Tracking
Companies I'm watching. For the illustrated version, see the map. Machine-readable at /tracking.json.
AI Infra
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Harvey San Francisco
Legal-vertical foundation model layer. The most convincing example of vertical AI beating horizontal AI on an industry with deep workflow moats.
Consumer AI
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Shizuku AI Tokyo
AI VTuber companions. Therapy-and-companionship is quietly the largest GenAI use case, and Shizuku is the native format for it — a16z-backed, $15M seed, built from Tokyo.
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Perplexity San Francisco
Answer engine that proved search is unbundling from Google. Distribution through taste — their product, positioning, and partnerships all read as deliberate.
Marketplace
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Mercor San Francisco met
Expert-in-the-loop data marketplace for frontier labs. Interned on the Strategic Projects team — saw firsthand how unit economics of expert work are being rewritten for the model era.
Japan
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Sakana AI Tokyo
David Ha and Llion Jones building nature-inspired foundation models from Tokyo. The closest thing Japan has to a frontier lab, and the most credible signal that great model research can happen outside SF.
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Preferred Networks Tokyo
Japan's quiet deep-learning giant — chips, robotics, industrial AI. Shows what a patient, industrial-first AI company looks like outside the SF hype cycle.
Dev Tools
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Cursor San Francisco
The OKC Thunder of AI startups — vertically integrated product, obsessive taste, and a team that compounds on itself. Feels like a generational company in the making.
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Linear San Francisco
The benchmark for SaaS craft. Proof that opinionated design taste compounds into pricing power; every next-gen dev-tools company references them.
Fintech
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Givefront San Francisco met
Modern banking infrastructure for nonprofits (YC W24). Previously ran product and sales here. The nonprofit financial stack is 20 years behind; Givefront is dragging it into the present.
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Ramp New York
Finance automation built around AI-native workflows from day one. The cleanest example of a pre-LLM fintech rebuilding itself on the new primitives without losing its operating discipline.