BUILDERS
BUILDERS is a podcast that explores how founders get new technology adopted. Each episode features a founder sharing their journey of breaking into an industry, earning early believers, building credibility, and achieving real technology adoption. The show is part of a network of 20 industry-specific shows with over 1,200 founder interviews. It is produced by Front Lines Media.
Episodes
How UnityAI ran 5 simultaneous market experiments to find its ICP after abandoning health systems | Edmund, CEO of UnityAI
Edmund spent years as Chief Data Officer at HCA Healthcare — 200 hospitals across America — watching a parade of vendors pitch solutions to problems that didn't exist in his environment. He saw the pattern clearly: founders who had never been inside a complex healthcare system, selling point capabilities with no understanding of how clinical workflows actually interconnect. When the AI moment
How TabaPay kept its original 2017 ICP intact for nine years while still growing the addressable market | Rodney Robinson
TabaPay is rewriting the payment infrastructure stack for fintechs, lenders, and money-moving businesses — delivering the low-cost, instant, round-trip payment capabilities that established acquirers wouldn't offer and the market had no clean solution for. Founded in 2017 after Rodney Robinson spent years operating inside money transmission and the MasterCard ecosystem, TabaPay was built on a thes
How Smirk Health runs GTM through an agentic AI layer | Felix W. Ortiz III
Health insurance hasn't fundamentally changed since a vice president at Baylor University created it with a group of nurses in 1929. What started as a fringe benefit became a wartime recruitment tool in the 1940s, got codified into group insurance through the ERISA Act in the 1970s, and has remained structurally employer-tied ever since. The problem: that architecture assumes a workforce that no l
How Mach identified non-traditional OEMs as its fastest revenue channel after auditing where closed deals were actually coming from | Colin Hurd
Mach builds the autonomy stack for the off-highway world — the heavy equipment running agriculture, land care, mining, logistics, construction, and defense. Founded on technology roots going back to 2013, Mach integrates hardware and software directly onto existing OEM platforms, giving mid-market equipment manufacturers a fast path to autonomous operations without building it themselves. Mach'
How BinSentry frames every enterprise pitch around executive career risk — not product features | Ben Allen
BinSentry is bringing real-time inventory intelligence to one of the largest and most overlooked supply chains on the planet. The US animal feed industry alone processes over $200 billion in transactions annually — and globally, the number exceeds $1 trillion. Yet most feed mills still rely on humans manually peering into bins to estimate what's there, a workflow Ben Allen's grandfather wo
How Zip Security built a vCISO channel by treating consultants as the primary customer, not the middleman | Joshua Zweig
The cybersecurity industry has a problem it created itself. The tools exist to protect most organizations — but deploying and managing them costs seven dollars in services for every one dollar in software license. Multiply that across the eight to ten tools a company actually needs, and you've priced out the majority of the market. Zip Security was built to close that gap with AI and automatio
How Avantos positioned against CRM by calling itself an operating system for client management — and why buyers got it immediately | Bassam Chaptini
Avantos AI is replacing the fragmented patchwork of CRMs, task managers, and paper-based workflows that financial services firms have relied on for decades with a single operating system for client management. Built on a knowledge graph and AI-native from the ground up, Avantos models the full complexity of financial relationships — client data, the service team, and the products clients hold —
How Nominal combined go-to-market engineering and CFO dinners to build a pipeline motion that converts | Guy Leibovitz
Most AI finance startups are chasing the same crowded ground — invoice processing, AP automation, SMB-friendly dashboards. Nominal is doing something different. Guy Leibovitz, a three-time founder with two exits, is building AI agents that replace the full manual workload of controllers and accountants — and he's selling it into mid-market and enterprise companies that nobody else is seriously
How Renterra built an outbound cold calling engine | Andy Feis
Heavy equipment rental is a $100 billion market — and until recently, it ran almost entirely on pen and paper or legacy software built 30 to 40 years ago. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Andy Feis, Co-Founder & CEO of Renterra, to learn how five years of management consulting across manufacturing, mining, logistics, and construction led him to one of the most overlooked s
How Rembrand repositioned away from "product placement" to unlock a completely different media buyer and budget | Omar Tawakol
Rembrand is building a new media category called in-content advertising — using AI to insert brand products seamlessly into existing video content, from social creator clips to premium TV shows and films, in a way viewers can't detect. The founding insight is blunt: ad industry executives were going home and paying to avoid their own product. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with
How Extend built a four-pillar marketing org mapped to four distinct B2B2B growth motions | Guillaume Bouvard
Extend's model is built on a specific bet: that banks want to offer their SMB clients a better expense management product but won't build it themselves. Extend builds that product and sells it to the bank, who then distributes it to their business customers as their own offering. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Guillaume Bouvard, Co-Founder, COO & CMO of Extend, to
Why IO River hired a VP of sales one month after founding | Edward Tsinovoi
Akamai once made the decision to freeze its entire network for a full year. No changes. No deployments. No innovation. The cost of another major outage — like the ones that had already knocked critical services offline — was simply too high to justify any forward movement. Edward Tsinovoi was inside that decision. And what it revealed to him wasn't just an operational problem at Akamai. It w
How Vinci captured existing budget line items instead of creating new demand from scratch | Hardik Kabaria
Vinci is building the foundation model for the physical world — starting with heat transfer in semiconductor and electronics engineering. Approximately three years into the journey, the team has shipped a product now in use by engineering teams at top-tier semiconductor and electronics companies. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Hardik Kabaria, CEO and Co-Founder of Vinci, to l
How Safebooks AI positioned against the 80% accuracy standard that makes AI unacceptable in finance | Ahikam Kaufman
Safebooks AI is building the infrastructure layer that makes agentic AI safe to operate inside the office of the CFO. Where most finance automation tools solve point problems — AP, AR, billing, reconciliation — Safebooks ingests data end to end across every system in a company's financial stack: CPQ, CRM, contract management, billing, ERP, and banking. Using graph AI technology, it normalizes
How Copper is creating a new category of appliances | Weldon Kennedy
Copper makes battery-equipped induction ranges that plug into a standard household outlet — no panel upgrades, no new circuits, no electrician. In a Los Angeles building renovation, that difference saved a developer $800,000. In a deal with the New York City Housing Authority, it unlocked a contract for 10,000 units. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Weldon Kennedy, Co-Founder &
What ToltIQ's co-founder — a former KKR CIO — says founders must never do when selling AI to financial services buyers | Ed Brandman
Ed Brandman spent decades in global financial services before retiring in 2018. His last chapter before stepping away was at KKR — where he joined when the firm had just 390 people and left having helped build it into one of the most recognizable names in alternative assets. Five years later, a conversation with his son (now his co-founder) about the due diligence process pulled him back. That bec
How Reevo mapped every GTM persona as a node-edge graph to find its product wedge before building anything | David Zhu
Reevo launched with an audacious compound thesis: tear out the Frankenstack of CRM, sequencing tools, conversation intelligence, data enrichment, and forecasting apps that buries revenue teams in busywork — and replace it with a single unified platform that powers the entire GTM motion from first outreach to closed-won and beyond. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with David Zhu, Co-Fou
Inside Campfire's founder-led growth strategy | John Glasgow
John Glasgow spent over a decade as the end customer of enterprise accounting software — at Adobe, Invoice2Go, and Bill.com — before deciding to build the ERP he always wished existed. After Invoice2Go was acquired for $625 million, he applied to Y Combinator with a newborn at home and a single conviction: the incumbents were 25–30 years old, the pain was acute, and nobody was building for the mod
How Arintra built a 100% pilot success rate by leading with ROI in autonomous medical coding | Nitesh Shroff
Medical coding is a mandatory workflow — no code, no claim, no payment. But the US isn't producing enough coders to keep up, payer-side complexity keeps growing, and hospital margins are already razor-thin. Arintra is building the AI infrastructure to take that workflow off the table entirely. In this episode of BUILDERS, CEO and Co-Founder Nitesh Shroff breaks down how Arintra is winning deal
How Remark's uses custom gifting to drive demand | Theo Satloff
E-commerce hasn't fundamentally changed since 1996. Same homepage. Same nav tree. Same cart and checkout. Theo Satloff, Co-founder & CEO of Remark, is building from the inside out to change that — replacing the generic, one-size-fits-all brand website with a personalized, consultative shopping experience that adapts to the individual the moment they land on site.In this episode, Theo gets
How AIR generating revenue while most eVTOL competitors produced zero sales | Rani Plaut
AIR is an eVTOL company on a path to making personal aviation a mass-market product — not a commercial fleet play. With a $35M+ order book, aircraft already delivered, and double-digit revenues projected for 2026, AIR is an outlier in a sector where most well-funded competitors have yet to generate meaningful revenue. On this episode of BUILDERS, we spoke with Rani Plaut, CEO and Co-Founder of
How OpenHands built a four-bucket qualification framework to stop losing time on low-maturity enterprise accounts | Robert Brennan
OpenHands is the largest open source platform for agentic software development — giving engineering teams AI automation for the maintenance work that consumes developer cycles without requiring creative judgment: dependency updates, vulnerability remediation, unit test coverage, and code review. In this episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Robert Brennan, Co-Founder and CEO of OpenHands, to di
How Frugal used 6 months of founder-led pipeline before making its first GTM hire | Michael Weider
Frugal is building the engineering-layer that FinOps dashboards never could. Where existing tools tell you what you're spending, Frugal embeds cost visibility directly into the software development lifecycle — so engineers make better cost decisions before the bill arrives, not 30 days after. In this episode of BUILDERS, four-time founder Michael Weider breaks down why AI is quietly destroy
How Fleetzero sells against "do nothing" | Mike Carter
Roughly 90% of the world's goods move by sea on vessels powered by technology that, in many cases, hasn't meaningfully advanced since the textbooks Mike Carter studied at Kings Point — which were printed in the 1960s. Mike and his co-founder Steven grew up together in the mountains of North Carolina, spent careers at offshore drilling contractors and energy majors like Shell, and eventuall
How Blue Current pivoted its entire go-to-market from EVs to stationary storage after identifying the cascading adoption slowdown | Susan Stone
Blue Current spent a decade doing what most battery startups won't: staying in the lab until the chemistry was genuinely ready. Founded with a single North Star — build a safer battery, whatever that takes — the company scrapped its original technology after early cells literally caught fire, rebuilt around silicon as an active anode material in a fully dry architecture, and emerged with a ba
How Motif wins in a change-resistant market by leading with net-new capability instead of incremental improvement | Amar Hanspal
Motif is building a browser-based, AI-native design system for architects, engineers, and general contractors — bringing a notoriously complex, desktop-heavy workflow into the modern era. In this episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Amar Hanspal, CEO of Motif, to talk about the GTM decisions that shaped Motif's early traction: how they identified the right ICP, why they went PLG, what it
How Baobab uses attack surface reconnaissance to underwrite cyber risk more accurately than incumbents | Vincenz Klemm
Cyber insurance was bleeding money across Europe — and the industry knew it. Loss ratios were unsustainable because carriers were pricing risk they didn't actually understand. Vincenz Klemm, CEO and Co-Founder of Baobab, saw that as a systems problem, not a market problem. His solution: build an insurer that maps a company's external attack surface before underwriting, retrieves leaked cre
Why EverWorker targets "boring billion-dollar companies" | Anton Antich
Most AI companies in 2023 raced to own a vertical. EverWorker made the opposite bet — build a horizontal platform that lets anyone create agents for any purpose, no code required. In this episode of BUILDERS, Anton Antich, CPO and Co-Founder of EverWorker, gets into what it actually takes to sell AI inside enterprises that are stuck between the hype and the reality, why he's making the case ag
How Yutori landed enterprise contracts without a sales team by letting prosumer word of mouth do the work | Abhishek Das, Co-CEO at Yutori
Yutori is building web agents — AI that can monitor, navigate, and eventually act on the web on your behalf. Their first product, Scouts, launched in beta in June 2024 with one deliberate constraint: read-only web monitoring. No booking, no form-filling, no write actions. Just signal extraction from the open web. That narrow framing, paired with a $25K launch video that went viral on Twitter, drov
How Andromeda selected its beachhead market using three criteria: impact, deployment complexity, and market opportunity | Grace Brown
Andromeda is building social humanoid robots designed to solve the loneliness epidemic among the elderly. Its flagship robot, Abby, is already deployed in nursing homes across Australia — speaking 90 languages, building ongoing relationships with residents, and filling a care gap that human staff simply don't have the capacity to address. In this episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Grace Bro
How GradBridge is building distribution through school partnerships to reach students at the point of decline | Jen O'Donald
Every year, more than half of private student loan applicants get declined. Not because they're unserious about their education — but because they narrowly miss a credit cutoff. For upperclassmen and grad students already deep into a degree, that rejection often means dropping out. Jen O'Donald spent 13 years at Sallie Mae, most recently running product, watching this gap go unsolved. So s
How Amaze used acquisitions to accelerate distribution rather than build it from scratch | Aaron Day
Amaze Holdings is quietly becoming one of the more interesting GTM stories in the creator economy. With 14 million users who have launched stores and 3,000–4,000 new ones joining daily at near-zero acquisition cost, CEO Aaron Day has built a social commerce platform that lets anyone start selling inside YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, and Discord — no inventory, no upfront investment require
How Greenfly doubled revenue and headcount by staying inside three tightly defined verticals instead of expanding TAM
Greenfly powers short-form content distribution for major sports leagues worldwide — giving athletes, teams, and leagues real-time access to highlights and fan UGC that flows directly to social channels. When Mark Keaney joined as CRO three years ago, the company had 35 employees. It has since doubled both revenue and headcount. In this episode of Unicorn Builders, Mark breaks down how a niche B2B
How StackHawk repositioned runtime testing as the essential layer when AI-generated code made static analysis unmanageable
Joni Klippert didn't come from security. She came from DevOps — two companies, including VictorOps, which she joined as the first non-engineering hire and helped bring to market. At conferences like DevOps Days Enterprise, she kept running into the same frustrated security teams: they knew they couldn't keep up with the pace of software delivery, but their only move was to act as a gate. T
How DOSS exited founder-led sales by unlearning what made founder selling work
DOSS is building the operations cloud for physical-products companies — procurement, inventory management, and order management unified on a modern data platform, positioned as the layer that sits around the ERP general ledger rather than replacing it. In this episode of BUILDERS, Co-Founder and CEO Wiley Jones gets specific about what 22 months in market actually taught him: why nine of those mon
How Sleep AI built an 8-year data moat before hiring their first salesperson | Colin Lawlor
Sleep AI is building the world's largest sleep intelligence platform, with over a billion hours of sleep data, connections to more than a million users, and 100+ published studies. The company operates a B2B model providing sleep data infrastructure through three channels: R&D services for product validation, reimbursed digital therapeutics in Germany's healthcare system, and SDK/API p
Why up to 50% of Savvy Wealth’s marketing budget goes towards experimentation
Savvy Wealth is an AI-enabled platform for independent financial advisors — solo operators and small teams — that handles everything from CRM and billing to compliance, investment management, and financial planning. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Ritik Malhotra, Founder & CEO, to get into the GTM mechanics behind selling into one of the most trust-locked markets in financial serv
How OneCrew resisted horizontal expansion to dominate one vertical in construction software | Ari Bleemer
OneCrew is building end-to-end operational software for asphalt and concrete contractors—a segment caught between Procore's general contractor focus and ServiceTitan's field services model. After leaving Bain & Company and Google, Ari Bleemer and his co-founder Max identified that self-performing specialty contractors who handle everything from estimating to payment collection had no purpose-b
AI vs. AI: why Quantro Security is building defense for the era of AI-native offense
Mehul spent over 20 years building cybersecurity products, including early time at Tenable where he watched the company scale from a scrappy startup to a billion-dollar platform. Now he's co-founding Quantro Security, which just came out of stealth with an AI agent platform built specifically for cyber defense. The core thesis: AI has reduced the cost of building attacks to near zero, and stat
The crawl-walk-run sequence DG Matrix uses to convert disbelieving enterprise buyers into nine-figure contracts | Haroon Inam
Haroon Inam is the CEO of DG Matrix, which just closed a $60M raise backed by ABB and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to scale behind-the-meter power architecture for AI data centers. In this episode, he breaks down how a pre-scale startup wins deals measured in hundreds of megawatts, why channel partners became a balance sheet solution rather than just a distribution play, and the exact sequence he u
The "mission ready" messaging system Overwatch Imaging uses to cut through defense tech hype
Greg Davis bootstrapped Overwatch Imaging into a profitable, venture-backed dual-use company — before defense tech was a fundable category. In this episode, he breaks down how to sell autonomy into risk-averse, mission-critical markets: why the message that closes investors actively kills deals with operators, how to give customers an adoption on-ramp without commoditizing your technology, and wha
The ROI system Faro Health uses to convert enterprise pilots | Scott Chetham
Clinical trial design hasn't materially changed in 25 years. Faro Health is fixing that — automating the manual labor behind protocol design for enterprise pharma and compressing ROI proof to a single quarter. Scott Chetham built what the industry refused to, and is now navigating the harder problem: scaling trust in a field where a single misstep touches billion-dollar pipelines.Topics Discus
How Monet used Facebook groups to sign up 7,500 content creators before building the product
Jacob Casson spent years trying to solve cash flow for the entertainment and media industry — influencer agencies, production houses, film and TV — while nearly running his own company into the ground twice. In this episode, he breaks down how Monet evolved from a creator banking product into a financial back office and lending platform, how he recapitalized under a hostile takeover attempt, and w
How PlantSwitch landed Walmart as an early customer | Dillon Baxter
PlantSwitch CEO Dillon Baxter won a 25-million-unit Walmart contract before his company had a production facility. He flew to China, stood up a 300,000 square foot vertically integrated factory in 45 days, and delivered 100 million forks in the first year. This episode covers what he learned about vertical integration, GTM sequencing, and why selling materials to legacy manufacturers is a trap mos
Why 3V Infrastructure stripped sustainability from its pitch and led with cap rates instead | Ben Kanner
3V Infrastructure finances EV charging infrastructure for multifamily real estate owners, removing upfront cost as the blocker to deployment. Ben Kanner breaks down how they built a channel-first GTM, why they deliberately stripped sustainability from their pitch, and how they're reworking their funnel after deals started stalling mid-stage.Topics Discussed:Why multifamily EV charging is uniqu
How Market Logic rebuilt customer segmentation to stop optimizing for the loudest accounts | Dirk Wolf
Market Logic Software sits at the intersection of market intelligence and enterprise AI — helping companies like Procter & Gamble and Unilever move from gut-feel decision-making to insights-driven operations. When Dirk Wolf stepped in as CEO five years ago, the business had impressive logos but a fundamental scaling problem: every customer had been co-built with, deeply customized, and operati
How C8 Health broke into more than 100 hospital systems | Galia Rosen Schwarz
C8 Health is solving a problem that costs hospitals billions: the implementation gap between medical knowledge and actual clinical practice. Despite hospitals investing heavily in clinical trials, licensing platforms like UpToDate and OpenEvidence, and creating comprehensive policies and guidelines, this knowledge remains siloed across 20+ disconnected systems per department. Operating across over
Why Nauta doesn’t do POCs | Valentina Jordan
Nauta is building the data infrastructure layer for global supply chain, starting with mid-market shippers who manage 600+ suppliers across 40+ countries but lack a single source of truth. Co-founded by Valentina Jordan, who spent six and a half years at Rappi, Nauta targets the $200M-$2B revenue segment where companies face enterprise-level complexity without enterprise resources. In this episode
How Podero avoids "pilot purgatory" | Chris Bernkopf
Podero builds software that enables European utilities to trade device flexibility—EVs, heat pumps, and batteries—on energy markets, generating trading revenues while reducing consumer bills by 20-30%. The company navigates a uniquely complex B2B motion: they must sell utilities, secure API access from device OEMs, and ensure utilities successfully roll out consumer-facing products—all simultaneou
How Cassidy achieved 90% content performance consistency across TikTok and Instagram | Justin Fineberg
Justin Fineberg built a 500,000+ follower audience on TikTok and Instagram before launching Cassidy, an AI automation platform for non-technical users. By consistently creating content about AI and technology, he turned inbound interest into his initial customer base and market validation. In this episode of BUILDERS, Justin breaks down how he leveraged short-form video to identify product opportu
How Vycarb's 'show, then tell' marketing strategy converts prospects | Garrett Boudinot
Vycarb is commercializing a carbon storage technology that mimics ocean chemistry, converting CO2 into bicarbonate—a stable molecule that remains sequestered for hundreds of thousands of years. Based in Brooklyn, the company operates at the intersection of hard science and market-making in carbon removal, where customers, verification standards, and pricing mechanisms are all emerging simultaneous
How Sola Insurance built a referral engine with insurance agents | Wesley Pergament
Hail has officially surpassed hurricanes and wildfires as the costliest natural disaster in the U.S. over the last 25 years—a shift that became visible three years ago and created a massive market opportunity. Wesley Pergament recognized this trend early and built Sola Insurance around it, transforming how homeowners protect their properties by eliminating the subjective claims process that's
How Icarus Robotics secured NASA deployment in their first year | Ethan Barajas
Astronaut time costs $130,000 per hour, yet a significant portion goes to routine maintenance and cargo logistics rather than breakthrough science. Icarus Robotics is building the robotic workforce for commercial space stations, and despite being just over a year old, secured a deployment partnership with NASA and Voyager Space for the International Space Station in 2027. In this episode, we sat d
Why organic referrals drive 80% of Clockwise's growth after a decade of marketing experiments | Matt Martin
Clockwise is pioneering intelligent time management for knowledge workers, addressing the fundamental constraint that limits all knowledge work organizations: how teams allocate their most finite resource. Founded in 2016, the company has spent a decade solving the problem of calendar inefficiency and meeting overload that fragments productive time. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down wit
How Voxel collapsed implementation time from months to 14 days | Vernon O'Donnell
Voxel applies computer vision AI to industrial workplace safety, tackling a $100-180 billion annual problem in the US alone. Vernon O'Donnell joined as CEO two years ago facing a company with strong Carnegie Mellon-trained technical talent but a fundamentally broken go-to-market motion. The founding team had pursued an insurance carrier-led channel strategy that seemed logical but create
How hema.to uses clinical evidence as their core marketing strategy in healthcare AI | Karsten Miermans
hema.to is building AI-powered diagnostic infrastructure for cytometry—a specialized area of laboratory medicine analyzing immune system data to detect blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma. Unlike radiology or pathology where AI solutions are abundant, cytometry has remained largely untouched by the AI wave, creating both opportunity and isolation for the Munich-based company. In a recent epis
How Dextall builds trust in construction | Aurimas Sabulis
Dextall is attacking a structural inefficiency in construction: the 3-year design coordination cycle that precedes every mid-rise building, combined with the chaotic on-site execution that follows. Founded by Aurimas Sabulis after years running a commercial window company and witnessing construction site dysfunction firsthand, Dextall is building what Aurimas calls a "prefab operating system"—soft
How Empathy landed 9 of the top 10 US life insurance carriers | Ron Gura
Empathy is pioneering bereavement care as an enterprise benefit, transforming how employers and financial institutions support employees during life's most challenging transitions. Working with 9 of the top 10 life insurance carriers in the US and Canada—covering over 40 million people—Empathy created a new category by combining grief support with practical logistics like probate navigation, accou
How Ridepanda landed Amazon and Google by repositioning within existing commuter benefit budgets | Chinmay Malaviya
Ridepanda turned the failed unit economics of shared micro-mobility into a viable B2B model by eliminating operational costs that drove Lime's per-minute pricing from $0.15 to $0.55. After working at Lime and seeing firsthand why rebalancing, charging, vandalism, and theft made profitability impossible, Co-founder Chinmay Malaviya built a subscription model where employers subsidize personal e-bik
How Palla Financial navigates selling to banks with no standard buyer: from remittance teams to CEOs | Enrique Perezalonso
The cross-border payments market remains stubbornly difficult despite billions in venture capital and countless smart founders attacking the problem. The core challenge isn't technology—it's economics. Western Union's margins weren't exploitative greed; they reflected the brutal reality of cash distribution networks, compliance infrastructure, and dual-country regulatory overhead. Palla Financial
How Telo Trucks avoided the failure pattern that killed 60+ automotive startups in the last 40 years | Jason Marks
Telo Trucks is reimagining the American pickup for dense urban environments. With over 13,000 reservations and plans to deliver their first vehicles in 2026, Telo is tackling one of the hardest challenges in business: starting an automotive company. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Jason Marks, CEO & Founder of Telo Trucks, to learn about the company's journey from building ele
How Lula pivoted from B2C to B2B after discovering landlords were 80%+ of users | Bo Lais
Lula rebuilt property maintenance from the ground up by solving a fundamental problem: property managers spend 40% of their time coordinating maintenance with zero visibility into work order status. After pivoting from a B2C app when they discovered landlords were their actual users, Bo Lais and his team made a critical insight—deep PMS integration wasn't a feature, it was the entire go-to-market
How CoreStory seeded "Spec-Driven Development" across the market without analyst relations | Anand Kulkarni
CoreStory is building code intelligence platforms that address the fundamental limitation of today's coding agents: their inability to navigate complex enterprise codebases. While foundation models excel at greenfield development, they fail at real-world engineering tasks in systems spanning millions of lines of code. CoreStory's context layer delivers a 44% improvement on SWE-bench, the industry'
How theion's CEO approaches pre-GTM deep tech strategy | Dr. Ulrich Ehmes"
theion is developing lithium-sulfur battery technology targeting 500 watt hours per kilogram in their first commercial product—nearly double today's lithium-ion cells at 270-300 Wh/kg—with an ultimate roadmap to 1,000 Wh/kg. By replacing nickel-manganese-cobalt cathodes with crystalline sulfur and graphite anodes with lithium metal, theion aims to deliver three times the energy density at one-thir
How Positron AI is driving sales ahead of product | Mitesh Agrawal
Positron AI is a 2+ year old silicon company targeting decode-heavy AI inference workloads where memory bandwidth, not compute, is the bottleneck. Launching end of 2025/early 2026, their architecture delivers 2TB of on-chip memory capacity versus Nvidia Rubin's 0.4TB—enabling 3-5x better performance per dollar and per watt for reasoning models, code generation, and video generation. In this episod
How Qualytics Knew it had found product-market fit | Gorkem Sevinc
Qualytics is redefining enterprise data quality by positioning it as a collaborative business function rather than an isolated data engineering problem. Founded at the start of the pandemic by Gorkem Sevinc - a former CTO and CDO who spent years managing reactive data quality firefights - Qualytics emerged from a clear practitioner pain point: writing endless custom rules to catch data issues afte
Behind the Scenes: How This Healthcare Founder Prepared to Testify Before Congress | Brian Whorley
Brian Whorley, Founder and CEO of Paytient, is rebuilding healthcare's broken payment infrastructure. Paytient enables employers and insurers to front healthcare costs for members who repay over time, interest-free. The company now serves 6,000 employers and powers payment solutions for nearly half of America's 50 million Medicare seniors. In this episode of BUILDERS, Brian reveals his cou
How Trener Robotics partnered with 3 of the 5 largest robot OEMs | Asad Tirmizi
Trener Robotics is solving a fundamental problem in industrial automation: the 5 million robotic arms deployed globally operate without intelligence, relying on 60-year-old procedural programming methods. With $38 Million in total funding—including a just-closed $32 Million Series A—the company compressed an 18-month journey from pre-seed to Series A by focusing ruthlessly on CNC machine tending.
How Autonomize AI built credibility with healthcare buyers | Ganesh Padmanabhan
Autonomize AI is transforming healthcare infrastructure by eliminating administrative waste and reimagining how health enterprises operate. Covering 150 million of the 330 million lives in the United States and powering three of the five largest health enterprises, Autonomize AI has found traction by solving healthcare's hardest problems first. In this episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Ganesh
How Heka Global positioned web intelligence as a fourth fraud detection layer to avoid vendor comparison | Idan Bar Dov
Identity fraud spiked 148% in 2025 as AI democratized identity fabrication. Financial institutions now face a fundamental question: Are you dealing with a real human? Heka Global is addressing this with web intelligence—analyzing digital footprints like connected applications rather than traditional signals. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Idan Bar Dov, Co-Founder & CEO of Heka Gl
How AskElephant achieved 400% growth with zero marketing spend | Woody Klemetson
Woody Klemetson scaled sales from 100 people at Divi to 350 at Bill.com post-acquisition, then walked away to build something harder: infrastructure for hybrid AI-human revenue teams. At AskElephant, he's tackling the problem that every revenue leader faces but few can articulate—how to actually implement AI in revenue operations when your systems weren't built for it. With zero marketing spend, A
Why Portnox's CEO refuses to measure Net Promoter Score | Denny LeCompte
Portnox is an enterprise access control platform that eliminates passwords and enforces zero trust security. The company was bootstrapped for over a decade, plateauing at a few million in ARR before investors brought in Denny LeCompte as CEO four years ago. Since then, Portnox has grown 8x. But this episode isn't about that growth story. Denny, a former cognitive scientist and professor who taught
Why Civ Robotics trains construction engineers into sales reps instead of hiring salespeople | Tom Yeshurun
Civ Robotics is automating construction layout—the process of translating blueprints into physical markers on job sites—using autonomous ground robots instead of traditional surveying crews. Founded by civil engineer Tom Yeshurun after he spent $2 million on a four-person surveying team for a single project, Civ has scaled from initial concept to deploying robots across the United States, Australi
How Collate turned 12,000 open source users into an inbound sales engine | Suresh Srinivas
Collate is building a semantic intelligence platform that unifies fragmented metadata tooling across the modern data stack. With 12,000+ community members, 3,000+ open source deployments, and 400+ code contributors, the company has proven that open source can be a systematic GTM engine, not just a distribution tactic. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Suresh Srinivas, Co-Founder & C
How WindBorne Systems landed their first Air Force contract through Defense Innovation Unit | John Dean
WindBorne Systems is transforming global weather forecasting by deploying long-duration weather balloons that fly for weeks instead of hours. What began as a Stanford Student Space Initiative project has scaled to 100 balloons aloft simultaneously, targeting 500 by end of next year, with an end goal of 10,000 balloons monitoring Earth's atmosphere. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with John
How deskbird pivoted from near-bankruptcy to $10M+ ARR in the flexible workplace category | Ivan Cossu
Ivan Cossu is Co-Founder and CEO of deskbird, a flexible workplace management platform that's scaled past $10 million ARR. Founded in April 2020 during COVID's most uncertain period, deskbird survived a near-death pivot just months in and scaled across 10 international markets within six months—an unconventional path that challenged conventional wisdom about market domination strategies. Ivan shar
How Maxima moved upmarket from 10-person startups to 500-1,000 employee companies after early customer feedback | Yogi Goel (Maxima)
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