intris: These founders are escaping the permanent underclass

Sohum Gautam is a founder who left the M&T program at Penn after just one semester to co-found Seda, where he is rethinking what social platforms look like in an AI driven world. Originally studying computer science and finance, Sohum spent more time building side projects than optimizing for grades (same), and when Seda began to gain early traction and raise venture backing, he made the decision to take a leave of absence.

Seda turns AI chats into a social layer for college communities. Instead of AI conversations living in private browser tabs, users can post their chats into university-specific feeds, attach their name or stay anonymous, and import share links from platforms like OpenAI, Claude, and other LLMs so existing conversations become part of a shared stream. The core idea is that AI usage should not be invisible. On Seda, you can follow friends, creators, or campus personalities to see how they are using generative AI in real time, whether that is asking for advice, drafting messages, or experimenting with prompts. Rather than building a better model, Seda is building a place where AI interactions themselves become social content.

Sohum is currently a resident at The Residency, building alongside other early stage founders while preparing to raise a larger pre seed round. Most of the work right now is founder-led growth, talking to users, manually onboarding new communities, and testing what actually sticks. His GTM strategy borrows from early campus playbooks used by companies like Facebook and Tinder, focusing on concentrated university rollouts.

People are already using AI for a myriad of reasons but no one can see it! Imagine being able to open up an app and see all the brainrot your friends ask ChatGPT. A social platform built specifically around AI chats is still largely unexplored territory, and Seda is testing what that could look like across east coast campuses.

Jake Ottiger building a AI-native services firm

Jake left Thrive to build a one-man AI-native services firm, shipping agents and internal tooling for everyone from machine shops to rag distributors, bringing real leverage to traditional businesses fast. If you know any business that needs agents, product builds, or internal tooling, reach out to him at @jakeottiger on X. 

Celeste Amadon building Known (AI-powered dating app)

Celeste is the founder of Known, a San Francisco-based dating app using voice AI to get singles off their phones and into real life dates with way higher meetup rates than swipe-based platforms, and she’s been running a bunch of mixers around SF, so if you’re a single cool girl looking to meet a cool tech bro (or someone else great), you should download and check it out.

Autumn-Kyoko Cushman building ShiftOS (Holly)

Autumn-Kyoko Cushman, U.S. Navy veteran and founder of ShiftOS, is shipping Holly, an AI workforce admin built to automate scheduling, credentialing, and staffing workflows for healthcare teams drowning in admin drag and burnout (health systems are already onboarding customers)

Maha Nawaz, Chiling Han, Cristiano Da Silva, Nicole Wong Heart Start, Treehacks 2026

This TreeHacks team built an autonomous CPR robot that detects cardiac arrest via a wearable sensor, calls emergency services with location and status, and self-positions to deliver CPR until help arrives, showing rare depth in hardware, robotics, and real-world impact in just 36 hours. Even though they just won the hackathon and aren’t fully building this as a full time startup, I think they’re the kind of builders you can see making waves with what they ship next and I will be keeping up with their careers.

Selin Kocalar building Delve

Selin is the cofounder of Delve, an AI-native compliance platform helping startups automate SOC 2, HIPAA, and other security frameworks so they can sell into enterprise faster. She’s building at the intersection of AI and regulation, turning compliance from a bottleneck into a growth lever for high-growth tech companies.

Potpie AI raised $2.2M in pre-seed funding from Emergent Ventures. The company unifies code, tickets, logs, and documentation into one engineering context layer so AI agents can actually function inside large, messy real-world codebases.

Validfor raised $1.2M in pre-seed funding from DOMiNO Ventures. The company builds agentic AI tools that automate compliance and validation workflows for life-sciences companies, producing audit-ready outputs without manual paperwork sprawl.

Sophia Space raised $10M in seed funding co-led by Alpha Funds. The company is building modular orbital computing infrastructure, enabling data processing directly in space instead of sending everything back to Earth.

t54 raised $5M in seed funding from Anagram, PL Capital, and Franklin Templeton. The company is building identity and risk infrastructure that allows autonomous AI agents to transact and operate safely in financial systems.

Quill Meetings raised $6.5M in seed funding led by Basis Set Ventures. The company builds a meeting-to-actions AI assistant that runs local-first by default, converting conversations into structured follow-ups without sending sensitive data to the cloud.

TBD raised $3M in seed funding from CMT Digital and ParaFi. The company is launching prediction markets designed to measure verified human sentiment, turning opinion into a tradable signal.

Elly raised $8M in funding led by Sorenson Capital. The company is building an AI-native hiring platform that automates sourcing, screening, and recruiter workflows to reduce manual recruiting work.

Gushwork raised $9M in seed funding from Susquehanna. The company helps B2B businesses get discovered in AI search results by producing optimized content and tracking inbound demand from AI-driven discovery channels.

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