When I’m old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say ‘wow, that was an adventure,’ not ‘wow, I sure felt safe.
🤝 Good Morning and Welcome Back to Good People 🤝
A weekly newsletter for 36,500+ elite engineers, founders, and investors who think Zuckerberg is starting to look a little desperate.
Hey there 👋
I’m Ryan, Head of Marketing here at Coastal x Good People. I’ve got 20/200 spots left to be an early member of an exclusive talent network for elite engineers who are shaping the startup ecosystem.
📣 Private Slack
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There’s still time to secure your spot as an early member. If you’re interested: Schedule a 15-minute call with me here.
Talk soon,
Ryan
P.S. – If you know another engineer who'd be perfect for this, feel free to forward this their way. Good people know good people, after all.
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📆 This Week in the Newsletter 📆
🥳 Happy Friday! We’ve got 8 Hot Startups hiring, Tennr’s Series C, and an audit of automation and augmentation potential across the U.S. workforce.
💸 Notable Fundraise: Tennr raised $101 million in a Series C round led by IVP. The company’s mission - to automate and streamline the patient referral process; a notorious “black hole” in U.S. healthcare. They do this by using proprietary AI models to process and route referrals, whether they come in by fax, email, or e-portal. Read the announcement →
👨💻 Website Of The Week: Friends of Good People, LMArena (formerly Chatbot Arena) lets users submit prompts and see responses from two anonymous large language models (LLMs) side by side. You can test unreleased models, tweak architectures, and immediately see how changes affect public perception and ranking. See how top models stack up →
📖 What We’re Reading: “You may not take interest in AI, but AI will take interest in you.” That’s the ominous warning within a new paper published by Stanford’s SALT Lab. They surveyed 1,500 workers across 104 occupations and found that while many want AI to automate repetitive or stressful tasks, there’s a major mismatch between what workers want and where companies are investing. The Future of Work with AI Agents →
🎧 What We’re Watching: The story of a near-catastrophic cyberattack on the global internet, narrowly averted by the sharp eye of a single developer. A subtle but suspicious spike in CPU usage while running tests on a Linux system leads to the discovery of a hidden backdoor in the widely used open-source tool, XZ Utils. Watch How a Hacker Saved the Internet →
Remember to forward this email to any friends who you think have what it takes to work at a tier-1 VC Backed Startup.
👇 Alright on to the good stuff 👇
🔥 Hot Startups Hiring🔥
💼 Startup #1 💼
🏙️ Hiring Location: SF
🛠️ Industry: AI, SaaS
💸 Round/Funding: Seed, $5M
🏦 Investors: Foundation Capital, South Park Commons
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This startup is re-wiring the insurance-brokerage industry with AI agents that allow brokerages to grow revenue without growing headcount. Their mission is to eliminate grunt work and empower Account Managers to focus on what truly matters—serving clients and growing books of business.
🏗️ Product: This startup automates the most painful, manual workflows for insurance brokerages—giving account managers instant leverage.
Key product features:
AI-powered proposal generation
Automated policy checking
Coverage comparison in minutes
Cert automation and document parsing
Instead of spending hours copy/pasting and re-checking 100+ data points, account managers using this startup complete full workflows in 3–4 minutes. It’s not just time saved—it’s headcount avoided and revenue unlocked.
📣 Talking Points:
Breakneck Growth, Real Revenue: This startup grew from $100K to $1M+ ARR in a single quarter, with zero sales fluff. 25 brokerages already onboard—and each one saves thousands of hours and grows revenue without hiring more people.
Unsexy Industry. Unmatched Opportunity: Insurance brokerage is a $1T+ market running on spreadsheets and PDFs. This startup is the first to bring real automation into this space—solving problems that are painful, essential, and untouched by modern tech.
Small Team, Big Surface Area: Just 5 engineers owning end-to-end product in a deeply operational market. You won’t be optimizing buttons—you’ll be shipping workflows that directly power agencies insuring everything from warehouses to space stations.
🧑💻 Roles: Senior Full Stack
💸 Salary: $165k- $215k
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
🛠️ Startup #2 🛠️
🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC, SF
🛠️ Industry: AI, IT
💸 Round/Funding: Series A, $70M
🏦 Investors: 8VC, Angels, General Catalyst
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This startup is an Applied AI Lab building agents to transform the IT Services sector.
📣 Talking Points:
$70M+ raised in stealth, backed by General Catalyst, 8VC & top angels
Transforming IT services with AI agents — first acquisition pushes revenue to $50M+
Small, hands-on founding team (4 people), working mostly in-person from NYC or SF
🧑💻 Roles: Full Stack Engineer; AI Engineer; FDE
💸 Salary: $150k-250k
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
🛡️ Startup #3 🛡️
🏙️ Hiring Location: SF
🛠️ Industry: AI, Cybersecurity
💸 Round/Funding: Series A, $27m
🏦 Investors: First Round, Liquid2, Ribbit Capital, Y Combinator
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: Big tech and finance companies rely on armies of low-paid outsourced humans to protect their platforms from fraud, harassment, and crime. It’s super important work, but the jobs are difficult and sometimes traumatizing — and it’s impossible to keep up.
This startup builds AI agents that check for every bad thing you might worry about, plus the ones you don’t know about like new scams and sanctions.
These AI agents can replace Accenture and other BPOs for risk, compliance, and safety work. It’s not just about basic content moderation. It’s complex workflows too.
🏗️ Product: This startup builds AI agents for Risk and Compliance that do complex workflows like underwriting and investigations. Trusted by the world's largest marketplaces and payments companies.
📣 Talking Points:
$27M raised from Ribbit, First Round, Y Combinator, and Joe Montana's Liquid 2 Ventures
AI agents outperforming humans: 95% accuracy vs. 80%, trusted by Visa, Upwork, Substack, and more
20x YoY growth — engineering-led team, based in SF, fully onsite
🧑💻 Roles: Front End; AI Engineer; Senior Full Stack
💸 Salary: $170k-230k
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
🏋️♀️ Startup #4 🏋️♀️
🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC
🛠️ Industry: AI Models
💸 Round/Funding: Seed, $3.1M
🏦 Investors: 776 (Alexis Ohanian), Abstract, Gary Vaynerchuk, Inspired Capital
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: Our mission is to accelerate the development of autonomous AI agents.
We are the data engine behind the training of AI agents at top 5 AI labs.
To accomplish this, it needs to train its models to take action, not just chat. This requires new training infrastructure – simulation environments where agents can learn by doing.
🏗️ Product: A pretend app where AI can practice doing tasks (making a spreadsheet) so it can learn and get better over time. This startup built a platform for training gyms – the labs use 100s of these gyms to train their agents.
📣 Talking Points:
Training gyms for AI agents — simulation infrastructure that helps frontier models actually learn by doing
Contracts at top 5 AI labs — huge early traction in a massive emerging category
Founding engineer opportunity — full ownership, direct access to the founder, and a chance to shape the future of autonomous AI from Day 1
🧑💻 Roles: Backend & Infra Engineers
💸 Salary: $150k-$275k
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
🎥 Startup #5 🎥
🏙️ Hiring Location: SF
🛠️ Industry: AI, Media
💸 Round/Funding: Series A, $40M
🏦 Investors: Abstract, Amazon Alex Fund, Index, a16z
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This Startup is building the AI-native platform for generative media, powered by their proprietary foundation model. It’s the first omnimodal model in production and enables the creation of high-quality character performances in any style or use case.
🏗️ Product: First omnimodal model in production, allowing users to generate engaging character performances from just an image and audio. It’s the only model that works across any framing (full body, side profile, close-up, etc) or character type (realistic, animated, animals, etc)
This startup has a creation platform that unifies the creation experience. Besides Character-3, users can access other leading image, video, and audio models.
📣 Talking Points:
This startup’s building the first omnimodal AI model: it creates high-quality character performances from just an image and audio. Works across any style: realistic, animated, animals, whatever.
Raised $40M+ - Small, elite team, including top engineers and researchers. Hiring fast.
With offices in SF and NYC, and a flexible but on-site culture, this startup offers an opportunity to build at the frontier of AI-native media. This startup gives users access to best-in-class models—creating a unified, pro-grade platform for generative video and audio.
🧑💻 Roles: Staff Level Platform, Staff Level Backend, Staff level Fullstack
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
🏥 Startup #6 🏥
🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC
🛠️ Industry: AI, Healthcare
💸 Round/Funding: Series A, $32M
🏦 Investors: Accel, Bain Capital
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This startup streamlines the initial steps of patient care, from confirming insurance coverage to verifying benefits and securing treatment approvals.
🏗️ Product: A singular portal to interface with every health insurance company in America in a streamlined and automated fashion, consolidating a fragment and broken process
📣 Talking Points:
Platform uses GenAI to parse clinical documentation and automatically out insurance forms for prior auth
Strong commercial momentum; 40% MoM growth + nation-wide healthcare customers
Strong founding team (ex-Ramp) backed by T1 Investors
🧑💻 Roles: Back End; Full Stack Engineer
💸 Salary: $150k-$220K+
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
🚙 Startup #7 🚙
🏙️ Hiring Location: SF
🛠️ Industry: AI, Automotive
💸 Round/Funding: Seed, $17M
🏦 Investors: Breakpoint Capital, Explorer Fund, Flex Capital, Unpopular Ventures, YC, a16z
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This startup’s mission is to modernize how automotive dealerships handle communication by deploying intelligent AI agents that function as reliable, first-line team members.
The long-term vision is to build a fully autonomous AI teammate capable of managing all dealership communication and back-office tasks — from handling phone calls to executing service requests — allowing human staff to focus on high-value customer interactions like relationship building and closing sales.
🏗️ Product: This startup provides customizable AI agents for automotive dealerships that:
Answer 100% of inbound calls
Handle a wide range of service and sales requests autonomously
Are tailored to each dealership’s brand, tone, and workflows
Use multi-model LLM orchestration, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Groq, and in-house models
Support natural conversation, with edge-case training and environmental awareness
Integrate with internal systems like DMS, CRM, service scheduler, and external sources like NHTSA and Black Book
This startup’s voice AI platform was built entirely in-house.
📣 Talking Points:
AI voice agents for dealerships, already handling 1M+ call minutes since launch.
Backed by a16z, YC, and CarDealershipGuy and have clear PMF — with some dealerships seeing millions in recovered revenue and >50% of tasks fully handled by AI.
10-person team in SF early-stage, huge ownership, deep technical surface.
🧑💻 Roles: Senior Product Engineer
💸 Salary: $180k-$250k
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 3
💰 Startup #8 💰
🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC
🛠️ Industry: Crypto/Web3
💸 Round/Funding: Seed, Boot-strapped, profitable, founder-owned
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This startup is a crypto-native firm specializing in quantitative proprietary trading and DeFi infrastructure.
📣 Talking Points:
Trades hundreds of millions in volume per week, business is wholly owned by the founders (very profitable / bootstrapped) - working with top-tier chains and ecosystems
Small, agile team over-taking market share from massive incumbents in the space. Solely focused on-chain. Team comes from TradFi, digital assets, and high frequency trading.
Strong BD motions; established partnerships in place with leading web3 ecosystems (e.g. Solana, Mysten Labs, etc). Pacing for $XXM+ in profit by EoY (80% Profit Margins)
🧑💻 Roles: Senior Back End; Smart Contract Engineer; Security Engineer
💸 Salary: $250 - $300K+
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
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