Your Showcase Primer: Specter, Flow Engineering, General Matter
The Infrastructure Layer of the AI Era
🌟 Engineers — want to meet these three founders and more? Apply to attend our May 20th SF Startup Showcase.
Energy systems, industrial operations, and hardware development were never designed for the scale and complexity of the AI era. Critical infrastructure is still monitored through fragmented legacy systems with limited real-time visibility. Hardware engineering continues to rely on manual workflows, and as electricity demand surges from AI infrastructure, the U.S. faces gaps in its energy supply chain. These three founders are building solutions to these foundational problems by applying modern software, AI, and industrial technology to the core physical systems that power the economy.
Xerxes Libsch, Founder of Specter
Much of the world’s critical infrastructure is monitored by a few cameras and maybe a security guard intermittently checking a monitor. There are power plants, industrial sites, oil rigs, nuclear plants, and data centers that still rely on legacy monitoring systems, leaving operators with incomplete information, delayed alerts, or costly manual monitoring. The result is intrusions, safety incidents, or equipment failures that are detected too late, if at all. Software has transformed digital systems, but the physical world remains largely unobserved.
Xerxes is taking his experience from Uber and Anduril to solve this problem with Specter, a real-time perception system for the physical world. By deploying a network of low-cost, rapidly installable sensors connected through a wireless mesh, Specter gives companies continuous visibility across their entire physical footprint. Their platform acts as a software-defined control plane, turning raw sensor data into real-time intelligence that can detect intrusions, monitor operations, and enable automated responses.
Picture a system that partners with AI to detect everything from missing safety gear on a construction site to a building fire or a fight in a crowded stadium. The result is a shift from reactive, fragmented monitoring of physical systems to software-level observability and control.
If you’re curious to learn more about bringing real-time perception and control to the physical world, come meet Xerxes at the next Founders You Should Know showcase!
Pari Singh, Founder of Flow Engineering
The world around us relies on hardware engineering, from cars and nuclear reactors to the device you’re reading this on. Yet the system it was built with is still stuck in the dark ages. Walk into one of the best hardware engineering organizations in the world (think Space X, Tesla) and you will find teams of brilliant engineers manually moving between Excel spreadsheets, CAD tools, simulation environments, PDFs, and compliance documents. It’s extremely manual. While software development has undergone a dramatic transformation through AI-assisted coding and autonomous agents, physical engineering has largely been left behind.
As a mechanical engineer himself, this problem drew Pari Singh to develop Flow Engineering. With Flow, we are entering a world where intelligent agents will not just write software, but also design mechanical systems, run simulations, validate requirements, coordinate testing, manage regulatory workflows, and integrate across the full hardware development lifecycle. The cost of software creation collapsed once engineers could delegate implementation to AI systems. The same transition is now coming for the physical world. Flow is built for this shift. It exists to eliminate the operational bottlenecks between engineering intent and execution by creating an intelligence layer across complex hardware programs. It enables hardware engineering organizations to use agents to do the vast majority of their engineering work.
The result is a future where building a rocket, humanoid robot, or energy system starts to look less like traditional hardware engineering and more like programming software. This incredible value proposition has led Flow to partnerships with companies like Rivian, and Flow is now looking to scale their engineering team drastically in the next few months.
If you’re interested in changing how the physical world is built, come meet Pari at the next showcase.
Scott Nolan, Founder of General Matter
Right now, the primary bottleneck to scaling AI is energy, and unless you’re building data centers in space, nuclear is the answer. The problem is the U.S. lacks the fuel supply chain needed to support it. While electricity demand surges from rapid expansion of AI infrastructure and the push for reliable baseload power, the U.S. still lacks meaningful domestic capacity to enrich the uranium required for today’s reactors. America depends heavily on foreign suppliers for enriched uranium. That dependency has turned nuclear fuel into a strategic bottleneck for U.S. energy security, technological competitiveness, and long-term grid reliability.
Scott Nolan founded General Matter to rebuild this missing layer of American infrastructure. The team comes from SpaceX, Tesla, Anduril, and the DOD and approaches enrichment like a modern industrial technology problem: scalable, cost-competitive, and built for the energy demands of the next several decades. General Matter has already secured major Department of Energy support, including participation in the federal HALEU enrichment program and a $900 million DOE award to expand domestic enrichment capacity.
The next era of American energy security will not just require new reactors, but a fully rebuilt domestic fuel ecosystem that is scalable, reliable, and strategically independent. By modernizing enrichment infrastructure and bringing advanced fuel production back onshore, General Matter is likely to become foundational infrastructure for the future of U.S. energy.
Apply to attend the May 20th Startup Showcase and meet these founders in person.