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🤝 Good Morning and Welcome Back to Good People 🤝
A weekly newsletter for 36,500+ elite engineers, founders, and investors who argue Tesla vs Waymo with the same passion as the Jacob vs Edward debate.
Hey there 👋
I’m Ryan, Head of Marketing here at Coastal x Good People.
Last week, the entire Coastal Recruiting flew in for our bi-annual team offsite in San Diego. Between strategy sessions, beach time, and late-night chats by the fire, we spent five days plotting how to make Good People and Coastal Recruiting even better for you.
Your Coastal Recruiters
Quick thought - working remotely has its advantages (I'm currently in a towel writing this), but there's nothing like working next to the people you're building with. Some of our best unlocks came four hours into a winding conversation (turns out y’all hate booking through calendly). That’s why 90% of the companies we work with require at least 3 days onsite. It’s those moments of real connection and spontaneous problem-solving that set great teams, and great products, apart.
Expect some exciting updates to our recruiting process in the coming weeks. Special shoutout to David and Asher for bringing us all together. The award for longest distance traveled goes to our incredible Chief of Staff, Petro, who endured 36 hours flying from South Africa.
Talk Soon,
Ryan
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📆 This Week in the Newsletter 📆
🥳 Happy Friday! We've got Delphi’s $16M raise, HMPL.js revolution, MIT's underwater AI breakthrough, and a fascinating look at what ChatGPT does to your brain.
💸 Notable Fundraise: Delphi just raised $16M to turn real experts into interactive AI “digital minds” you can actually talk to. Inspired by its founder’s wish to chat with his late grandfather’s wisdom, is building a platform where anyone can create a verified, conversational AI version of themselves. The company just landed a $16 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital, with backing from big names like Menlo, Anthropic, and even the founders of Zoom, YouTube, and DoorDash. Read the announcement here →
👨💻 Website Of The Week: Meet HMPL.js, the server-oriented template language that's quietly revolutionizing how we think about client-server communication. While everyone's obsessing over the latest JavaScript frameworks, this 24KB gem is making apps 1.67x smaller than vanilla JS and offering something genuinely different: customizable fetch-based templating that gives you all the benefits of SSR without the framework bloat.
📖 What We’re Reading: MIT's LOBSTgER project is merging AI with underwater photography in ways that would make Jacques Cousteau jealous. The initiative, Learning Oceanic Bioecological Systems Through Generative Representations, uses custom diffusion models trained exclusively on curated underwater photographs to generate scientifically accurate ocean imagery. Read how they’re saving the coast of Maine →
🎧 What We’re Watching: Dr. Sanjay Gupta guest-hosted CNN10 this week to analyze a groundbreaking study: what literally happens to our brain activity when we use AI shortcuts like ChatGPT. As engineers increasingly rely on AI tools for everything from code completion to problem-solving, understanding the neurological impact becomes crucial. The episode dives into the first scientific look at how these tools are changing our neural patterns and cognitive processes. It's a must-watch for anyone wondering whether we're enhancing our capabilities or fundamentally rewiring how we think. Watch the segment below!
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, Robotics
💸 Round/Funding: Seed, $15M
🏦 Investors: Founders Fund, Founders of Anduril and Palantir, Thrive Capital
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This startup is building the enterprise robotics company. Previously, at Anduril and Tesla, the team built autonomous systems that are now deployed across the globe. This startup’s mission is to make the world safer by bringing these situational awareness capabilities to American companies.
🏗️ Product: This startup’s first product is a wireless camera mesh that detects physical activity (intrusions, safety issues, vehicle movement, etc.) in real time—up to 1km from power and connectivity sources.
It enables security and operations teams to:
Instantly detect threats or anomalies
Get full situational awareness at the edge of large or remote physical environments
Customize real-time alerts via an intuitive interface
This isn't just a surveillance tool, it's the first step in autonomous response systems like drone-based deterrents and robotic logistics, already in the product pipeline.
📣 Talking Points:
Built by ex-Anduril, Tesla, and Special Forces operators - this startup is turning the defense-grade perception stack into something scalable for U.S. businesses.
This startup already has 10 Global 2000s under contract — not just “interested,” but locked in. PMF is real and the upside is massive.
From edge mesh computing to real-time autonomy - you’ll be working at the intersection of robotics, AI, and hardware—helping define a brand new category.
🧑💻 Roles: Full Stack Engineer; Back End
💸 Salary: $150-$250K
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
🏦 Startup #2 🏦
🏙️ Hiring Location: NYC
🛠️ Industry: AI, Fintech
💸 Round/Funding: Series A, $32.2M
🏦 Investors: Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Canapi Ventures, Curql
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: Increase the stability and performance of US financial institutions and the communities they serve.
🏗️ Product: This startup operates a deposit network designed to modernize how financial institutions manage liquidity, extended deposit insurance, and compliance—all embedded directly into digital banking platforms.
Core Product Functions:
Extended FDIC/NCUA insurance: Automatically splits large deposits (e.g., $5M) into FDIC-insured $250K chunks across multiple partner institutions
Balance Sheet Optimization: Enables banks to "sweep" or source funds to optimize capital usage, comply with regulatory caps, and enhance lending ability
Embedded into digital banking: Unlike legacy providers, this startup integrates directly with platforms like Fiserv and Jack Henry for a seamless UX
📣 Talking Points:
Backed by the Best, Building the Future - With backing from a16z and the founder of their biggest competitor (Gene Ludwig of IntraFi), this startup is not just disrupting the system—they’re rewriting it with the blessing and brains of the legacy leaders.
Solving a Post-SVB Critical Need - This startup’s platform is designed to prevent the next banking crisis—by helping banks retain large deposits safely, compliantly, and competitively. It’s a foundational fix for systemic risk.
Massive Impact, Tiny Team - With only 26 employees, this startup is already working with over 100 banks and some of the largest credit unions in the U.S. The scale of impact relative to team size is rare—and every hire shapes the product and culture.
🧑💻 Roles: Senior Software Engineer; FDE (Forward Deplayed)
💸 Salary: $140-$200k+
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 5
🛡️ Startup #3 🛡️
🏙️ Hiring Location: SF
🛠️ Industry: AI, Advertising
💸 Round/Funding: Seed, $7.3M
🏦 Investors: Canaan, J Ventures, NEO
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This startup’s mission is to enable clients of all sizes to easily and efficiently execute advertising strategies that optimize return on ad spend. In little more than a year, their data-driven, tech-enabled approach has become thoroughly disruptive, displacing traditional incumbents and winning return business in the highly lucrative half-trillion dollar per year digital ads market.
Traditional agencies have been given notice: This startup is building the future of advertising.
🏗️ Product: They compete directly with traditional ad agencies who are limited to human scale. This startup automates ad buying, strategy, and creative decisions using rich data models. This tooling enables their agency to start faster, act quicker, and iterate more efficiently than traditional agency models.
📣 Talking Points:
AI-native ad agency model - This startup is doing what traditional agencies can’t: automating campaign execution and creative iteration with state-of-the-art machine learning.
Backed by legends who built the internet - Investors include Scott Banister (invented search ads, early PayPal board) and Steve Huffman (Reddit co-founder & CEO)—a high-conviction bet on the next great performance engine.
🧑💻 Roles: Senior Software Engineer; Principal Engineer
🚙 Days Required Onsite: 4
🏋️♀️ 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, South Bay
🛠️ Industry: AI, SaaS
💸 Round/Funding: Seed, $23M
🏦 Investors: Coatue, GTM Capital, Karthik Narsimhan, Tal Shaked, The Anthology Fund, Vinod Marur
🙏🏼 Mission/Vision: This Startup is on a mission to unlock real-time, self-service data insights for enterprises by building a cutting-edge AI platform that seamlessly handles structured and unstructured data. Their vision is to make trustable, agentic data access the new normal—replacing bottlenecks with autonomy and speed across decision-making teams.
🏗️ Product: This Startup is building the agentic AI platform for enterprise data—bringing real-time, explainable insights directly to the fingertips of non-technical users like ops leaders, product managers, and execs. The system spans internal structured data (think Snowflake/BigQuery) and unstructured knowledge (Confluence, Slack, Notion, etc.).
Engineers at this startup tackle:
LLM grounding + retrieval augmentation at scale
Self-serve, low-latency querying over massive datasets
Robust infra for multi-modal enterprise data access
📣 Talking Points:
Built by AI legends – From ex-Google Search to Rubrik, Tagtile (acq. FB), AWS, Glean, and Databricks—This startup’s team has built infrastructure powering trillions of queries.
Tech with purpose – Solving real-world data pain for CDOs and CIOs. The AI actually works—and doesn’t hallucinate.
Your fingerprints will be everywhere – You’ll help define the product roadmap, ship core systems, and scale to Fortune 100 usage—while the company is still lean and early.
🧑💻 Roles: Full Stack Engineer; Front End; Back End; Machine Learning
💸 Salary: $170-$250k
🚙 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
💸 Startup Engineering Compensation Calculator 💸
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