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A single glass of water holds about 20 hours of breathing

Leo Kankkunen is building the gear that pulls it out

Tankless diving technology that generates breathable oxygen directly from water. 

It sounds impossible at first. Then you hear the physics...

Then you realize the implications stretch far past diving

Water is hydrogen and oxygen. Apply a DC current, swing away the electrons binding them, and you get the purest form of breathable gas.

The idea started with a simple frustration

Leo is an electrical engineer and a diver. Every dive exposed the same limits: Bulky tanks, Logistics, Safety risks, Cost, and Operational complexity.

Instead of accepting those constraints, he asked a question: Is there any way we could breathe like a fish?

That sent him down a rabbit hole into electrolysis

If water already contains oxygen, why haul tanks at all? 

Why not generate breathable oxygen exactly where and when it's needed?

Enter DAIVIN! (YC W26) - Tankless dive gear that generates oxygen directly from the water around you. No tanks to haul, fill, or run out of.

But diving is just the wedge

Anywhere breathing depends on a tank, the tank sets the limit. 

Crisis zones. High altitude rescue. Anywhere time is human lives. 

Generate the oxygen on site, and there's no supply chain to depend on.

🎙️ Leo Kankkunen, CEO & Founder, Daivin on Fondo START pod

00:18 What Daivin is building and why oxygen tanks are the real problem
00:43 One glass of water holds roughly 20 hours of breathing
01:05 The science of splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen with a DC current
01:38 The wearable system that draws in surrounding water and produces oxygen
02:10 Leo's path from electrical engineer and diver to founder
02:48 Where the tech stands today: commercial close, consumer further out
03:15 Why removing oxygen logistics matters in crisis response and rescue
03:38 The Netflix versus Blockbuster framing for oxygen infrastructure
04:05 Why water beats gas tanks for breathing beyond Earth
05:20 From a Slush side event in Finland to a YC interview within weeks
06:25 Building in San Francisco versus Finland and compressing months into weeks
07:15 Leo's advice for founders: build what genuinely interests you

Check out daivin.tech

Startups spend more time wiring their outbound tools together than actually talking to potential customers

Verbiflow was built to change that

It's Outbound Infrastructure for growth teams

Outbound used to be a stack

One tool for email.

Another for LinkedIn.

Something else for cold calls.

Verbiflow is the system that runs your outbound, all in one place

Run sequences through email, LinkedIn, and cold calls

Handles sending

Manages replies

Runs follow-ups

Keeps it all in sync

Because the real bottleneck isn't finding leads

It's getting in front of the right people before momentum disappears

And in a world flooded with AI-generated outreach, they're betting on: better conversations, not more messages

From prospect to pipeline

From outreach to conversation

From disconnected tools to one outbound system

🎙️ Kash Ambarani & Rishi Mahadevan, Co-Founders, Verbiflow on Fondo START pod

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00:57 Platforms for email, LinkedIn, and cold calling are completely separate

02:08 We built an MCP that gets you live in 10 minutes

03:25 Why AI "personalization" in email is making outbound worse

04:18 Cold calling is the most underrated channel right now

05:16 AI coaching and real-time objection handling on calls

06:03 A targeted list is way better than trying to fill a giant list

07:35 Try to get there in person and actually talk to them

08:10 How they mapped every Series A-C startup in SF by scraping T&Cs

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Check out verbiflow.com

Most brands don't know if their marketing is working.

They launch campaigns. Spend real money. Watch the dashboards. Then hope.

Months later, a report arrives explaining what happened. 

The campaign is over. 
The budget is gone.
The market has already moved.

That's how brand tracking has worked for years.

Henk and Harry are repeat founders with exits behind them - two decades building brand trackers for the world's largest brands on one side, a startup built and sold plus a market research career on the other. They'd watched the same problem from the inside for years.

Tracking was expensive. Slow. Built around snapshots. 

Not how brands actually grow.

So they built Timelaps: An AI-native brand tracker that continuously surveys thousands of real consumers and shows whether your marketing is moving the metrics that matter. 

Brand awareness. 
Consideration. 
Preference. 
Category ownership. 
Brand growth.

Research-grade tracking. 
Updated continuously. 
Running in days instead of months. 
At a fifth of the cost of traditional tracking.

From "What happened?" to "What's happening right now?"

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🎙️  Henk Pretorius & Harry Zhang, Co-Founders, Timelaps on Fondo START pod

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00:17 Building AI-native brand intelligence for modern brands

00:45 Why brand tracking remains one of marketing's biggest pain points

01:53 How two founders met at ODF and began validating ideas together

02:42 Combining market research expertise with startup experience

03:24 Landing customers from a prototype before building the full product

03:46 Winning Product Hunt with an early demo

04:35 Why the original customer problem never changed

05:30 The limitations of traditional brand tracking and brand audits

06:03 Moving from delayed reports to continuous insights

06:40 The metrics that matter most in brand intelligence

07:35 Making enterprise-grade brand tracking accessible to challenger brands

11:43 Why San Francisco accelerates founder learning and execution

12:47 The "Olympic Games of building companies" mindset

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Check out www.timelaps.io

The internet got flooded with AI content.

Everything started sounding the same.

Same hooks.
Same cadence.
Same “we’re not doing X — we’re doing Y.”

Jameson Zaballos thinks that’s exactly why human taste matters more now.

Napa is the team behind those viral startup memes you’ve probably already seen.

But underneath the memes is a bigger thesis:
The future of founder marketing belongs to people who still sound human.

Not polished.
Not optimized.

Human.

AI can generate infinite content.
But it still averages the internet.

The founders winning attention right now are the ones adding taste back into the loop.
Write like you talk.

Post when nobody else posts.

Make your ICP feel seen.

Usenapa.com

🎙️ Jameson Zaballos, Co-Founder & CEO, Napa on Fondo START

01:07 Why founders can't cut through the noise
02:12 "If you outsource the opinion to Claude, you level the playing field"
02:45 How AI writing quietly cheapens your brand
04:15 Why human unpredictability is still the moat
05:58 The overlooked advantage of posting on weekends
08:42 Why memes work when they reflect real customer pain
09:55 The return of long-form storytelling

Global markets were built for everyone. 
Access wasn't.

Millions of traders outside the US watch Tesla move. Watch Nvidia earnings.
Watch SpaceX rumors explode timelines.

But when it's time to act? The door closes.

Mochatrade is rebuilding that layer.
A perpetual futures platform for US equities. Built for global traders first.

Trade TSLA, NVDA, AAPL, and 50+ US stocks

Up to 50x leverage
24/7 markets
No US brokerage account required

Deposit in local currency. 
Trade in minutes. 
Stay self-custodial the entire time.

Because the future of trading won't look like legacy brokerage apps.

It'll be:
Borderless
Always-on
Crypto-native infrastructure underneath
Simple UX on top

India already drives massive derivatives (60%) volume. But global traders still can't easily access leveraged US equities.

That contradiction became the company.

"We have experienced the pain point ourselves" 

Parth and Chetan grew up in India watching this door stay closed.

So they built the platform they wished existed.

Not another broker. An access layer for the next generation of retail traders.

🎙️ Parth Maheshwari & Chetan Manda, Co-Founders, Mochatrade on Fondo START pod

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00:57 Why global traders still can't access leveraged US stocks

02:21 Turning INR deposits into seamless US stock trading

03:27 Why India dominates 60% of global derivatives activity

04:06 Trading pre-IPO companies like SpaceX through perps

05:10 What perpetual futures actually are and why they're simpler

06:27 Why perps fix the retail options problem

07:45 From AI agents to financial infrastructure

08:52 Leaving AI to rebuild global market access

09:30 How three IIT friends and former roommates found the idea

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Check out www.mochatrade.com

The best AI companies aren't replacing bad software. They're giving it a login.

Every software company for years has made the same pitch to manufacturers: clean APIs, migrate your stack, rip out your ERP.

It never works. 

The ERP is the company brain. Years of data. 

You can't rip it out any more than you can rip out someone's memory.

Nikolas Keller & Co-Founder Lukas Postulka figured out the obvious thing that everyone missed

Stop trying to replace the software. 

Give an AI employee a login instead.

Walter (YC P26) signs into SAP, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Oracle the way a new hire would. 

Ready to go from day 1.

Works out of Teams and email like the rest of the team. 

Reads orders. Enters them. Places supplier POs. Catches pricing errors before they ship...

Not another dashboard. Not another integration project. Not another rip and replace.

A purchase order that used to take 15 minutes now takes a few seconds.

The insight came from a $109M manufacturer who had a full-time employee doing nothing but typing purchase orders into an ERP

Not because the work was valuable. Because the software demanded it.

With Walter, your software stays. The manual work disappears.

🎙️ Nikolas Keller, CEO & Co-Founder of Walter (YC P26) on Fondo START

02:02 Growing up across Beijing, Zurich, Munich, and Singapore
02:53 Walking into French restaurants asking for a job
04:10 Why he walked away from the Michelin-star path
04:48 Choosing startups because uncertainty was the point
05:25 Flying to San Francisco with a duffel bag
06:18 Getting rejected, then forcing his way into a startup
07:06 Learning software engineering and customer discovery
08:00 Meeting future co-founder Lukas Pistoor
09:00 Lukas' bias toward action and unconventional journey
10:16 Discovering the manufacturing workflow problem
10:48 Selling Walter before the product existed
11:26 Why AI employees work where ERP replacements fail

visit www.walter.one to learn more

Relationships drive revenue.

That's why more companies are investing in dinners, customer events, founder meetups, and community gatherings.

But here's what happens after the event:

You sourced the attendees

You sent the invites

You hosted the event

Then everyone goes home

Now you're digging through Slack messages, WhatsApp chats, notes apps, spreadsheets, and email threads trying to remember:

Who showed up.

Who you talked to.

What was discussed.

Who deserves a follow-up.

Most of that context never makes it back into the business.

The event created value.

The workflow lost it.

Pavoot is an AI event manager built for companies that run customer events

It helps teams find the right attendees and draft personalized invitations

It shows who's in the room and why they're relevant

It lets teammates capture notes around each attendee and share context with each other in real time

And afterward, those conversations can flow back into the CRM instead of disappearing into someone's phone.

The event was never the hard part.

Keeping what it created is.

Because relationships don't create value when they're made

They create value when they're remembered

🎙️ Gohar Tamrazyan, CEO & Co-Founder Pavoot (YC P26) on Fondo START

00:22 Ana's journey from Brazil to AI research at ETH Zürich

01:06 Gohar's chess background and Swiss national team experience

01:40 Building a media management tool and discovering a larger problem

02:45 Why companies are investing more heavily in in-person events

03:14 The real goal behind customer events: relationships and outcomes

04:05 Using AI to source attendees and build the right room

04:21 Event recommendations based on attendee interests

04:38 The challenge of remembering conversations after events

05:00 Why teams still rely on Slack, WhatsApp, notes, and voice recordings

05:30 Capturing attendee context and team notes in one place

06:17 Launching Pavoot's Luma integration

08:22 Which companies benefit most from AI-powered event management

learn more at pavoot.com

Chris Bakke never pitched Elon. He just posted good ideas in public for nine months straight.

Laskie was sourcing engineers on Twitter while everyone else lived on LinkedIn.

Along the way Chris started tweeting his own takes on how Twitter should fix recruiting.

Not as a pitch - just because he had strong opinions about what was broken.

Elon liked one. Then followed him. For the next nine months Chris kept the takes sharp on purpose, knowing exactly who was watching.

Then the DM came. A phone number and a note to call that Saturday. His wife was sure he was getting catfished. 

He called anyway, and Elon picked up on the first ring.

Six minutes later it was an invite to dinner at the Tesla Fremont factory that week.

Deal closed in 45 days - Elon's first acquisition at Twitter

Then Twitter became X, X got acquired by xAI, xAI got acquired by SpaceX.

Chris came out the other side holding SpaceX shares

None of it happens if he builds quietly. The ideas did the outreach for him.

🎙️ Chris Bakke, Founder with exits to @X @Indeed @Zillow to on Fondo START pod

02:08 Building Laskie as a recruiting startup in the COVID remote-work wave
03:24 The thesis: reverse-arbitrage engineering talent outside the US
04:41 Why being in an exponentially growing space matters more than anything
05:17 The Twitter takes that got Elon to follow, then DM
06:33 What it's like getting a DM from the richest man in the world
07:06 The Saturday phone call and the Tesla Fremont dinner
08:29 Why you never take the acquirer's first number
09:14 Using optionality as leverage
10:48 Selling from a point of weakness as the hiring market collapsed
11:22 Two years at X and xAI, and a deal around $50M
12:05 The acquisition chain: shell company to Twitter to X to xAI
13:19 SpaceX deal, and the shares he kept

Visit www.chrisbakke.com to learn more

Teddy li's first version of Prepse did something reasonable

It connected to your call recordings, pulled out the data, and filled in your CRM. customers told him it was a nice add-on. he could have explained why they were wrong. he chose to find out why they were right.

So he looked closer, and what the most interested customers actually wanted was underneath it.

They didn't just want cleaner data. they wanted to use it to improve how their teams sold, to make their median reps perform like their top ones.

The data was the input. The training was the point.

He then worked with hundreds of enablement managers to learn what the best teams do differently, and built Prepse around the answer: reps run simulations of real buyer conversations before they have them for real.

The real product was hiding one question deeper than the one he set out to answer.

The useful question about ai in sales isn't what it can replace. It's what it can't. It can't decide how your company should handle a pricing objection, or what a good discovery call sounds like in your market.

That judgment lives in a handful of your best people, and it's the scarce thing.

He built Prepse on that premise.

Instead of automating the seller, it takes the judgment your best people already have and turns it into something every rep can practice against. Your playbook, your objections, your definition of good, run as simulations a rep can repeat until the real call feels like the fourth take.

The leaders set the bar. The software makes sure everyone can reach it.

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🎙️ Teddy Li, Co-Founder, Prepse on Fondo START pod

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00:00 Teddy introduces Prepse and what an AI enablement manager actually does
01:00 The original product: pulling call-recording data into the CRM
01:25 Why customers treated it as an add-on, and what they actually wanted instead
01:45 Studying hundreds of enablement managers to model best-in-class teams
02:05 Snagging the six-letter domain for ten bucks, and what Prepse stands for
02:40 His previous company, Nofin, and going through YC
03:05 Why a founder's skills carry over non-linearly between startups
04:00 The two kinds of teams Prepse sells to
04:30 The real goal: turning the median rep into a top rep
05:35 His onboarding philosophy, getting users to the magic immediately
06:30 What he tells founders about cutting onboarding friction
07:00 Revealing product depth one layer at a time, like an onion

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Check out prepse.com

AI shouldn't replace therapists.
It should help them spend more time being therapists.

Not because AI won't get smarter

Because good therapy isn't just information
It's trust
It's compassion

It's the human element.

Most therapists spend only about half their time doing therapy

The other half?

Running the business

Notes. Paperwork. Marketing. Insurance claims.

Klarify automates the work around the session so therapists can focus on the work only they can do

Today, more than 7,000 therapists use the platform

The result is clear: they spend less time running a business, more time doing the work only they can do

Moody Abdul, Co-Founder & CEO of Klarify, on Fondo START Podcast

01:53 Therapy changed my life
02:22 A therapist asked to use my previous product
02:31 Therapists spend much of their time on admin
03:22 Surpassing 7,300 therapists on the platform
03:46 Why AI won't replace therapists
05:07 The real value hidden inside therapy notes
05:28 Turning session insights into therapist marketing
06:09 Building tools for independent therapists
07:00 Fighting insurance claim denials with AI
07:28 Why therapist SEO and client discovery matter
08:17 The therapist Klarify serves today
09:32 From solo therapists to 60-person clinics
10:00 Solving therapist-client matching

Learn more at www.klarify.ca