ”It's just a very frustrating experience, because you're stuck in a loop,” he says. In 2023, he and co-founder Ashwin Sreenivas launched Decagon to solve the problem with powerful new technology: AI agents. Today, customers like Avis Budget Group, Duolingo and Fanatics all work with Decagon, helping it reach a $4....

Just nine months ago, Morgan Prize-winning prodigy Carina Hong was still on an academic track, pursuing a joint law degree and math PhD at Stanford. Now, as the founder of startup Axiom Math, she runs one of the most promising challengers in a new, fast-paced category: AI for math. Recently valued at $1.6 billion, Axiom has already solved some of math’s most challenging problems, and Hong hopes it...

Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg operates between two worlds. On one side are highly-trained lawyers who are skeptical about AI’s ability to improve their work. On the other are Silicon Valley technologists who see law as one of the fields that the biggest AI labs, Anthropic and OpenAI, can easily absorb. Co-founded in 2022, Harvey now works with more than 100,000 lawyers across 1,000 businesses, gener...

Star Catcher CEO Andrew Rush grew up loving science fiction. Now he’s helping to bring a whole new generation of tech into reality in space by tackling its biggest bottleneck: access to power. “Everybody basically goes on camping trips. You bring your solar rays with you,” says Star Catcher CEO Andrew Rush. “Our daily lives are based on and enriched by space, regardless of who we are. So providing...

Startup founder Victor Riparbelli has always been drawn to counterculture ideas. "Life's more interesting at the fringes," he says. When Victor co-founded Synthesia in 2017 to produce AI video, most investors didn't buy it — nearly 100 said no. A pivotal refocus away from Hollywood toward unglamorous business use cases like training videos and internal communications changed everything, helping Sy...

$50 billion. That’s how much in tariff refunds Ryan Petersen hopes to retrieve for U.S. citizens using AI agents recently built by his startup, Flexport. But logistics unicorn Flexport was struggling when co-founder Petersen returned as CEO in 2023. Customers were fleeing; morale had plunged. Ryan talks about his Upstart Moment in engineering a comeback – and why AI agents are increasingly the ans...

Experts have called Valar Atomics CEO Isaiah Taylor “totally nuts.” He says that when you’re trying to build a trillion-dollar company that’s literally splitting the atom, it comes with the territory. Isaiah discusses his origins founding nuclear energy startup Valar, why competitors have failed, and his Upstart Moment in raising $150 million to build new-look energy campuses called “gigasites.” H...

When Loyal founder Celine Halioua told people she was building a dog longevity startup, they laughed in her face. Now she's running what could be the largest-ever clinical trial to extend canine lifespans — pursuing FDA approval for multiple drugs to help senior and large dogs live two years longer or more. Celine shares her unusual journey to raising $250 million for a startup that defies easy la...

Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins leads the most valuable woman-led startup in the world, a design and publishing tool used by more than 260 million users and valued at $42 billion. But before all that, Melanie was an Upstart: an unappreciated founder from western Australia who had to fly to San Francisco uninvited just to secure startup funding. Melanie goes into that Upstart Moment in thi...

On The Upstarts Podcast, you’ll hear from some of the most exciting Upstarts today: emerging technology leaders punching above their weight to achieve real impact. Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad profiled leaders from Marc Benioff to Melanie Perkins in a decade-plus at Forbes. Now as the founder and editor of Upstarts Media, he’s sitting down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo...