đ Engineers â want to meet the three founders below? Apply to attend our Jan 28th SF Startup Showcase.
If youâre going to join a startup, timing matters.
In just a few weeks, weâll be featuring 10 founders at inflection points â joining their team means youâre early enough to shape the company, and at the right time to know the bet is real.
Over the next few weeks, weâll introduce each founder so you know who youâre meeting at the showcase, and why theyâre worth paying attention to.
In this first edition, hear more about:
Tanay Kothariâs breakout voice tool Wispr Flow
Sergiy Nesterenkoâs autonomous PCB design engine, Quilter
Alex Dhillonâs AI-driven brand defense platform, Outtake
+ 3 FYSK Community founders hiring AEs, SWEs, PMs, and more at the end of articleâŠ
Tanay Kothari, founder of Wispr Flow
Tanay used to sleep every other night at school so he could code more. It sounds implausible until you hear the rest of his story: he shipped dozens of apps as a teenager, trained 20+ hours a day for international Olympiads, and represented India at both the International Olympiad in Informatics and the International Linguistics Olympiad. Itâs no surprise heâs now the breakout founder behind Wispr Flow, a tool thatâs quickly winning over nearly everyone who tries it.
If youâve used Wispr Flow, you already know what makes it special. If you havenâtâitâs a voice operating system that replaces your keyboard with high-accuracy dictation and commands. After six months, heavy users speak over 70% of their characters through Flow instead of typing them. This isnât habit-forcing. Wispr Flow just makes intuitive sense. In fact, much of Tanayâs early investor interest came from VCs who were already using the product and had an inkling it would be hugely successful.
Tanayâs vision goes beyond productivity gains. He talks about wanting his future kids to grow up with computers that feel like people, not âglass rectangles.â In his view, keyboards and mice are transitional technologies weâll look back on the way we look at fax machines.
Wispr has raised $81M to date with backing from NEA, 8VC, and others.
Learn more about Tanayâs journey, whatâs next for Wispr Flow, and how you can join the team at our upcoming showcase.
Sergiy Nesterenko, founder of Quilter
Sergiy has learned a painful lesson about timing. At SpaceX, he built a UWB RF positioning system with sub-centimeter accuracy. He never commercialized it. Years later, Apple rolled out UWB chips in iPhones, effectively mainstreaming the same class of technology. The lesson stuck.
Born in Ukraine three months before the Soviet Union collapsed, Sergiy grew up on stories of Yuri Gagarin and Soviet engineering feats that nudged him toward hard-physics problems. He immigrated to the U.S. at 10 without speaking English, then went on to triple major at UC Berkeley in Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry. After stints in research labs and working on the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy at SpaceX until 2019, an investor told him âYou should start a company. Iâll give you a million bucks. Go for it.â
This time, he wasnât going to miss the window.
Quilter uses reinforcement learning and computational physics to generate manufacturable, optimized PCB layouts directly from schematics. More than 90% of printed circuit board layout work is still done manually using tools that havenât meaningfully improved since the 1980s. Sergiyâs core thesis is that PCB design is a trillion-dollar bottleneck underlying every hardware product and that AI can act as a âcompilerâ that continuously optimizes routing and layout under real-world constraints.
Sergiy is explicit that he doesnât want to build an âAI copilotâ that still forces engineers to babysit layouts; his ambition is a fully autonomous layout engine.
The approach is working. One engineer used Quilter to figure out the minimum viable board size by simply submitting the same design at different board sizes instead of manually optimizing for weeks. The company just raised a $25M Series B in October 2025 led by Index Ventures.
Learn how Sergiyâs pulling it off at our showcase.
Alex Dhillon, founder of Outtake
By the time Alex graduated high school, heâd lived in four countries, gone to class in six languages, and attended three different high schools. That kind of global perspective shaped how he thinks about problemsâespecially the ones that scale across borders at internet speed.
In 2023 after spending some time at Palantir, he noticed something alarming: weâd entered the âzero-cost attack era.â Generative AI makes it trivial for attackers to spin up highly convincing phishing and impersonation campaigns at scale. Organizations from creators to hedge funds were seeing fraudulent copies of their brands proliferate online. Manual monitoring and legal processes couldnât keep up.
His core idea: if criminals are using AI at scale, defenders need fleets of AI agents capable of continuously mapping and cleaning up the threat landscape.
Outtake uses autonomous agents and legal workflows to detect and take down AI-driven scams at scaleâcloned websites, phishing pages, deepfake accounts, brand impersonations. The platform operates âoutside the firewall,â with bots that crawl the public internet, classify threats, and automatically initiate takedowns across registrars and platforms.
Outtake has raised $20M to date, and early customers include OpenAI.
Learn more about how Alex and his team of ex-Palantir engineers are fighting back against the zero-cost attack at our showcase.
đ€ Beyond the Showcase: Founders Actively Hiring
Want an intro to these founders? Email a blurb about yourself to rachel@foundersysk.com â if youâre a good fit, weâll connect you.
Josh Payne @ Coframe is hiring Account Executives and a Customer Success Manager. Heâs building the world's first AI Growth Engineer, and are the only marketing technology company officially partnered with OpenAI.
Jeffery Liu @ Assort Health is hiring Software Engineers and Product Managers for their AI Agent products. Assort is a comprehensive patient experience platform â their omnichannel AI agents eliminate lengthy hold times and inefficiencies that stand in the way of patients getting the care they need.
Lily Clifford @ Rime is hiring a Head of Marketing to make voice AI feel more human with their on-prem and cloud text-to-speech and voice agents.
Helen Hastings @ Quanta is hiring a Senior Product Designer and Senior Software Engineers to build out their AI-powered accounting and finance platform.
Want to meet these founders and ones of other breakout startups? Apply to attend our Jan 28th SF Startup Showcase.