Startup Bios

Ghost, a startup run by a 19-year-old CEO, just came out of stealth with an $11 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Its product, Core, is a $3,499 screenless computer that runs your personal AI agents at home, with the models, memory and your data kept on the device. Here's what's inside the box, what the privacy fine print actually says, and how it stacks up against the Mac Mini, Apple and the big AI labs.

Chapters

0:00 Ghost in 30 seconds

0:27 A 19-year-old CEO

0:57 The $11M seed

1:29 Core: a computer for AI agents

2:41 $3,499, and sold out

4:35 Ownership and the privacy fine print

7:51 Brian's Take

Startup Bios is the show about the newest startups coming out of stealth, hosted by Brian McCullough. Like and subscribe, and get the audio version on the Startup Bios podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mithrl, the San Francisco startup behind a Scientific Decision Engine for drug discovery, just raised a $20 million Series A led by Obvious Ventures. Co-founder Vivek Adarsh came out of NVIDIA's CUDA compiler team, and his pitch is triage: AI has made drug hypotheses cheap, lab experiments are still expensive, so Mithrl's biomedical world model helps decide which ideas are worth testing. Here's how it works, who it's up against, and why patents are the number Adarsh cares about most.

Chapters

0:00 Mithrl in 30 seconds

0:24 Why Mithrl exists

1:01 The $20M Series A

1:59 Ideas got cheap, testing didn't

3:20 The biomedical world model

5:41 Benchmarks, customers and patents

8:42 Brian's Take

Startup Bios is the show about the newest startups coming out of stealth, hosted by Brian McCullough. Like and subscribe, and get the audio version on the Startup Bios podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

HIFI, the New York startup wiring bank rails, stablecoins and Wall Street's tokenized securities into one API, just raised a $37 million Series A led by Left Lane Capital. The company says it moves more than $7 billion a year, counts Sumitomo as a customer, and was in DTCC's tokenized production trades alongside BlackRock and Goldman. Here's how it works, who it's up against, from Stripe's Bridge to Circle, and the risks worth watching.

Chapters

0:00 HIFI in 30 seconds

0:19 1968: when Wall Street closed on Wednesdays

0:59 The $37M Series A

2:05 One API, three sets of pipes

4:11 DTCC, tokenized repo and Visa

7:10 The stablecoin market

8:53 Brian's Take

Startup Bios is the show about the newest startups coming out of stealth, hosted by Brian McCullough. Like and subscribe, and get the audio version on the Startup Bios podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chamelio, an Israeli legal AI startup, just raised a $26 million Series A led by Entrée Capital, eight months after its $10 million seed. Instead of just storing contracts like traditional CLM software, Chamelio's platform drafts, reviews and negotiates them for in-house legal teams, with lawyers kept in the loop where the company wants oversight. Here's who's behind it, how it works, and whether it can take on Ironclad, Icertis and the AI-native crowd.

Chapters

0:00 Chamelio in 30 seconds

0:24 Why legal is the bottleneck

0:55 The $26M Series A

1:36 The founders

3:14 Beyond the fancy filing cabinet

7:22 Traction and customers

8:57 Brian's Take

Startup Bios is the show about the newest startups coming out of stealth, hosted by Brian McCullough. Like and subscribe, and get the audio version on the Startup Bios podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ando came out of stealth with $20 million from Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence to build a team messaging app where AI agents are actual members of the team, not bots you have to copy and paste into. Sara Du, the second-time founder behind Alloy Automation, wants to kill the "meat proxy" problem. But can a new chat app really pull teams off Slack?

Chapters

0:00 Ando in 30 seconds

0:24 Sara Du and the "meat proxy" problem

2:40 What Ando actually looks like

4:23 A rough start, then sticky customers

6:07 The founder and the $20M round

8:02 Brian's Take

10:16 Sign-off

Startup Bios is the show about the newest startups coming out of stealth, hosted by Brian McCullough. Like and subscribe, and get the audio version on the Startup Bios podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Maven Robotics came out of stealth with a $100 million Series A led by RoboStrategy to put wheeled, two-armed robots to work building pallets in warehouses. Two brothers, an Apple car team, one unnamed customer won with a cartoon robot, and a bet that "deep, then wide" beats the humanoid demo reel.

Chapters:

0:00 Maven Robotics in 30 seconds

0:20 Welcome

0:52 Winning the first customer with a cartoon robot

2:26 The $100M Series A and RoboStrategy

3:25 What the robot actually does: mixed-case palletizing

4:37 Wheels, two arms, no legs

6:02 The founders and the Apple car team

8:08 "Deep, then wide"

9:54 Brian's Take

12:25 Sign-off

Startup Bios is the show about the newest startups coming out of stealth, hosted by Brian McCullough. Like and subscribe, and get the audio version on the Startup Bios podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.