Forerunner

Our Founding @kirstenagreen speaking @DecagonAI today: "[in startup building] there's no playbook you can just follow. Commonalities exist, but execution is an art—you make some things up as you go, learn every lesson, experiment, & strike aggressively when an opening appears."

NEW: When it comes to customer service, founder Jesse Zhang knows your pain. "It's just a very frustrating experience," he says. As CEO of $4.5B @DecagonAI, Zhang (@thejessezhang) works with customers like Avis Budget Group, Duolingo and Fanatics to solve that problem with AI agents. But he's competing in a hotly-contested category with pedigreed unicorns like Sierra and Intercom, and new entrants seemingly every week. "If everyone's starting at the same line, it's just, 'how fast can you go?'" Zhang says. "You have to build a product where if someone's happy with you, the next person has to be 10x better to displace you." On The Upstarts Podcast, Zhang shares how Decagon sees rapid iteration as a weapon, not a moat; how he plans to fend off big AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic; and how a new AI concierge can go beyond simply triaging customer problems. Plus, he shares his Upstart Moment: winning an uphill sales battle with a full-court press that turned a tree of “red dots” into green buyers. Catch the full episode, presented by @mercury 👇 youtube.com/watch?v=QLyp0g…:

This is what Forerunner is built for: bringing together builders who are all in on building a future worth having, and giving them the room to grow alongside each other.

This year, we went deep on: • The Chief Storyteller: How founders can sharpen their narrative as an edge • The Hard Calls: How real judgment gets formed, often without perfect data or a safety net • Creating a Culture of Curiosity in the Age of AI: leading with adaptability as the landscape shifts.

Consistently two of our favorite days of the year. Our 2026 Founders Summit was something special:

We're backing @depthfirstlabs in their $80M series B, announced today. depthfirst is building the essential layer for trust and safety in this technology shift, founded by a crew of former Faire, DeepMind, and Databricks leaders: depthfirst.com/post/series-b-…

Legendary consumer investor @kirstenagreen @ForerunnerVC dropped some knowledge that the idea is not enough - you need GTM insights, recruiting ability, and a the whole interplay to be a stellar founder!

"'We know exactly what we can do,' says @eurie_kim, a board director. 'We could manufacture 10,000 Abis, and we’d be able to deploy them.'” We're proud to back Andromeda, the makers of Abi, the first emotionally intelligent robot for elder care. upstartsmedia.com/p/abi-robot-fo…

Beautiful day for a @ForerunnerVC Founders Summit ☀️

We just closed a $75M Series B. 50x volume growth since launch. ~55 people. NYC. We're hiring engineers: → Frontend: Own the entire client experience. React Native, real-time data, the kind of UI problems you only get when milliseconds matter and real money is on the line. → Backend: Distributed systems, Rust, low-latency event-driven architecture. You're scaling the matching and pricing infrastructure for a real-time financial exchange, not just another CRUD app. Small eng team. You will build systems to support millions of traders and billions of trading volume. Reach out to jobs@novig.com.

There's a new playbook in vertical AI: building one compounding engine with two interfaces. In prior cycles, B2C and B2B evolved in distinct waves. Google and Amazon first built massive consumer audiences. Then, over years (decades), they exposed capabilities as infrastructure to the market. AWS didn't follow S3...it took time. The cycles were long and sequential. What we're seeing now is a compression of that happening in real time. Consumer and infrastructure aren't sequential anymore. They're simultaneous. The arc looks something like: • Launch as a consumer-facing assistant or tool • Build differentiated intelligence or interaction layer • Realize the leverage in embedding that layer elsewhere • Expose APIs / SDKs / agent capabilities as a natural extension of what the consumer surface already built • Evolve into both product and infrastructure My working hypothesis: Consumer builds... • Data • UX iteration • Brand • Real-world feedback loops Infrastructure builds.... • Revenue durability • Distribution hedge • Strategic leverage • Added valuation multiple In other words, consumer AI may increasingly function as the front-end acquisition, while infrastructure becomes an economic moat. They're not two separate businesses — they're one compounding engine. We’re seeing early versions of this pattern: @mindtripai — an AI travel planner now building an agent-first layer that can be embedded via API or integrated agent-to-agent. The consumer product builds the travel identity graph; the infrastructure ambition is to own the decision layer. @shopondaydream — a consumer visual shopping experience now powering visual search and recommendations directly on brand websites, decoupling the intelligence layer from the consumer UI. @duckbillai — a human concierge now introducing MCP to bring human-in-the-oop trust into broader agent ecosystems. @tryheroapp — a proactive daily assistant now extending AI Autocomplete as enterprise infrastructure embedded in third-party text boxes. The same predictive intelligence powers both surfaces. These companies aren’t just adding enterprise as a monetization path, but aiming to become vertical control planes — the intelligence layer others depend on — especially in a world where distribution may concentrate around a few dominant AI interfaces. If OpenAI wins distribution, you want to be the vertical brain it calls. If distribution fragments, you want to own the daily habit directly. Not all vertical AI → infra expansions are equal. The real question: is there a single intelligence core compounding across surfaces — or simply two adjacent products under one roof? The latter is just operational complexity, but the former is a control plane.

Better healthcare. All 50 states. @TealHealth is pioneering at-home cervical screening for all women, providing an easier, more comfortable, and convenient option than the current standard. That means better adherence and better health for all. forbes.com/sites/brucelee…

After leading @koahlabs' seed round last year, we've reinvested in the team's $20.5M series A as this team scales the essential monetization layer for the consumer AI wave. This team is relentless and entirely customer-obsessed: koahlabs.com/blog/theory-ve…

There is no consumer AI wave without new monetization channels for consumer AI businesses. @koahlabs is AdSense for AI. In 13 months, they've processed 170M queries and 35M native ad impressions. @nicoleahjohnson led the seed last year and we've now invested again at the A ⚡️

AI apps are leaving billions on the table because there's no good way to monetize them. We're fixing that. $20.5M Series A funding led by @Theoryvc With participation from @ForerunnerVC, @southpkcommons, @AndrewKaram

For more on our investment last year: forerunnerventures.com/perspectives/i…

Congrats to @Novig ⚡️⚡️⚡️ Novig stands out as the first peer-to-peer approach to prediction markets, a more transparent, dynamic, and equitable offering. The traction speaks for itself! fortune.com/2026/02/18/spo…

High end, bespoke match making services are $$$ and prime for AI. Finding love/connection = a category consumers are willing to spend against. @ForerunnerVC led the $10M seed for Known, launching today! @Celesteamadon is a force ⚡️ fastcompany.com/91484596/every…

we've been paying humans to make phone calls nobody wants to make since before @AlexanderTw33ts discovered the concept of labor 344,799 calls. some legal. most ethical. a few that keep me up at night. MCP drops tomorrow. my lawyers are very tired. whattheduck.ai

Loved working with @benln and @nextplayso on this post about the career-making consumer AI startups that are hiring now. Hard to pick just 50! open.substack.com/pub/nextplayso…