Vetted Founders in the Bay Area

“Engineering leader who drove Lightroom Mobile’s roadmap at Adobe by enforcing reuse of Photoshop imaging tech to deliver RAW, non-destructive mobile editing with full Creative Cloud compatibility. In startup environments, has repeatedly scaled and professionalized engineering orgs (career ladders, evaluation systems, delivery process) and led high-stakes cloud/platform transformations—migrating off Heroku and consolidating fragmented AWS/GCP usage into a single GCP platform—improving reliability, deploy speed, and cutting cloud costs by 20%+.”

“ML/NLP practitioner and technical founder who built an AUP risk-scoring model at Bill.com using TF-IDF + SVD features with XGBoost, and previously created automated data-quality guardrails for a Global Equity Risk stacked ML model at Thomson Reuters. Recently built a RAG-based chatbot for PaymentJock’s Home Affordability Probability product using embeddings and a local vector database (FAISS/Chroma), improving answer quality through chunking rather than expensive fine-tuning.”

Ananda Kanagaraj Sankar

Screened

Engineering Leader specializing in marketplace monetization, pricing, payments, and trust & safety

San Jose, CA14y exp

“Early-stage founder in the ideation phase who previously took a hackathon concept in digital accessibility from prototype to a scalable SaaS platform, validating with developers, government web teams, and accessibility experts; the product was selected for deployment by the Indian Government. Strong focus on MVP validation, leveraging AI/automation, and building with limited resources; requires visa sponsorship due to immigration status.”

“Operator with consulting and startup experience who has led founder-level, zero-to-one initiatives across highly complex domains—from conceiving and launching an $80M, 80m maritime disaster-response vessel for Global Support & Development (Sergey Brin’s org) to acting as a cross-functional leader at Windfall Bio spanning regulatory, GTM, partnerships, and R&D. At Deloitte, owned the Omnia ESG software roadmap and drove >30% faster delivery through standardization/automation, and was tapped to train other managers on their operating cadence system.”

“Former VC and angel investor with board experience (Sand Hill Angels) who has raised money for their own companies and helped over two dozen companies prepare for fundraising and M&A. Strong fit for CEO roles in venture-backed environments given extensive capital markets and deal-prep exposure.”

“Entrepreneurial candidate building an AI startup focused on helping companies find product-market fit. They are already at MVP stage with 3 beta customers and are using A/B testing for validation, showing early traction and a hands-on approach to customer-driven product development.”

Gaurav Narasimhan

Screened

Executive AI platform leader specializing in autonomous agent systems for enterprise SaaS

Redwood City, CA26y exp

“Real estate entrepreneur who has previously raised capital from friends and family and has engaged directly with VC firms including A16z. Demonstrates unusually strong founder commitment, having worked two full-time jobs for the past six years while pursuing entrepreneurial goals, with hypothesys.ai described as the outcome.”

Emmanuel Haldopoulos

Screened

Senior Systems Integration Engineer specializing in ADAS and autonomous driving

San Jose, CA5y exp

“Solutions engineer at a Voice AI startup building and deploying voice agents for self-storage customers, owning the full lifecycle from cold outreach and demos through contract negotiation, FMS/API integration, and post-sales optimization. Also has Audi/Porsche experience demoing pre-production vehicles and autonomous driving features (L3 lane changes) to internal stakeholders and VW Group leadership, with a strong track record of tailoring technical narratives to varied audiences and improving conversion by adapting agents to regional dialects.”

“Startup-focused finance/operations leader and long-time Controller (15+ years) who helps growing companies bring accounting ops in-house and implement scalable systems (ERP, AP invoice workflows, bank rec automation). Known for hands-on process optimization and change management—using demos and quick wins to convert resistant users and deliver measurable time savings. Works fully remote with a flexible schedule and also supports global offices on systems selection and implementation.”

Prateek Patil

Screened

Engineering Leader specializing in Digital Health, AI, and Cloud Platforms

Santa Clara, CA16y exp

“Senior Engineering Manager at Roche leading two Scrum teams building internally shared (“inner-sourced”) tools and libraries for a healthcare enterprise. Has led security/compliance-first architecture decisions (e.g., Python AI modules running inside a Java container) and front-end modularization (Angular monorepo to module federation), with a strong focus on developer experience via automated Swagger/OpenAPI documentation and robust testing/versioning practices.”