The tech boosting scientists, success stats, and IT staff
Patrick Finlay, Jack Dent, and Andrei Serban are building with AI to elevate the work of critical teams
While AI seems to be the prerequisite for all modern startups, these three founders are aligned around one mission: harnessing it to enhance human work, not necessarily replace it.
Today marks the final day of our in-depth week-long preview of the founders speaking at next week’s Founders You Should Know showcase. We still have a few seats left for high-talent engineers — if you or a friend are exploring new opportunities, apply now to secure your seat.
Patrick Finlay, founder of Solidroad
After closing his first startup, Patrick took a break to figure out what was next. In that time, he wrote about his vision for his future, including an outline of his dream company:
4 years later, this reads less like a wishlist and more like a blueprint — it’s exactly the company he’s built at Solidroad.
Patrick is folding hard-won lessons from his first startup into his current goal to tackle one of the most universal pain points in business: customer experience. Solidroad reviews all customer interactions, led by humans or AI, and turns them into opportunities for improvement. The platform automatically generates training simulations for support reps and refinements for AI agents, ensuring that no matter who (or what) is handling the interaction, the customer’s experience gets better.
The company is growing fast, helping customer success teams from fashion to airlines to insurance. Across all of their customers, one thing remains consistent: every metric that matters for customer success is improving with Solidroad.
Come hear more about the startup that’s making young(er) Patrick’s vision a reality next Wednesday.
Jack Dent, founder of Chai Discovery
Jack Dent and his co-founder were close friends in their undergraduate CS program at Harvard, but it would take 6 years after graduation for them to make the leap to starting a company together. He spent those years at Stripe, building and overseeing multiple products from concept to launch. When the time came for a new challenge, he turned to his college friends to take on a bold mission: leveraging AI to discover new biomedical drugs.
It’s hard not to be impressed by what Jack and his team are building at Chai Discovery. With the discovery of new antibodies becoming increasingly challenging, Chai Discovery is transforming the drug discovery process. Their latest model, Chai-2, achieves an antibody design hit rate approaching 20% — a dramatic improvement over the industry average of 0.1%.
They recently closed a $70M Series A led by Menlo Ventures to continue advancing the frontiers of medical AI and are actively hiring top engineering talent to join the team. Come meet Jack next week and discover why this could be your next career-defining opportunity.
Andrei Serban, founder of Console
Andrei Serban checks all the boxes of a Silicon Valley prodigy: Thiel Fellow, Waterloo CS dropout, and a successful exit before the age of 30. Rippling acquired his first startup, and he stuck around briefly (five months) before the urge to build came again. During his short stint, frequent conversations with IT teams revealed how much of their bandwidth was consumed by tasks that required time, not skill. This, he decided, would be the focus of his next venture.
Why IT? Andrei says it’s simple: once he finds a problem worth solving, he can get absorbed no matter the industry. At heart, he’s an engineer — he wants to fix what’s broken and leave processes better than he found them.
He’s doing just that with Console, his new startup that automates mundane, repetitive IT tasks so help desk professionals can focus their efforts on more strategic work. Convincing massive tech companies to hand over the keys to their operations isn’t simple, but Console makes a compelling pitch: it plugs directly into Slack and supercharges the IT teams that keep companies running. Early adopters like Scale, Ramp, and Calendly already lean on Console to resolve tickets faster, with Console handling more than 50% of the tasks that once bottlenecked help desks.
Come meet 2x founder Andrei next week at our Founders You Should Know Showcase.
Want to hear more of their stories? Apply now to claim your seat at the showcase and meet these two breakout founders.