Early Stage Founders (poach.vc)

Early Stage Founders (poach.vc)

(0190) 1X Robot Hands Lead, ComfyUI Co-Founder & Jane Street to Anthropic

PoachVC's avatar
PoachVC
Aug 27, 2026
∙ Paid

Hey, this is news.poach.vc, where we help you discover pre-seed / seed deal flow by tracking the people the top 350 VCs are interacting with online.

For raw data feeds and social media tracking, check out poach.vc!

Notes

  • We curate interesting people that have some signals that they might be interesting founders either now or in the future. They are not guaranteed to be currently founding or interested in investment.

  • If you have any questions, suggestions, or need custom tracking, please reach out to contact@poach.vc

  • Thanks for your support! If you enjoyed this edition, please share with your investor friends!

  • We post two times a week, with 2/3 of the content behind a paywall.

Early Stage Founders

  • Aarav Wattal (California)

    • Stanford EE+CS student and undergraduate researcher, building Majestic Labs. Previously ML and design verification intern at AMD.

    • Twitter / LinkedIn

  • Andrew Chan (Greater Los Angeles)

    • Venture capital investor and Managing Partner at Atas VC. Previously worked at BuildersVC, NASA JPL, and Caltech. Also co-founder of Veridian Technologies and serves on the VC Advisory Board at Los Angeles Venture Association.

    • Twitter / LinkedIn

  • Caleb Winston (West Hollywood)

    • AI systems researcher at Stanford, currently director at a stealth startup.

    • Twitter / LinkedIn

  • Cris Lenta (San Francisco)

    • AI researcher with work published at MIT Press and one exit under his belt. Now building a general-purpose emergent life simulator at a stealth startup.

    • Twitter / LinkedIn

  • Georgia Witchel (New York)

    • Deep-tech founder and CEO of Mantis Biotech, previously CTO at Louiza Labs and algorithm engineer at Theo Health. Also an author, painter, and ice climber.

    • Twitter / LinkedIn

  • Mack Hopen (Seattle)

    • Materials engineer turned entrepreneur, currently Partner + Engineer at Acequia Capital. Previously founded an energy storage startup and serves as advisor at Milvus Advanced.

    • Twitter / LinkedIn

  • Michael Wax (Munich, Germany)

    • Engineer turned GP at BlueYard Capital and Co-Founder and Chairman at Forto. Previously studied at TUM and CDTM. Active business angel with investments in 70+ companies.

    • 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

  • Oliver Stark (San Francisco)

    • Former Senior Mechanical Engineer and Team Lead for hands at 1X, now founder of a stealth robotics startup.

    • Twitter / LinkedIn

  • Omar H. (Landsberg, Germany)

    • Competitive programmer turned VC investor at Project A, focusing on AI and deep tech at pre-seed and seed stages. Co-founder of DealDock and mentor at TUM.ai.

    • Twitter / LinkedIn

  • Robin Huang

    • Co-founder of ComfyUI, a node-based interface for Stable Diffusion and other AI image generation models.

    • Twitter / LinkedIn

  • Shaya Zarkesh (Saratoga)

    • Quantitative trader at Jane Street who moved into AI research and engineering, working at Anthropic after a stint at Adept.

    • Twitter / LinkedIn

  • Tianwei Yin (Australia)

    • Working on multimodal AGI at Reve. Previously at MIT and Adobe.

    • Twitter / LinkedIn

  • Tj Richardson (New York metropolitan area)

    • Data scientist at Advent International, previously investment banking analyst at Perella Weinberg Partners. Now founder of fundable.ai, building real-time venture news and deal sourcing tools for VCs.

    • Twitter / LinkedIn

Already Funded Founders Followed

  • Alex Koumpas (Twitter, LinkedIn) - Lucent and an Entrepreneur in Residence at Entrepreneurs First

  • Andrew W. (Twitter, LinkedIn) - Valon and former Principal at Soros Fund Management

  • Chintan Parikh (Twitter, LinkedIn) - Stealth (YC F25) and former VP Engineering at Secureframe

  • Gabriel Dymowski (Twitter, LinkedIn) - Pocket (YC W26) and former CEO at DoxyChain, recognized as Forbes 25 Under 25

  • Lindon Gao (Twitter, LinkedIn) - Dyna Robotics and former Vice President of Engineering at Instacart

  • Narayana Aaditya (Twitter, LinkedIn) - Skillsync (YC W26) and Creator at Ideal Gas

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

  • Sai Mandhan (Twitter, LinkedIn) - Remedy (YC F25) and previously worked in machine learning at Nike and research at NASA

Investors Followed

  • Annmaria Antony (Twitter, LinkedIn)

  • Cannon Kissane (Twitter, LinkedIn)

  • Gaby Lorenzi (Twitter, LinkedIn)

This post is for paid subscribers

Already a paid subscriber? Sign in
© 2026 poach.vc · Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start your SubstackGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture