👋 I’m Justin. I run The SF Grind, The LA Grind, and scout for Headline. I live in LA but spend a lot of time in San Francisco meeting founders, hosting gatherings, and enjoying the wonderful city.
Happy Monday! We’ve got our first 4 speakers confirmed for Ambition: Mehul Nariyawala (Matic), Tyler Denk (beehiiv), Dee Murthy (Ghost), and Jessica Chang (Upwards). I’m very excited about how this 150-person summit is shaping up! Apply to join.
Founder Spotlight: I want to feature amazing SF-based founders in this newsletter. If you’d like to be featured in front of ~3,500 readers of The SF Grind, fill out this form.
Let’s get to it.
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🌁 Upcoming Event We’re Hosting 🌁
🗓️ June 19: SF Startup Community Coffee Meetup. Union Square. 9 - 11 am.
👋 This Week in SF 👋
🗓️ May 18: From Demo to Production: Building Reliable AI Agents | Hands-On Workshop. Mission Bay. 5 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ May 19: Find your Co-Founder! Mid-Market. 5 - 9:30 pm.
🗓️ May 19: WorkOS Applied AI Showcase. SoMa. 5:30 - 8 pm.
🗓️ May 19: Demo Day. Financial District. 6 - 8 pm.
🗓️ May 19: European founders dinner. Corona Heights. 7:30 - 11 pm.
🗓️ May 20: Delivering better healthcare experiences with Sierra. SoMa. 5:30 - 8 pm.
🗓️ May 20: Meet & Create: Optimize Your Workflow with an AI Teammate. Mid-Market. 6 - 8 pm.
🗓️ May 20: Women Who Build: San Francisco Craft Night hosted by Anything. Union Square. 6:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ May 20: Hiring Dinner: Building Teams in Hypergrowth. Union Square. 7 - 9 pm.
🗓️ May 21: Berkeley Robotics Community Showcase: Where Generations Meet. Berkeley. 1 - 4 pm.
🗓️ May 21: WorkOS MCP Night: Agent Mode. Nob Hill. 5:30 - 10 pm.
🗓️ May 21: CapCut x Design Buddies Design Hackathon powered by Design Studio. Mission District. 6 - 10 pm.
🗓️ May 21: MotherDuck + DuckDB May Meetup. Financial District. 6 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ May 24: Gen Z Marketers & Creators in the Park. Mission Dolores. 12 - 3 pm.
👀 Events Coming Soon 👀
🗓️ May 26: How to AI Pill Your Company. South Beach. 5 - 8 pm.
🗓️ May 27: HeyGen’s “Infinitely Me” Pop-Up. Fort Mason.
🗓️ May 27: Hardware Founder Dinner with Rho @ Antler VC. South Beach. 6:30 - 8:30 pm.m
🗓️ May 27: Comedy & Charisma Show. 5:30 - 8:30 pm.
Reply to this email to submit an event for consideration in the next edition
Top 5 SF Startup Jobs
Senior Software Engineer @ Turing Labs Inc.
Backend Engineer @ Pump.co
Founding Designer @ Sonia
Tech. Product Lead / EPM / Ex-Founder @ Careforce
Product Manager - AI @ Dynamo AI
👋 Hiring? Reply to this email to feature your job in this newsletter.
Other Opportunities
Know a founder or investor in SF who is raising capital or searching for a co-founder? Reply to this email with more details that I could share with the 3,000+ subscribers of this newsletter.
Origin Lab, a provider of a technology platform turning licensed game worlds into structured training data for world models and multimodal AI, raised a $8M Seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Outmarket AI, a provider of an AI platform purpose-built for insurance, raised a $17M Series A led by Permanent Capital Ventures.
Secludy, a privacy-tech startup serving banks, payments firms, and fintech companies, raised a $4M Seed round led by Impression Ventures.
Recursive Superintelligence, a developer of self-improving artificial intelligence software and autonomous training systems, raised a $650M round led by GV and Greycroft.
GridCARE, a power acceleration company for AI, raised a $64M Series A led by Sutter Hill Ventures and John Doerr.
Flick, a provider of an AI-native filmmaking platform, raised a $6M Seed round backed by True Ventures, Google Ventures, Y Combinator and more.
Nectar Social, a provider of an agentic social operating solution, raised a $30M Series A led by Menlo Ventures and its Anthology Fund.
Wirestock, a provider of a platform for creators, raised a $23M Series A led by Nava Ventures.
Graphon AI, a developer of a pre-model intelligence and relational representation layer for enterprise AI, raised a $8.3M Seed round led by Arvind Gupta of Novera Ventures.
Ranger AI, a developer of an agentic revenue operations platform for industrial tendering, raised a $8.4M Seed round led by Bonfire Ventures.
Synthetic, a developer of an autonomous AI bookkeeping service for software startups, raised $10M Seed round led by Khosla Ventures.
Ampa, a developer of a portable transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) platform for depression, raised a round of undisclosed amount led by Morningside Ventures, Trimera Capital and more.
Mind Robotics, an industrial robotics company, raised a $400M round led by Kleiner Perkins.
Judgment Labs, an infrastructure company that supports the production data workflow using improving agents, raised a $32M Seed round and Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Knit Health, a developer of clinical intelligence AI software for healthcare systems, raised a $11.6M Seed round co-led by Uncork Capital and Frist Cressey Ventures.
Vapi, Inc., a developer of an API-native enterprise voice AI platform, raised a $50M Series B led by Peak XV.
Ciridae, a company developing operating systems for real economy businesses, raised a $20M Seed round led by Accel.
Nova Intelligence, a provider of an AI platform for SAP, raised a $40M Seed round and Series A led by CEO Emma Qian, CTO Sam Yang and more.
Featured Location
Foreign Cinema. A romantic, candlelit Mission spot with outdoor movies, great cocktails, and effortlessly cool SF date-night energy.
Fun Events
See you next week,
Justin