Vetted Co-Founders

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).”

“Co-founder and employee #1 who built Reva, a vertically integrated conversational CRM for multifamily leasing and resident services, leading product, engineering, and design from inception through acquisition. Combines deep enterprise product leadership with early AI experience, including a pre-LLM chatbot that drove a 400% lift in lead conversion and prior edtech work where AI-enabled learning tools improved struggling students by a full letter grade on average.”

Omkar Lahurikar

Screened

Senior engineering founder specializing in AI systems and automotive controls

Dearborn, MI13y exp

“Builder-minded founder/operator currently at Ford who previously co-founded MeruDynamics, an "Uber for manufacturing" platform, and took it from zero to paying customer without raising capital. He also independently built and deployed RDD, an AI copilot for engineering decision capture, with evals, prompt versioning, and LLM cost telemetry—showing unusual depth in both product thinking and practical AI execution.”

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).”

Ramtin Kazemi

Screened

Junior Full-Stack Software Engineer specializing in Django, AWS, and AI/ML

San Diego, California1y exp

“Full-stack engineer who built and owned an AI-powered personal statement editor in Next.js (App Router + TypeScript), including dynamic routing, server-side data fetching, and typed API route handlers. Post-launch, they handled production monitoring/debugging and shipped reliability/performance upgrades (rate limiting, retries, rollback, DB indexing), and report a 40% latency reduction using Suspense/streaming and React concurrency patterns. Also implemented a durable Temporal-orchestrated AI document workflow with robust retry/idempotency strategies.”

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.”

“Solo-built and launched an AI logo generator SaaS in ~2 months using React/Next.js/TypeScript with managed auth and payments, deploying via Vercel/GitHub CI/CD. Also has hands-on AWS production experience running containerized services with Terraform-managed multi-environment infrastructure and strong reliability patterns for integrations/pipelines.”

“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.”

“Early-stage investor from Manchester Stories with a strong sourcing engine, generating 500-600 deals per year through referrals, events, thematic research, and AI-driven stealth startup discovery. Particularly differentiated in private payer healthcare and founder relationship-building, with examples of converting value-add outbound outreach into investments through hands-on market guidance and rigorous diligence.”

“University student who completed a 3-month internship at Venture Starters, supporting multiple startups with market research, donor outreach, data analytics, and organizational work. They helped match startups to aligned donors and opportunities, crafted tailored outreach emails, and used shared Excel tracking and AI-assisted research to streamline prospecting.”

“AI/full-stack engineer with experience spanning startup product building at Twinly, enterprise analytics at Zoho, and high-stakes life sciences ML at Wave Life Sciences. Stands out for combining React/TypeScript + FastAPI product execution with rigorous AI evaluation, retrieval optimization, and human-in-the-loop design, delivering measurable outcomes like 75% fewer analytics requests, 20% fewer failed experiments, and MVP delivery 3 weeks early.”