From retreat to reality

Stanford PhD, previously at Coverity (acquired for $350M)

Andy arrived at Inception with ideas he'd been brewing for years. Three days later he had a team, a working demo, a pitch deck, and investor interest. Two team members from that retreat are still with the company today. He used the same demo from Inception for five months straight — in every investor pitch and recruiting conversation. Two weeks after the retreat kicked everything off, Ventrilo closed its seed round.

Raised $10M seed from a16z, Bloomberg Beta, Conviction

Co-founder of Autograph (unicorn), proven operator

Inception provided the perfect incubator to launch Coframe. The community, mentorship, and investor access were invaluable from day one.

Raised $9M from Khosla Ventures

Chemical engineering at UVA, finance at Columbia. Led innovation at GoogleX. Leads Rinnce (Responsible Innovation Center).

Asmau spent a weekend at an Inception retreat surrounded by ambitious young builders. The experience reinforced her belief that investing in founders is the highest-leverage bet you can make — the same lesson her grandfather taught when he prioritized education against all odds in 1950s Nigeria.

Founded Rinnce (Responsible Innovation Center)

Building the memory layer for AI agents

The team joined Inception Cohort 9 in March 2024 and accelerated from idea to product market fit. They refined their pitch and rebranded from Embedchain to Mem0.

YC acceptance, $20M Series A, 40K+ GitHub stars

Former VP of Product (Platform) at Twitter. CEO & co-founder of GfyCat (acquired). MIT alum.

Richard came to Inception Cohort 2 thinking about building an AI executive assistant. The retreat validated the idea — people kept saying they'd be the first customer. He later reconnected with a longtime contact from MIT (former CTO of Giphy) and brought him into the Inception community. They did a demo day together and launched the company.

Raised pre-seed, covered by The Information

Both grew up in manufacturing towns. Share a passion for speed — on mountains and racetracks. Engineering team from Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, NASA, Nvidia, and Amazon.

AJ and Leonie went through an Inception retreat together and connected over a shared vision: bringing AI to the manufacturing floor. They saw firsthand how factories still ran on human intuition and manual processes. At Inception they turned that insight into a company — building AI agents and mathematical optimization to automate order adjustments and supplier management.

$5M seed led by General Catalyst, with Neo, Sheryl Sandberg's Fund, Jeff Wilke, Claire Hughes Johnson

Co-founded PamaStay with Aaron T. to tackle financial risk and compliance in healthcare.

Through the Inception Studio retreat, Ashwini found the mentorship and community she needed to sharpen PamaStay's vision — a financial risk and compliance control center for healthcare providers. The support from the Inception family helped the team build out claim denial remediation, compliance management, HCC coding insights, and contract-driven analytics.

Accepted into StartX Fall 2025 cohort (2,500+ Stanford founders, 18+ unicorns)

Ex-Google engineer and Area120 CTO. Co-founded Lightning Rod Labs with Danny Franklin to train AI that predicts the future from unstructured data.

Ben brought Lightning Rod Labs to the Inception Studio Buildathon at HumanX — and was a top 3 team. The team's proprietary framework trains models to make accurate predictions using self-play on real-world outcomes, without curated labels or human input. Inception helped sharpen the vision for turning messy, unstructured data into reliable forecasts.

$700K+ revenue, awarded DoD Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace status, defense and intelligence customers

Raj brings deep IT consulting and project leadership across healthcare and tech startups. Deepak is a UC Berkeley alum with enterprise compliance expertise.

Raj represented Trenta at the Inception Studio founder retreat with Cohort 17. The sharp feedback and genuine camaraderie helped the team refine their vision for AI-powered audit intelligence — automating compliance across HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO frameworks so audit professionals can focus on delivering real value instead of manual busywork.

Customers include top audit firms like Frank Rimerman and RubinBrown LLP. Presented at SF ISACA on agentic AI for audit efficiency.

Dropout turned founder. Traveled 20 countries after COVID collapsed his first homestay business. Backed by Keisuke Honda (Japanese soccer legend) through X&KSK ventures.

Hidetaka brought Homii to the Inception Studio AI Hackathon at the IVS conference — and won first prize with unanimous judge recognition. But it was the direct feedback from judge Tiffine Wang that left the deepest mark, pushing him to examine the core value of both himself and Homii. After a period of recharging, he hit reboot with a bigger vision: an AI-powered platform connecting travelers to authentic local experiences, far beyond homestay matching and far beyond Japan.

Won 1st place at Inception Studio AI Hackathon at IVS. Backed by Keisuke Honda's X&KSK. Expanding globally.

UChicago Booth MBA, UC Berkeley AI executive program. Deep expertise in go-to-market strategy, revenue architecture, and predictive marketing.

Catherine joined Inception Studio's Cohort 18 while building Propensity AI. Surrounded by incredible builders, she found the peer support and mentorship that made the difference in her founder journey — turning frameworks around data-driven GTM execution and agent AI into a real company.

Building Propensity AI with a growing team. Also accepted into AWS/Techstars Impact Bootcamp.

Built GuestOS originally to improve processes and revenue at her family's hotel. Turned that firsthand hospitality experience into an AI platform for the entire travel industry.

Jessie presented GuestOS at Inception Studio's Demo Day — one year later, the platform serves thousands of users across travel and hospitality. When the LA wildfires hit and public systems failed, GuestOS stepped in to deliver critical information. She even presented the platform to Cambodia's Prime Minister, showing its potential for systemic change.

Thousands of users across travel and hospitality. Recognized by State of California during Palisades fires. Presented to Cambodia's Prime Minister.

Co-founder & CEO of Glasp, a social web highlighter used by hundreds of thousands of knowledge workers. Building "Digital Me" — AI-powered digital clones trained on your highlights.

Kazuki joined an Inception retreat and found the community and mentorship to sharpen Glasp's vision. Surrounded by ambitious builders, he refined his pitch and deepened his conviction that everyone's learning and insights should be accessible — not just to themselves, but to future generations.

Hundreds of thousands of users. Building Digital Me, an AI clone trained on your highlights.

Building AI-powered product discovery for e-commerce.

After three days of nonstop building and refining pitches late into the morning hours, ConvoSearch was selected as one of 8 teams to pitch on Demo Day before 100+ investors. Unfiltered mentor feedback validated strong market interest.

Pitched at Demo Day before 100+ investors and founders

GTM-oriented co-founder of Brixo. Previously led marketing at HG Insights ($60M ARR) and was an early hire at Intricately (acquired). Serial startup operator across Datanyze (acquired by ZoomInfo) and others.

Matt and his co-founders are building Brixo to turn AI product telemetry into business-ready insights — helping teams spot upsell and churn signals, measure resolution rates, and understand user intent at scale. At the Inception retreat, Matt dove in headfirst — 3 days, no sleep, 8 pitch practice sessions. He pushed to the mental edge alongside other talented founders, making quick critical decisions between sessions. The experience culminated in a Demo Day pitch that helped kick off their fundraising efforts.

Four enterprise design partners on production data. Fundraising to scale team and customer base.

Principal-level engineering leader across multiple tech companies from startup to IPO. Employee #8 at a YC-backed company valued at over $3B. Building trust infrastructure for professional identity.

Matt joined Inception Studio's Cohort 22 for a 72-hour hackathon at a Napa winery. Protobloc is building the trust infrastructure layer for professional identity — letting people prove claims about their work history through verified credentials. The no-distractions format and iterative feedback from experienced advisors helped the team make more progress on their pitch in a few days than they had in months. By the end, the transformation across all four cohort companies was incredible.

Raising $2.5M. Building the "Stripe for professional identity" in a $33B+ market.