intris: YC Lessons, Early-Stage Discipline, and This Week’s Pre-Seed & Seed Rounds

Sung Cho is a junior at Wharton pursuing a simultaneous master's in electrical engineering, and his path to entrepreneurship traces back to a high school internship at a Korean fintech company that first pulled him toward the startup world. Even while completing military service and securing a banking offer, he kept that founding ambition alive, flying to San Francisco over spring break to meet founders and VCs and eventually connecting with two Korea-based builders through a mutual investor. That connection led him to join their team, where his primary role was customer-facing sales and outreach, and within weeks of joining they had applied and gotten into YC together.

The YC experience reshaped how he thinks about building from the ground up. On the practical side, the program offered substantial financial runway through perks like tens of thousands in API credits, CRM tools, and a deals network largely built around serving YC founders first. The alumni network, which he used heavily for sales, and the social proof of being a YC company opened doors that cold outreach never could. His biggest intellectual takeaway was a complete reframe of sales: rather than trying to convince people, the job is to qualify and filter, actively letting go of customers who aren't the right fit so you can concentrate on proving your thesis with the right population. He also described another perk of the community being the group office hours, where eight to ten companies with similar profiles met biweekly and set concrete goals around metrics like ARR and growth targets, adding another layer of accountability that many groups carried well beyond the batch itself.

By the time demo day passed, Sung had made the call to return to school rather than renege on his banking offer and take more time away. His broader tech perspective reflects that same ground-level honesty. He thinks SaaS as an industry is approaching the end of its growth cycle, trending toward consolidation and commoditization rather than the outright collapse that the so-called "SaaSpocalypse" crowd keeps predicting, comparing it to where oil and gas sits today. Still breathing, just no longer the hottest thing in the room. Whether he ends up in banking, back in the startup world, or somewhere in between, he has the kind of analytical clarity and firsthand experience that will serve him well in any of those paths.

Certivo (Seattle, WA) raised $4M in seed funding. The company builds an AI-native compliance management platform that automates supplier evidence collection, regulatory monitoring, and documentation for manufacturers, turning reactive compliance into continuous infrastructure. The round was led by Suffolk Technologies, with participation from Pioneer Square Ventures.

Qumis (Chicago, IL) raised $4.3M in seed funding, bringing its total raised to $6.75M. The company has built an attorney-trained AI platform for commercial insurance coverage intelligence that combines document processing with multi-stage legal reasoning, with source-linked citations so users can verify every output. The round was led by MTech Capital, with participation from American Family Ventures.

Sift Biosciences (San Carlos, CA) raised $3.7M in pre-seed funding. The company is developing a peptide-based immunotherapy platform designed to activate pre-existing memory T cells to fight immunologically "cold" solid tumors like colorectal and ovarian cancer, as well as autoimmune diseases. The round was co-led by Lifespan Vision Ventures and Freeflow Ventures, with participation from Valuence Ventures, Eisai Innovation, and SBI US Gateway Fund.

Grotto AI (New York, NY) raised $10M in seed funding. The company builds an AI platform for multifamily real estate leasing that provides real-time coaching to leasing agents and identifies the precise moments when a prospect's warmth and intent make a human conversation most likely to convert, betting on augmenting humans rather than replacing them. The round was led by ICONIQ, with participation from Asymmetric Capital Partners.

QuadSci (New York, NY) raised $8M in Series A funding. The company offers an AI platform for customer intelligence that analyzes trillions of digital usage events to surface which customer behaviors correlate with retention and revenue outcomes. The round included Crosslink Capital, Alumni Ventures, and Correlation Ventures.

Portkey (San Francisco, CA) raised $15M in Series A funding. The company provides a unified control plane for production AI that sits directly in the path of every model request to handle governance, observability, reliability, and cost management. It currently processes over 500B LLM tokens across 125M daily requests for more than 24,000 organizations. The round was led by Elevation Capital, with participation from Lightspeed.

Rainfall Health (Berkeley, CA) raised $15M in Series A funding. The company builds an AI-driven compliance and reimbursement platform that helps hospitals navigate the CMS TEAM model, automating episode tracking, quality reporting, and care coordination to help health systems avoid penalties while unlocking new Medicare revenue.