ZipRecruiter

HydraDB is building the graph-native context and memory infrastructure for AI. AI is stateless — HydraDB fixes that with graphs: instead of similarity search over a vector store, it builds structured context graphs of entities, relationships, temporal states, and causal chains, returning relevance instead of similarity. The product is a GraphDB built on object storage with a tiered architecture (in-memory cache → NVMe → object storage), git-style temporal versioning, and entity resolution — roughly 10x cheaper and purpose-built for modern AI workloads. Born out of research at Stanford, HydraDB has raised $6.5M from investors including Jeff Dean, Sky9 Capital, and researchers from OpenAI and DeepMind. Over 2,000 developers build on it today, with 1B+ documents ingested.

SCAILE is an AI visibility company building infrastructure to make brands visible in AI search, with a mission to make every brand the answer in AI search. It aims for brands to be discovered, cited, and recommended by AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, and is live with clients including Beurer, Building Radar, and Lyceum Technologies. The company counts Google Cloud for Startups and NCA among its backers and is trusted by 40+ companies across 14+ industries. The founder-led team, based in Munich and Hamburg, includes co-founders Simon Wilhelm (CEO), August Gutsche (CPO), and Anton Billstein, with backgrounds at BCG and La Famiglia VC. SCAILE is supported by programs such as IFB Innovationsstarter, Microsoft Founders Hub, Notion Startups, and TUM Venture Labs / TUM.ai, and has a team size of approximately 8-12 people.

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.