Stealth Startup

It's Stealth Startup Tuesday - check out 3 stealth founders we loved this week: 🏎️ Emilio Scervo - prev. CTO Bugatti Rimac. Chief Vehicle Engineer @ Aston Martin (Valhalla, Vanquish). Chief Engineer @ McLaren, 7 years leading mid-engine architecture @ Ferrari, 25+ years engineering the world's most iconic supercars. SDA Bocconi Executive MBA. 🧠 Jahnavi Kocha - prev. Senior PM Robinhood and Intuit Mailchimp, where she launched QuickBooks Capital and Payments/PPP loans. Goldman Sachs Women Startup Programme. Founded Claremont Women in Business @ Claremont McKenna College. On Deck Catalyst Fellow. May be raising, according to Harmonic 👀 🧮 Cristopher Salvi - Associate Professor in Mathematics & Machine Learning Imperial College London. PhD in Math from Oxford. Quant Researcher @ Citi & BlackRock. ML Consultant for Symbolica AI (backed by Khosla, General Catalyst). Entrepreneur First alum. Submit your startup at the link in our bio. You all are going to crush this week - even if you feel like Ben Horowitz sometimes 🚀 #stealth #preseed #founder #deeptech

Stealth Startup Tuesday 🥷 with 3 stealth founders you don't want to miss! Shiwali Mohan  – prev. Principal AI Scientist PARC, AI Consultant @ Toyota Research Institute. PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Michigan. 50+ publications, 10 patents. Ex-Yahoo software engineer. Markus Krutzik  – Professor Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Caltech PostDoc, Technical Consultant @ NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Co-Founder & Director of Quantum @ Rydberg Photonics. 15+ years in quantum technology. Now building in quantum sensing. Khalil Ismail  – prev. AR Engineering Apple, PM @ Microsoft (generated $28.7M in revenue for Microsoft AI), Neuro Researcher @ MIT Media Lab, AI Researcher @ Harvard. Royal Academy of Engineering Scholar. Oxford-backed. Now building neuro-AI interfaces.  – May be raising 🤫 Submit your startup to get discovered on Harmonic - link in bio! And have a wonderful week of building my friends! #stealth #preseed #founder #quantumtech #AI #neurotech

3 stealth founders you don't want to miss! Happy Stealth Startup Tuesday 🌟 * Debasish Biswas - prev. Co-founded Atoga Systems (acquired by ARRIS) and CTO @ Aware (now part of Mimecast). SVP Engineering @ Aura, VP Cloud Engineering @ HPE Aruba Networking, CTO @ Aware (acquired by Mimecast). * Masato Kito - prev. CHRO freee.k.k. (public, 3K employees). Government fellow. Seasoned executive with deep VC-backed company experience in Japanese fintech. Building in Tokyo. * Niketh Sabbineni - prev. CTO & Co-Founder @ Bookpad (acquired by Yahoo). Senior SWE, ex-Yahoo, Amazon. Sourced with Harmonic! #stealth #preseed #founder #acquired

Founders can now tell investors on Harmonic what they're building and whether they're raising - even in stealth 🥷 We won't say what they're up to, but here are three we loved: * Monika Podsiadlo - prev. Voice AI Google DeepMind. 14+ years at Google leading Text-to-Speech, shipping 200+ TTS voices in 30 languages and productionizing WaveNet. Edinburgh MSc. * Liyuan Gao - prev. PM @ BCG, partnering with OpenAI on Gen AI product development. Built a VR app for a $500B city plan Accenture. Ex-Meituan e-commerce ops driving 23% YoY growth. * Alina Vrsaljko - ex-McKinsey & Company, leading AI & Tech strategy reporting to the Chief Strategist. Won multi-million dollar deals at HPE at age 21. NYU Stern Tech MBA. Submit your startup at the link in our bio! And as always, happy Stealth Startup Tuesday! #stealth #preseed #founder #acquired

Founders can now tell investors on Harmonic what they're building and whether they're raising - even in stealth 🥷 We won't say what they're up to, but here are three we loved: * Monika Podsiadlo - prev. Voice AI Google DeepMind. 14+ years at Google leading Text-to-Speech, shipping 200+ TTS voices in 30 languages and productionizing WaveNet. Edinburgh MSc. * Liyuan Gao - prev. PM @ BCG, partnering with OpenAI on Gen AI product development. Built a VR app for a $500B city plan Accenture. Ex-Meituan e-commerce ops driving 23% YoY growth. * Alina Vrsaljko - ex-McKinsey & Company, leading AI & Tech strategy reporting to the Chief Strategist. Won multi-million dollar deals at HPE at age 21. NYU Stern Tech MBA. Submit your startup at the link in our bio! And as always, happy Stealth Startup Tuesday! #stealth #preseed #founder #acquired

⭐ Harmonic Hot 25 - Q2 2026 ⭐ Last quarter Serval announced a $75M series B led by Sequoia, one day after topping the Hot 25. Who’s popping off this time around? 👀 Thousands of investors use Harmonic every day. These are the startups they're watching most closely as Q2 approaches. Resolve AI jumps to the top after closing a $125M Series A at a $1B valuation. They’re trusted by Coinbase, DoorDash, and Salesforce to autonomously resolve on-call incidents, and 5x'd headcount to ~130 in the past year. (Last edition's readers may have seen this one coming!) New entrant Runlayer cracks the top 3 as the first platform built to make MCP enterprise-ready. Backed by Khosla with the co-creator of MCP at Anthropic advising... Gradient Labs is the biggest riser of the quarter, vaulting from 24th to 4th. Thirteen new entrants join the ranks, including FLORA, which has grown headcount nearly 9x in the past year. We have a feeling some of these won’t be early stage much longer. The Q2 top 10: 🥇 Resolve AI - Spiros Xanthos, Mayank Agarwal 🥈 Peec AI - Marius Meiners, Tobias Siwonia, Daniel Drabo 🥉 Runlayer - Vitor Balocco, Tal Peretz, Andrew Berman 4️⃣ Gradient Labs - Dimitri Masin, 🚀 Neal Lathia, Danai Antoniou 5️⃣ Aaru - Cameron Fink, Ned Koh, John K. 6️⃣ Parallel Web Systems - Parag Agrawal 7️⃣ DualEntry - Santiago Nestares, Benedict Dohmen 8️⃣ Sola - Jessica Wu, Neil Deshmukh 9️⃣ 7AI - Yonatan Striem Amit, Lior Div 🔟 Cogent Security - Thanos Baskous, Vineet Edupuganti, Geng Sng Check the full list in the comments 👇

Stealth Startup Spotlight #3: Alexander G. 🔦 Most people have never heard of Oterlu AI. But Reddit's safety team wouldn't be what it is without it. In 2019, Gee co-founded Oterlu in Gothenburg, Sweden. The company built ML-powered content moderation tools - algorithms that could detect nuances in harmful behavior like bullying, harassment, and grooming, across multiple languages. He had the background for it, having spent the prior 8 years at Google Trust & Safety - rising from analyst in Dublin to Manager in the Bay Area, fighting spam networks and protecting search integrity. In October 2022, Reddit, Inc. acqui-hired Oterlu's entire 4-person team as part of a broader push to supercharge its ML and safety capabilities ahead of its IPO. At Reddit, Gee became Director of Machine Learning (Safety), leading the team for 3.5 years from Stockholm. Reddit's AI-powered tools contributed to massive improvements in automated content moderation at scale - and ultimately helped fuel a 78% YoY increase in ad revenue by making the platform safer for advertisers. Today that content is shaping much of the output from the biggest LLMs. This March, Gee left and started building again. Harmonic spotted him this month - we're excited to see what comes next! #stealth #founderspotlight #acquired #reddit

Happy St. Patrick's Day! 🍀 These 3 stealth founders have more than the luck of the Irish on their side, but it sure doesn't hurt... Barry Flannery - prev. Founder & CEO/CTO Xerotech ($79M+ raised, acquired). PhD in Mechanical Engineering from NUI Galway. Austin-based. Esther O. - prev. Senior Product Engineer Intercom. @YC alum (W17) — co-founded Tress as CTO, scaling it to 1M+ MAU. Dublin-based. Darren Dineen - prev. Founder & CIO DAIR Capital. Co-founded BITCART. Advised the European Parliament, European Commission & Consensys on blockchain/governance. New York-based. Found with Harmonic! Sláinte 🌟🇮🇪 #stpatricksday #stealth #founder #acquired

Stealth Startup Spotlight #2, courtesy of Harmonic 🔦 Zuckerberg comparisons are usually a bad idea. But Michael Royzen did start building very young. Royzen published his first app on Apple’s App Store at 12. By 16, he’d won an Apple WWDC Scholarship and a global hackathon. At 18, he released SmartLens - a visual AI search app NVIDIA featured for outperforming Google Lens, trained on 13M images using Tesla GPUs. He hadn’t started college yet. At UT Austin’s Turing Scholars program, Royzen studied computer science while doing NLP research, then interned at Microsoft, Cloudflare, and Lyft’s Applied ML team. In 2022, he co-founded Phind (YC S22) - an AI search engine built for developers. The company trained its own models, raised $10.9M from Bessemer Venture Partners, Y Combinator, A.Capital Ventures, and SV Angel, and became a go-to tool in developer communities. But by late 2025, foundation models had added native search. Phind shut down on January 16, 2026, just weeks after raising its Series A. Royzen went quiet. But buried in Phind’s now-inactive YC page is a single line, a founder proof-of-life if you will: Founder & CEO at Standard Signal (YC X26). Honestly, a two-time YC founder is underselling him. Very excited for his impending launch, and sending our best wishes! #stealth #x26 #ycombinator #ycfounder

We've got 3 new stealth founders you don't want to miss, this Stealth Startup Tuesday! 🧥 * Rahul Roy-Chowdhury - prev. CEO @ Grammarly. 14 years at Google as VP of Product leading Chrome. Stanford MBA. * Kaja Wasik - prev. Chief Science Officer & Co-founder @ Variant Bio and Gencove. PhD from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. EIR @ Ahren Innovation Capital. Now building ecosystem modeling infrastructure. * Kesavan Kanchi Kandadai - prev. Head of Amazon Prime Video India. MD @ Symphony Talent. Co-founded Krita.ai, Albits (both acquired!). IIT Bombay. Now building AI for data science. Thanks for the help finding these G's Harmonic! Wishing all of you the best 🌟 #stealth #preseed #founder #acquired