(0188) Ex-Apple, Ex-Shopify & Midjourney Hardware Founders

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Notes

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Early Stage Founders

• Andy Li (San Francisco)

  • Former Apple product designer and YC W24 founder building Keywords AI, an LLMops platform. Previously worked in product engineering at John Deere.

  • Twitter / LinkedIn

• Anirudh Oppiliappan (Finland)

  • Software engineer turned co-founder of Tangled, a decentralized git hosting and collaboration platform. Previously worked on managed Kubernetes at UpCloud and was a founder in residence at Antler.

  • Twitter / LinkedIn

• Christopher L. Jones (California)

  • US Navy veteran and Caltech PhD turned founder, now CEO at Suitebriar. Previously worked at Google and serves as guest lecturer at UC Berkeley Haas. Building AI for behavioral health and startup tooling.

  • Twitter / LinkedIn

• Ethan Shaotran (Greater Los Angeles)

  • Harvard researcher turned founder of Energize.AI. Previously worked as a machine learning developer at Energy Impact Partners. Currently working at DOGE.

  • Twitter / LinkedIn

• Ilan Zerbib (San Francisco)

  • Repeat founder and former Director of Engineering at Shopify, now building Sapiom to create AI-native financial infrastructure for the agentic economy. Previously founded Earny, which was acquired.

  • Twitter / LinkedIn

• Jessie Dong (San Francisco)

  • Stanford CS student and co-founder & CEO of Airstitch. Previously worked at Tesla and Mithril Compute, currently doing research at Stanford AI Lab and serving on the investment team at Phoenix Rising focusing on AI infrastructure.

  • Twitter / LinkedIn

• Karl-Gustav Kallasmaa (London, United Kingdom)

  • Fellow at AI Circle and Unicorn Mafia, currently founding Attensira to help businesses with AI recommendations.

  • Twitter / LinkedIn

• Kelsey Pool (San Francisco)

  • Serial robotics entrepreneur and co-founder of a stealth robotics startup focused on building general purpose robots. Previously founded Bright Block and co-founded Zeroth Bot.

  • Twitter / LinkedIn

• Neil Mitra (Waterloo, Canada)

  • UBC Presidential Scholar who worked on hardware at Midjourney before founding Mitra Biotechnologies in 2020. Masason Foundation member and Z Fellow.

  • Twitter / LinkedIn

• Nils Cremer (Cambridge, United Kingdom)

  • Computer Science student and software engineer who worked at JetBrains and QuantCo before co-founding Tendrils Compute, a chip company.

  • Twitter / LinkedIn

• Shrish P. (Stanford)

  • Stanford student working as a VC analyst at Stanford Sustainable Investment Group and VC scout at Afore Capital. Also organizing sponsorships for TreeHacks.

  • Twitter / LinkedIn

• Vignesh Rajendran (New York)

  • Former investor at GSV Ventures turned product leader at LILT AI, now co-founder of a stealth startup.

  • Twitter / LinkedIn

• Wayde Gilliam (San Francisco)

  • Full-stack web and ML developer, creator of blurr (an open source deep learning library), and active contributor and community leader at fast.ai. Previously founded Cantos Labs and worked as a software engineer at Rutter. Currently co-founder and CTO at a stealth startup.

  • Twitter / LinkedIn

Already Funded Founders Followed

• Abhijay Rana (Twitter, LinkedIn) - Brex and founder of Nuntius (YC S25)

• Aryan S. (Twitter, LinkedIn) - Metis and former Partner at Dorm Room Fund

• Daniel Rupawalla (Twitter, LinkedIn) - Nuntius (YC S25) and previously founded a company that was acquired by US News

• Grace Li (Twitter, LinkedIn) - Design Arena and an AI/ML researcher at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

• Liam Fuller (Twitter, LinkedIn) - age 17 after dropping out of high school

• Luciano Arango (Twitter, LinkedIn) - Flex and previously co-founded and served as CEO at Maza

• Sai Krishna Srirampur (Twitter, LinkedIn) - ClickHouse and CEO and Co-founder of PeerDB, which was acquired by ClickHouse

Investors Followed

• Aidan Pak (Twitter, LinkedIn)

• Andy Kangpan (Twitter, LinkedIn)

• Eleanor Liu (Twitter, LinkedIn)

• Felix Martinez (Twitter, LinkedIn)

• Maria Heyen (Twitter, LinkedIn)

• Phil Brady (Twitter, LinkedIn)

• Sasha McKenzie (Twitter, LinkedIn)

• Shayan Shafii (Twitter, LinkedIn)

• Vikram Ramakrishnan (Twitter, LinkedIn)