Every one has left their last job and is building full time. None has raised an institutional round. 5 in commerce & distribution, 2 in financial services, 2 in healthcare, 1 in gov / security / trust. Below the top list, 34 more we rate lower but tracked anyway.
Repeat founders and senior startup operators, roughly seven to ten years in, usually the kind who pair with a strong technical co-founder. We weighted operators who came up through Series B to D companies over people with famous logos on the CV, and we kept to foundational industries: healthcare, financial services, energy, and the infrastructure under everyday life.
On what they're building: most of these are genuinely dark. Databases will show a description for a stealth company, but it is generated from the founder's previous company and it is wrong. We only state a direction where the founder said it themselves or we found it independently. Where it says dark, it is dark.
Ten and a half years at DoorDash, ending as Head of In Store. Before that Group PM and Head of Merchant Logistics.
SignalHe describes building where software meets the real world, from an operations background, running experiments that don't scale to derisk fast. Read against ten years at DoorDash ending as Head of In Store, that points at software for physical retail or last-mile operations. No company name or domain public yet.
Co-founded Octaura, the Citi-backed electronic trading venue for syndicated loans and CLOs. Before that ran Markets Strategic Investments at Citi for five years. Board seats at Trumid, Genesis Global, Arteria AI. Princeton.
SignalHer company is SPRINT, Spread Products Investment Technologies, which invests in and incubates fintech for credit markets. A straight line from Octaura and her Citi credit years. The clearest stated model of the thirteen.
Ten years of supply-chain and operations software: Director of Product at Resilinc for six years, Product Lead at Flexport, Principal PM at Gusto. Co-founded Eon Info Solutions before that.
SignalAn AI-native platform that turns days of preconstruction work into hours for contractors, covering drawing ingestion, symbol extraction, bill of quantities, and compliance checks. Preconstruction still runs on PDFs and tribal knowledge, and he is replacing that. Full time since early 2025.
Founding engineer at Vori (grocery software) and senior engineer at Instacart.
SignalFounder and CEO of Rapide (rapide.io): agentic AI running the retail back office, cost, pricing, ordering, inventory and receiving, for grocery and multi-vendor retail. Live product with a login and an outbound sales motion, no round on record. If you want this one, the window is closing.
Founded Medsaf and ran it eight years — venture-backed pharmaceutical supply chain fighting counterfeit drugs and hospital procurement. Then Director of Product Management at Pfizer.
SignalBuilding agricultural supply-chain infrastructure in East Africa. Her posts show hands-on farmer aggregation: over 3,000 farmers mobilized, more than 2,000 hectares, and an internal app that maps growers and scores them against 100-plus criteria. The model in her words is long-term production systems that connect farmers to global buyers, with one city as the regional entry point.
Senior Engineering Manager on AWS Control Tower at Amazon, and before that Managing Director at Deloitte. Also ran AWS solutions architecture for financial services and professional services at Check Point.
SignalBuilding a new AI-native approach to cloud security, straight out of running AWS Control Tower. Three months out, nothing raised, the earliest catchable person here.
Senior Staff Engineer at Instacart, marketplace engineering at Lyft, VP at Morgan Stanley. Co-founded and was President of Highstock.
SignalNo stated direction beyond 'building something new.' The marketplace-engineering record at Instacart and Lyft is the reason he is here. Highstock ran fifteen months and ended July 2025, worth asking how before the meeting.
Director of Engineering at Credit Karma. Before that co-founder and CTO of SeedFi, consumer lending, venture-backed.
SignalBuilding Sparkles (trysparkles.com), a browser extension that automates web tasks and aims to make the browser self-driving, with a waitlist open. He is the technical co-founder and someone else is CEO. On X (@rclmenezes) he posts AI-engineering and agent-tooling threads consistent with the build.
SVP and General Manager at hims & hers, running a telehealth P&L. Five years as a GM at Uber, Senior Director at Spotify. West Point, HBS, US Army Cavalry captain.
SignalHis own post says he left hims and hers in June 2025, after growing its GLP-1 weight-loss business past $700M in revenue as GM, and is now building something new with a lifelong friend. The company's focus is not public, and the name Vael does not appear anywhere in his own posts.
VP and Head of Clinical Data Science at Prolaio (AI cardiac care). Google Health AI resident. Stanford PhD, Edinburgh MBChB.
SignalLeft Prolaio in April 2026, where he was employee one building the clinical data-science team, with no next venture announced. His current public activity is community and education: he founded Cyprus Catalyst, connecting US talent to Cyprus's tech scene, and keeps an open-source healthcare-data-science textbook. Clinical AI fits his record, but there is no stated build yet.
| Founder | Sector | Where | Before |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tommy Jiang | Commerce & distribution | Austin | VP of Data, AI and Robotics at Moderna; GM of AWS Supply Chain at Amazon. Runs Keystone.AI, an enterprise-AI forecasting company spun out independent where he is President, plus the SCOS.ai supply-chain stack. A named company with structure, not a first-check build. |
| Alex Dunbrack | Gov / security / trust | San Francisco | Co-founder and COO of Vectrix (YC S20), acquired by Cloudflare. His public posts through mid-2025 are Cloudflare AI-security product work with no independent-build signal. Unclear he has left to found. |
| Pablo Graiver | Healthcare | New York | Founded Antidote (clinical-trial matching) for a decade; co-founded Kelkoo, sold to Yahoo. Out of stealth as of July 2026 with Zlick (zlick.co), agentic AI that forecasts clinical-trial enrollment. Past the stealth first-check window, only just. |
| Nitin Rao | Energy & industrials | San Francisco | Built Cloudflare's global network — SVP Global Infrastructure for ten years, then interim Chief Product Officer. Stealth record is one month old and completely dark. Pedigree this strong usually skips a small first check. |
| Tommy Peeples | Financial services | Brooklyn | Co-founded Plover Parametrics (YC W22), parametric climate-risk insurance. Deployment Strategist at Palantir for four and a half years. Now building Postal, an AI digital mailbox. It is live with about fifteen people, so past the first-check moment. The insurtech background is the on-thesis part. |
| Andres Velasquez | Financial services | New York | Head of Product at RobinFood, LatAm delivery. Product and ops at Tributi, Colombian tax filing. Co-founder of Atina, “AI agents that show up in your P&L.” Right shape, but six years in and no verifiable company footprint yet. |
| John Slump | Healthcare | Chicago | Co-founded FARAPULSE, acquired by Boston Scientific for around $295M. CFO at two more companies that sold to Integra and J&J. Three exits, but this is implantable medtech and he is still CEO of Atraverse Medical. Not full time on the new company. |
| Andrew Ullmann | Commerce & distribution | San Francisco | Head of Dasher Experience Support at DoorDash through the IPO. Product leadership at Stellic, Fora and SFR3. Left both roles in April 2026, so the timing is right. His headline claims two prior companies that do not appear anywhere in his record — ask about that first. |
| Umberto Javarone | Transportation | Milan | General Manager Italy at FreeNow. Ran urban mobility for Europcar. Four years at Apple. Real operator, wrong geography for a US first check, and he has a second venture running in parallel. |
| Keshav Sivakumar | Commerce & distribution | London | Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir. Co-founder and CTO of Lumitics, IoT food-waste hardware for commercial kitchens. No headline, no signal, and a seventeen-month gap. Nothing to pitch yet. |
| Miles Hobby | Healthcare | San Francisco | VP of Product at Payscale after they bought Agora, the company he co-founded and ran. Genuinely out of Nervana, the company he co-founded most recently, which is still operating without him. Ask what happened. |
| Val Miftakhov | Energy & industrials | San Carlos | Founded ZeroAvia (hydrogen aviation) and eMotorWerks, sold to Enel. Left the ZeroAvia CEO seat in May 2026, still on the board. Raised $339M at ZeroAvia. Whatever he builds next will not be a $1M first check. |
| John Hohm | Energy & industrials | New York | Senior Software Engineer at Fulcrum |
| Manav Khandelwal | Healthcare | New York | Product at Stripe |
| Charles Neugebauer | Energy & industrials | Los Altos | CEO/Founder at Leafburst, Inc. |
| Brian Conyer | Healthcare | Brooklyn | Chief Commercial Officer at CareValidate |
| Josiah Parappally | Financial services | New York | Staff Software Engineer at Ramp |
| Rui Aguiar | Commerce & distribution | Alto | investor/advisor at various startups |
| Chris Conley | Financial services | Boston | Software Engineer at Stripe |
| Ruhul Amin Obe | Financial services | London | Co-Founder at Onfido |
| Jay Shek | Healthcare | New York | VP, Consumer Product at Hone Health |
| Mai Huong Tran | Commerce & distribution | New York | Head of Enterprise Strategic Partnership at CharityRx |
| Yvonne Chen | Gov / security / trust | San Francisco | Product Lead, Builder in Residence at Neo |
| Michael Lee | Financial services | San Mateo | Product Lead at Stripe |
| Shirley Zhang | Healthcare | New York | Head of Ops & Special Projects at Create Wellness |
| Mary Stasinopoulos | Healthcare | New York | Head of Commercial Insights at Seed Health |
| Djordje Milosevic | Financial services | Belgrade | Director of Product, Treasury & Finance at Aspire |
| Rishi Penmetcha | Energy & industrials | New York | Engineering at Traba |
| Shahar Peleg | Energy & industrials | York | Director, ThinQ Energy and Commercial Energy Business - Product and Program Management at LG Electronics North America |
| Jon Goldsmith | Commerce & distribution | San Francisco | Founder at Tetra (YC W17) |
| Ned Scher | Financial services | San Francisco | Senior Manager, New Business Development at DoorDash |
| Joachim Valente | Gov / security / trust | San Francisco | Head of Security Intelligence at Neon |
| Siqi Shi, Mba, Ms, Pmp | Energy & industrials | New York | Product Management Director at Zuora |
| Max Tabachnik | Healthcare | New York | Staff Product Manager at Tomorrow Health |