đ Engineers â want to meet these two founders and more? Apply to attend our September 16th SF Startup Showcase.
AI is getting better at doing the actual work rather than just telling us how. Ploy is building agents that can operate a companyâs growth engine, while Gradient Robotics is taking that same shift into the physical world with robots built to manufacture and maintain AI infrastructure. One works through browsers and software, the other with servers, racks, and cablesâboth are betting that the next generation of automation will be measured by what actually gets done.
Bryant Chou, Founder of Ploy
Most companies launch a website and then let it sit. Meanwhile, their growth teams bounce between analytics dashboards, SEO tools, ad platforms, CRMs, designers, and engineers just to figure out whatâs working and make a change. Ploy makes the website to do that work itself.
Bryant Chou knows the problem well. He co-founded Webflow, architected the platform that now powers more than 1% of the active web, and along the way built and led its growth, marketing, sales, and data teams as Webflow scaled from $1M to $100M in revenue. After 12 years there, he came away frustrated that growth teams were spending more time measuring than doing â what he jokes has become âmeasureship.â Ploy is, fittingly, his ploy to automate away the operational work that got in the way.
Ployâs agents continuously monitor a companyâs website, traffic, and competitors and then act on what they find: writing content, building landing pages, running campaigns, identifying visitors, and feeding information back into the CRM. Teams like Hex and Clay are already using Ploy to automatically generate personalized enterprise landing pages and turn internal data into hundreds of programmatic SEO pages. The company launched publicly in June with a $27M seed from First Round Capital and Y Combinator.
If you want to build agents that turn insight into action, come meet Bryant at the showcase.
JX Mo, Founder of Gradient Robotics
The AI boom is more than a software story. Someone still has to manufacture the servers, assemble the racks, and keep enormous data centers running once theyâre built. Gradient Robotics is building the robots to do that work.
JX Mo came to Gradient after leading engineering and product at K-Scale Labs, where he worked on humanoid robotics. His experience there convinced him that robotics is undergoing a fundamental shift from programming every movement with classical control systems, to using learning-based approaches to teach robots how to operate in the real world. Gradient is applying that new robotics stack to AI infrastructure, by automating jobs like assembling systems and swapping servers inside data centers.
When we spoke with JX, Gradient had grown to 15 people, built its own machine shop and manufacturing facility in San Francisco, and was preparing for its first deployment roughly two and a half months later. The team includes engineers from Tesla Optimus, K-Scale, SpaceX, and Matic, and JX plans to double it this year, with mechanical, automation, and controls engineers especially high on the list.
If building the robots that will construct and maintain the infrastructure behind AI sounds more fun than building another AI app, come meet JX at the showcase.
Apply to attend our next SF Startup Showcase and meet these founders in person.