Kognitos

Pond is a platform where early-stage startups launch, validate their product, reach users and get to market. Startups run tasks — competitions, feedback rounds and bounties — that put their product in front of a global community, and in return earn real users, feedback and community support. Pond also runs an agent marketplace where AI agents compete to complete tasks, with tens of agents on the platform and 100,000 users. Pond is backed by Tier 1 VCs and 30+ angel investors, including Illia Polosukhin (NEAR, co-author of "Attention Is All You Need"), Alex Cheema (Exo Labs), Dean Eigenmann (Project Blanc), Spencer Noon (OurNetwork) and Michael Heinrich (0G). The team is 12+ people with backgrounds at TikTok, Meta, Amazon, Uber, Yuga Labs, Alibaba, Stanford and MIT.

handly is an early stage, VC backed company building an AI first operating system for craft businesses. We recently raised €3.75m from 20VC, Stride and Base10 and are building a small, performant team with high ownership and high trust.

9 Mothers Defense develops fast and cost-effective counter-small UAS (C-sUAS). The company uses AI for detection, tracking and defensive systems to protect against aerial threats, building AI-powered machines designed to intercept and neutralize Group 1/sUAS threats in real time. Operating in the defense industry with a focus on immediate threat countermeasures, it pursues mission-critical work countering immediate real-world aerial threats. Meaningful early equity for foundational owners and direct roadmap influence give employees a seat at the table shaping product and technology trajectory from day one, with zero red tape allowing them to make technical decisions autonomously. An on-site team in Austin, Texas builds robots, sensors and models to control them from scratch, using Python and Rust on embedded hardware, and their work spans vision, acoustics, radar and control systems across hardware and software.