Sourced Edition 4

Bi-Weekly Report of Data Driven Sourcing & Screening - New Stealth Founders, NVIDIA Alumnis, & APIGen Competitor Analysis

Welcome to Sourced, from your friends at Landscape 🏔️

As a reminder, Sourced is a data driven newsletter for early stage startup investors. All of the intelligence in this newsletter was gathered using Landscape, our new platform for investors looking to become more data driven.

Interested in learning more about Landscape? đź—“️ Book a Demo

🥷🏽 Fresh Stealth Founders

Landscape automatically monitors every founder entering stealth mode. There are currently 19.9k founders in stealth - are you tracking them?

Here are some interesting profiles we discovered recently 👇

Stealth

Stealth since June 2024

Geography: San Francisco, US

Background: 2x Founder & Experienced product leader in big tech companies such as Dropbox, Facebook, NVIDIA. PhD background and technical founder.

Stealth

Founder: Peter Roome

Stealth since June 2024

Geography: London, UK

Background: 4x founder and experienced tech leader in big tech companies such as Vinterior and Cazoo.

Stealth

Founder: Yannick Zhang

Stealth since June 2024

Geography: San Francisco, US

Background: 3x Founder & Experienced Tech Leader working as Director of Engineering at OKX, & Head of Mobile Engineering at Celer Network. Technical Founder.

Stealth

Founder: Sean R.

Stealth since May 2024

Geography: San Francisco, US

Background: 1st time Founder, with previously worked as Software Engineer for Machine Learning at Youtube. Prior to that, he’s worked as an Analyst at Harvard Undergraduate Data Analytics Group & worked as a Google Software Engineer Intern. Recently joined YC S24.

Stealth

Stealth since May 2024

Geography: Philadelphia, US

Background: Experienced tech leader working for global big tech companies such as Adobe, Pearson, Amazon, & Microsoft. He may be building something in the cloud computing space.

Stealth

Stealth since May 2024

Geography: Tuscany, Italy

Background: 2x Founder previously building in the cybersecurity sector and working on a new venture. Co-founded Security Forge. Technical Founder.

🔍 New Companies: Nvidia Alumni’s

NVIDIA employees are becoming multi-millionaires with their stock options valued more than $10M+. Here are some NVIDIA alumni’s that’s launched their own start ups!

Here are some early stage NVIDIA Alumni’s we’ve sourced recently 👇

Geography: US

Description: FlexAI is delivering universal AI compute by rearchitecting compute infrastructure at a system level. They built a layer of software intelligence, abstraction, and orchestration into the AI compute stack, enabling developers to benefit from a diverse set of compute architectures to train their models faster, more reliably, and at a fraction of the cost of traditional GPU clusters.

Founder Background: Big Tech Leader working at companies such as NVIDIA, Apple, Tesla, Zoox, and Intel Corporation.

Founder: Will Pearce

Geography: US

Description: Dreadnode specializes in AI security, focusing on research, training, and the development of tools for attacking and validating machine learning systems. Their services include creating AI red team tools, conducting cybersecurity evaluations, and developing offensive agents to automate hacking tasks

Founder Background: Previously AI Red Team Lead for NVIDIA and Microsoft as well as a security consultant with expertise in AI security

Founder: Asriel H.

Geography: US

Description: The startup specializes in solving the challenging problem of data collection for computer vision models. They use foundation models to automatically detect and synthesize missing data, making the process more efficient and cost-effective.

Background: Experienced Tech Leader working at Wirestock, Contenda, Snap Inc. and NVIDIA.

Founder: Alex Peats-Bond

Geography: Canada

Description: Senpilot is a startup that provides advanced AI-based tools for utility companies to enhance their operations. The company’s platform centralizes sensor data and uses AI to offer features like predictive analytics, smart asset managment, and enhanced risk management.

Founder Background: Previous worked as a senior software engineer at Uber and intern at NVIDIA.

⏰ Timing Alpha

Timing is everything in venture! We started measuring the time difference between when companies publicly announce their funding round and when they’re discovered on Landscape!

Here are some timing alpha of companies we’ve sourced recently 👇

Alpha: 196 days
Round Announced: June 11, 2024
Date Discovered: Nov. 28, 2023

Geography: US
Amount Raised: $9.2M
Round: Seed
Notable Investors: Exor Ventures

Alpha: 213 days
Round Announced: June 6, 2024
Date Discovered: Nov. 6, 2023

Geography: US
Amount Raised: $10M
Round: Seed
Notable Investors: Point72 Ventures

Alpha: 269 days
Round Announced: June 20, 2024
Date Discovered: Sept. 25, 2023

Geography: US
Amount Raised: $8M
Round: Seed
Notable Investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners

⚔️ Competitor Sourcing: APIGen

Source: Tech Crunch

Two 18 year old best friends Christopher Fitzgerald and Nicholas Van Landschoot graduated highschool and started building APIGen after raising $500K pre-seed investment from Varana.

APIGen is a platform that builds custom APIs from natural language prompts and able to sequence workflows to multiple multiple IoT’s and Web Apps 🤯

An example that was provide was an API that uses face recognition for building security. Once a database of photos of verified employee faces is created, the user could ask APIGen for an API that lets a smartlock’s door camera check the face of everyone who arrives against that database before unlocking the door.

We leveraged the market mapper tool in Landscape to find other companies building APIs in minutes with Generative AI, and here’s what we found 👇

RapidAPI
$272.5M Series D
San Francisco, US

Theneo
$500K Pre-seed
San Francisco, US

Mulesoft
Acq. by Salesforce
San Francisco, US

Devii
$590K Seed
Fargo, US

Fastgen
$500k Pre-seed
New York, US

Apidna
Undisclosed Pre-seed
New York, US

🌯 That’s a wrap!

Interested in learning more about Landscape? đź—“️ Book a Demo