👋 I’m Justin. I run The SF Grind, The LA Grind, host the Ambition Podcast, 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! I’m in the middle of Ambition Summit planning, which I can’t wait to make happen in exactly a month from today! Also, I just published episode #6 of the Ambition Podcast, on Sam Zemurray, America’s banana king, and I hope you check it out.
Let’s get to it.
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🌁 Upcoming Event We’re Hosting 🌁
🗓️ August 28: The SF Grind: SF Startup Community Coffee Meetup. Financial District. 9 - 10 am.
🗓️ September 24: Ambition Summit. Los Angeles.
👋 This Week in SF 👋
🗓️ August 24: vLLM x NVIDIA Dynamo Meetup. Union Square. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ August 24: Pebblebed's Builders Late Night Café. Mission District. 7:30 pm - 12 am.
🗓️ August 25: Mistral Meetup with SGLang. Chinatown. 5:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ August 25: Physical AI: What's Working (and What Still Breaks). Financial District. 5:30 - 8 pm.
🗓️ August 25: Embodied AI Night: Founders, Builders, and Researchers. South Beach. 6 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ August 26: Demo to Deal. Mid-Market. 1:30 - 2:30 pm.
🗓️ August 26: AI Infra Kebab. Union Square. 5 - 8 pm.
🗓️ August 26: Decagon x Centralize: GTM Summer Mixer. Union Square. 5 - 7 pm.
🗓️ August 26: AI, X-rays, and Manufacturing: Lumafield SF Open House and Live Go/No-Go Recording. South Beach. 5 - 7:30 pm.
🗓️ August 26: Durable AI: Agent Context is Everything. Financial District. 5:30 - 8 pm.
🗓️ August 26: The Vault: GP & LP Gathering. Mid-Market. 6 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ August 27: Step SF 2026: The AI & Tech Startup Festival. Dogpatch. 9 am - 8 pm.
🗓️ August 27: VC/LP Fundraising Kickoff Night. Presidio. 6 - 9 pm.
🗓️ August 27: From the Frontlines: Technical Talks with FDE Leaders | by Factory, Reducto, & Exa. Union Square. 6:30 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ August 28: Open Source AI Summit SF. Presidio. 3 - 8 pm.
🗓️ August 28: August Tech Rooftop Mixer. South Beach. 6 - 9 pm.
👀 Events Coming Soon 👀
🗓️ September 1: Agentic + AI Night: Multi-Agent Governance and Security. SoMa. 3:30 - 9 pm.
🗓️ September 5: Spatial Intelligence + Generative 3D Hackathon with Mint, Tripo, World Labs, Convex and Founders Inc. Marina District. 10 am - 8 pm.
🗓️ September 5: AI for the Rest of Us: A workshop for people who feel left behind by AI. Mid-Market. 2 - 5 pm.
🗓️ September 10: Llama Lounge 26: The AI Startup Event Series @ Microsoft. Mountain View. 5 - 8:30 pm.
🗓️ September 12: Open Model Hack - Gradient x Google Deepmind. Embarcadero. 9:30 am - 7:30 pm.
Reply to this email to submit an event for consideration in the next edition.
What happens when you put 150 ambitious founders, investors, and operators in one room for a full day?
We're about to find out.
On September 24th, Ambition 2026 takes over a private venue in Santa Monica. One day, one room, no filler panels.
This isn't a massive conference you wander through with a lanyard. It's curated, it's capped at 150, and attendees have already signed up from across the US and as far as Australia.
VIP tickets include an intimate dinner the night before with some of the speakers and as many great people as I can talk into showing up.
Top 5 SF Startup Jobs
Staff Software Engineer, Product Innovation @ LineLeap
MTS - Founding Designer @ Aside
Implementation Specialist @ Artos
Software engineer, Fullstack @ Aviator
👋 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 4,000+ subscribers of this newsletter.
The Ambition Podcast is a show about the world's most ambitious people from history, and the lessons you can take from their lives and use in your own work and life.
Each episode is deeply researched, built around the definitive biography of one person (or in some cases, two), with dozens of hours spent reading, synthesizing, and pulling out what actually matters.
First episodes of Ambition:
Available now on all podcasting platforms including: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, YouTube and more.
idler, a frontier data research lab and artificial intelligence evaluation platform, raised a $9M round led by Paradigm.
Thunder Compute, a GPU virtualization and cloud infrastructure platform provider, raised a $13M Series A led by Matrix Partners.
bitdrift, a provider of a mobile observability platform, raised a $15M round backed by Amplify Partners, 01 Advisors and more.
MaxQ Medical, a provider of an transurethral imaging and therapy platform for prostate care, raised a $31.5M Series A led by Atlantic Blue Ventures, S3 Ventures, and Olympus Innovation Ventures.
Serif Health, a provider of a healthcare price data and intelligence platform, received an undisclosed amount as investment from SEVA Growth LP.
Rundoo, a provider of an AI-first system of record platform for independent supply stores, raised a $30M Series B led by Battery Ventures.
ALSO, a technology company building small electric vehicles, raised a $150M Series D led by Prysm Capita.
Rillet, a provider of an AI-native ERP platform for finance teams, raised a $100M Series C led by ICONIQ.
Space, a provider of an AI-native distributed filesystem, raised a $2.4M Pre-Seed round led by a16z Speedrun.
Vals AI, a provider of an artificial intelligence evaluation and model auditing platform, raised a $40M Series A led by a16z (Andreessen Horowitz).
Groq, a provider of an AI infrastructure platform, raised a $350M Series A led by Disruptive.
Palona AI, a provider of a multimodal AI operating layer for physical businesses, closed an undisclosed amount for its Series A backed by Ardenwood Ventures, CrimsonOx and more.
Trajectory, a provider of an AI infrastructure and agent optimization platform, raised a $40M Series A led by Sequoia Capital.
Xpander, a provider of a vendor-neutral, all-in-one AI enablement platform, raised a $7.5M Seed round led by Pico Venture Partners.
Wispr, a provider of an AI voice dictation and human-AI interaction platform, raised a $280M Series B led by Menlo Ventures.
Higgsfield, a provider of an AI video and image creation platform for professional creators, brands, agencies, and studios, raised a $400M Series B led by DST Global.
Lemma, an AI agent observability and automated telemetry platform, raised a $2.3M Pre-Seed round backed by Matrix Partners, Y Combinator, and more.
Lucrative AI Inc., a provider of an MCP-native B2B revenue engine and sales automation platform, received a $500k investment from Mountainise Inc.
Featured Location
Barcha. A stylish Mediterranean restaurant in Financial District, known for its colorful interiors, lively atmosphere, and modern Middle Eastern-inspired cuisine.
Fun Events
See you next week,
Justin