Vetted Co-Founders in the Bay Area

Manvee Bansal

Screened

Mid-level Financial Analyst specializing in financial modeling and cost automation

Silicon Valley, CA4y exp

“Startup founder who co-founded Boogy, an LLM-based professional matchmaking product that scaled to 37k+ users in under 7 months by shifting GTM from individual onboarding to accelerator/VC partnerships (driving 5x engagement). After Boogy was acquired, joined Dossy as co-founder, hiring global growth interns and running LinkedIn-led GTM while fundraising.”

Leo Kim

Screened

Junior Software Engineer specializing in robotics and full-stack development

San Francisco, CA1y exp

“Software Engineer at Armstrong Robotics building multithreaded C++ perception/planning/control software for robotic arms running commercial dishwashers deployed across multiple restaurant sites (up to ~2,000 dishes/day per installation). Strong in production operations: on-call debugging with deep logging/video analysis, rapid hotfixes, Datadog-based monitoring, and a Three.js calibration tool plus large regression test suite to de-risk live deployments.”

Emmanuel Ngalima

Screened ReferencesStrong rec.

Mid-Level Software Engineer specializing in geospatial AI and cloud security automation

San Ramon, CA5y exp

“Cloud engineer and cloud OS SME (Chevron) who productionized large-scale security remediation—using Tanium and Ansible to address CIS benchmark noncompliance across 5,000+ servers with robust logging and RCA handoffs. Also drives adoption of a geospatial AI refinery inspection product by consolidating siloed imagery into an enterprise geospatial database, and presents internally on agentic/LLM tooling (LangChain/LangGraph, LangSmith observability).”

Ravi Gairola

Screened

Executive engineering leader specializing in AI platforms and cloud infrastructure

San Francisco, CA15y exp

“Engineering leader and hands-on architect with experience managing three teams spanning product, internal tooling, and ML, while also building AI chat and digital twin systems. Particularly notable for a patented memory architecture used to impersonate users in meetings/chat, plus prior delivery of a consumer digital payments system for Razer under tight deadlines and heavy tech debt.”

“Early-stage/first sales hire profile with strong outbound motion and process-building experience. Self-sourced and closed a $2.8M Yahoo deal (8-month cycle) using a shared mutual plan to manage stakeholders and timelines, and has recent mid-market ACV wins selling Mapistry to environmental compliance managers by enabling champions to secure internal budget. Has also implemented MEDDICC and built foundational GTM assets (e.g., Quantcast’s first sales deck used in $2B+ of closed business).”

Eugene Nelepko

Screened

Executive growth leader specializing in AI-powered SaaS, marketplaces, and e-commerce

San Francisco, CA13y exp

“Growth leader with strong zero-to-one and systems-building experience across e-commerce and retail media. Most notably, they proposed and launched a new retail media division from scratch, presold demand before product build, and scaled it to $1.5M ARR with 85% margin, while also building data-driven lifecycle and acquisition systems that materially improved activation and CAC efficiency.”

“Engineering Manager/player-coach leading Data Infrastructure, ML/DS, and AI Engineering pods who recently shipped multiple production agentic GenAI features. Built privacy-preserving LLM workflows (PII redaction via Microsoft Presidio) and drove an AI expense-approval agent from ambiguous ask to GA, cutting approval time from ~2.5 days to <4 hours with >85% accuracy. Also owned a major LLM cost overrun incident and implemented cost observability plus circuit breakers to prevent runaway agent loops.”

“Venture investing/sourcing professional who runs a high-volume, systematized founder outreach motion across warm intros, accelerators, social outbound, and databases (PitchBook/Crunchbase), targeting ~50 personalized founder touchpoints weekly. Uses AI workflows to build targeted lists and monitor company updates, and has converted highly contextual outbound into qualified diligence opportunities (e.g., industrial automation/frontline productivity). Values long-term founder relationships pre-raise through consistent value-add and is motivated by growth toward a partner track.”

Corbin Ward

Screened

Junior Product Manager / APM specializing in data tools, CMS platforms, and AI-enabled products

San Jose, CA1y exp

“Data Software Tools Analyst at Q.ai through rapid growth and a $2B Apple acquisition who led an internal CMS for participant/PII workflows using Next.js (App Router) + FastAPI/Postgres with strong security controls (JWT + Postgres RLS). Also drove a major frontend architecture shift toward React Server Components, reporting ~4x faster page loads, and has experience building durable realtime collaboration systems with Supabase/SvelteKit and server-centric state management.”