This week I learned more about the ultimate young founder: John Coogan (founder of TBPN). I dove into John’s inactive personal youtube channel. John’s career is something that needs to be studied. Before his wildly successful startups (Soylent, Lucy, TBPN), he interned at Citadel and got the job by sneaking into a Harvard recruiting event while he was a student at Northeastern. He described the summer internship as “dull” and did not take his return offer. Talk about aura.
In other news, Artemis II is set to land later tonight in my home ocean on the California coast. My favorite part of their entire trip has been the discussion of more existential topics like faith, family, and human connection.
Also, with summer coming up, I have thought a lot about what the few weeks my life will look like before my summer internship. So, I have made it a goal to work at my mom’s small medical supply company where I can understand how she uses software, manages large amounts of data, and see what kind of internal tooling can be created for her. And yes, I will take my stab at creating it. Taking inspiration from Jake Ottiger and many other AI workflow companies.
Building out agents for the middle market / small business sector is where so much value will be made for everyone outside of the bubble. Most of our life should be spent outside, so fixing how businesses run (not only the f500) will be so useful.
Enjoy reading!
What Matters on X This Week (If You’re Busy Building)
A16z new media is in full throttle with hiring amongst a ton of roles in media. You can see more here.
Z Fellows has put out a posting for 10k to any student with a summer internship who is willing to drop it and build instead. They are willing to match summer internship salaries. You can apply here.
Everyone keeps saying AI will replace junior VC work, but honestly that was never the edge. The real advantage has always been scar tissue. Knowing exactly how companies quietly fall apart from a thousand tiny decisions and catching it early. Data tells you what happened. Great investors are underwriting what hasn’t shown up yet but will. More on this here.
The heat seeker vs truth seeker framing is so real. A lot of venture right now is just chasing whatever already has momentum and calling it insight. Truth seeking is way less comfortable because it usually looks wrong before it looks obvious. Read more here.
Young Founders of the Week
Sandra Cai is the founder of Plurall AI, a B2B startup building AI systems to detect deepfakes, impersonation, and online fraud for platforms and enterprises that need to verify digital identity and media authenticity. I think her approach of selling trust and verification infrastructure to businesses facing rising AI generated fraud could become extremely lucrative as platforms and enterprises increasingly need reliable ways to authenticate content and users online.
Devin founded Assert after leaving Princeton. He is building developer infrastructure to improve how software teams build and ship code. Tools that manage reliability and developer workflows will represent a large and historically valuable category in the software stack.
Dylan Paoletti is the co-founder of GenCTX and is working on cancer therapeutics while still in high school. He’s already spending time in the synbio and biotech space, which is unusually technical for someone at that stage. His focus is on applying biology to real disease problems rather than just exploring the field at a surface level.
Shane is the founder of Offscreen, a gaming company, and a student at Princeton. He’s building in gaming, a space that’s heavily driven by product feel, community, and engagement, while balancing school. His work sits at the intersection of entertainment and tech, where small product decisions can have a big impact on user behavior.
Anantika Mannby is the founder of Perfit, a fashion app designed to blend social media and shopping into one experience. She has a background in building viral consumer products, and her work centers around capturing attention and translating that into engagement within a shopping environment. The product leans into how Gen Z already discovers and interacts with fashion online.
Pre-Seed/Seed Rounds of the Week
Pomo raised $4.5M in seed funding led by Kindred Ventures. The company is building an agentic marketing intelligence platform that continuously monitors market signals and helps teams prioritize and execute decisions.
Ridge AI raised $2.6M in pre-seed funding led by Madrona Venture Group. The company is building AI native embedded analytics that let B2B software companies ship browser native dashboards and AI data agents in hours.
Petwealth raised $1.7M in funding with investors unspecified. The company is building an at home PCR diagnostics and AI powered pet health intelligence platform delivering results in 24 to 48 hours.
Trent AI raised $13M in seed funding led by LocalGlobe and Cambridge Innovation Capital, with participation from investors across OpenAI, Spotify, Databricks, and AWS. The company is building a multi agent AI security platform that continuously scans, evaluates, and mitigates risks across autonomous AI agents and workflows, helping organizations safely deploy agentic system. Fun fact, my dad sold them their domain name!
X posts I liked this week <3
