Founders You Should Know — May 20th Showcase Recap
What does Taylor Swift have in common with uranium enrichment? This show :)
🍽️ Apply now to the Founders You Should Know community to join our summer dinner series: intimate, off-the-record conversations with breakout founders.
We’ve been hearing people say that the big AI labs are killing startup opportunities – adding new capabilities into their models so fast that startups can’t compete, and hoovering up all the talent that would otherwise be excited to join them.
We take the exact opposite view. We think there’s never been a better time to build something impactful at a startup. If you’ve been coming to FYSK for a while, you know we featured Anthropic back in 2023, when it was still under 100 people and a Series B company. Joining Anthropic at that stage turned out to be an incredible startup opportunity, and anyone who did is probably feeling very good about that decision today. But what’s happened since is even more important. The foundation models have become a utility like water and electricity — widely accessible with just an API call. They’re tools that everyone can now build with. And that means a whole new categories of ambitious startups have become possible.
The founders we featured last week are tackling some of humanity’s biggest and hardest problems: how to create abundant clean energy, how to foster deeper human connection, how to build at the speed of thought, and how to design the next generation of rockets and spaceships.
Talented engineers are finding fresh opportunities beyond the frontier labs at these startups. On Wednesday, we celebrated two community members who found their next chapter through FYSK. Sara Pohland joined Voio after attending a dinner we hosted with the founder, and Aadarsh Pratik joined Campfire after meeting them at the October showcase. Both received their FYSK hoodies on stage (and you can too if you’ve gotten a job through FYSK)!
If you’d like to be connected to any of the founders below, send us an email blurb with context and we’ll reach out to the founder to facilitate a connection.
Flow Engineering
Flow Engineering helps hardware teams design, test, and iterate complex systems at software speed.
Founder: Pari Singh
Open Roles: Account Executives, Software Engineers (Frontend, AI, Infrastructure, Full stack, Forward Deployed)
Keycard
Keycard builds identity and access infrastructure for AI agents, helping developers securely connect agents, people, and systems.
Founder: Ian Livingstone
Open Roles: SDK engineer, AI/Agent engineer, Systems engineer, Frontend engineer
Eigen
Eigen is building “the world’s mutual friend” — an AI companion designed to help people belong, grow together, and connect more deeply with one another.
Founder: Paul Scherer
Open Roles: Engineering, Operations
Serval
Serval builds AI agents for IT service management.
Founder: Jake Stauch
Open Roles: Software Engineers, Forward Deployed Engineers, Deployment Strategists, Designers, Account Executives, other
Tasklet
Tasklet is the agent OS for knowledge work. Scale your company without adding headcount with AI agents that do the work for you.
Founder: Andrew Lee
Open Roles: Agent engineers, Design engineers, Product engineers, Product Manager, GTM
General Matter
General Matter is fixing the domestic fuel bottleneck in nuclear energy through uranium enrichment infrastructure.
Founder: Scott Nolan
Open Roles: Hardware Engineering, Software Engineering
Sail Research
Sail Research provides the infrastructure for abundant intelligence.
Founder: Neil Movva
Open Roles: Distributed Systems, GPU Optimizers, Backend Generalists, Rust Lovers
Specter
Specter provides real-time physical intelligence across critical infrastructure and industrial environments through wireless long range sensing and general AI.
Founder: Xerxes Libsch
Open Roles: Software Engineering, Hardware Engineering, Manufacturing
OpenRouter
OpenRouter is a marketplace and unified API for accessing, comparing, and routing across hundreds of AI models.
Founder: Alex Atallah
Open Roles: Software Engineer (Platform, Product, Dev Products, Full Stack), Data Engineer, Security Engineer, Growth Engineer, Developer Relations Lead
Conduit
Conduit is building mind-reading AI for high-bandwidth brain-to-computer communication through a non-invasive thought-to-text system.
Founder: Rio Popper
Open Roles: ML Research, ML Ops, ML Infra, Data Engineers
Thank you again to everyone who attended and to Rippling and Digital Ocean for their continued generosity in supporting our community!
Couldn’t make this showcase? Feeling the FYSK FOMO? Apply now to our community and subscribe to our newsletter to get your invite to private founder dinners and our next show!