Meet the founders pitching Monday before everyone else does.

Ben Guo was early at Stripe in 2015 and spent over 8 years there. His cofounder Rob Cheung was the first engineer at Substack. Together they're building Zo — personal cloud infrastructure reimagined for the next billion people who aren't developers. The great powers of cloud computing have always been locked behind technical skill. Zo is changing that. Launched in November, growing fast, now building the team. $28M raised from Lightspeed, South Park Commons, and Guillermo Rauch.

Hiring: systems engineer and product engineers. Details here.

Akash Magoon built Adonis to fix one of healthcare's most expensive, invisible problems: revenue cycle management. Providers lose billions every year to billing inefficiencies that nobody catches until it's too late. Adonis flips the model — AI-driven automation that's proactive, not reactive, with high autonomous resolution rates. $95M+ raised from General Catalyst, Bling Capital, Point72, and Quadrille Capital. Just announced their Series C. Eight-figure revenue. The category is massive and Adonis is pulling ahead.

Hiring: AI engineering leader, senior forward deployed engineer, senior product manager, and more. Details here.

Andrew is building the infrastructure for fully autonomous businesses. Their product, Cofounder, lets anyone automate an entire company using natural language — coordinating AI agents across sales, marketing, ops, and engineering so humans don't have to. The goal: make launching a real-world business as easy as playing a video game. $10M raised from Union Square Ventures, Compound, and Acrew. Cofounder 2 launches next month.

Hiring: agents research lead, applied AI engineer, fullstack engineer, senior platform engineer, head of agentic marketing, head of agentic GTM. Details here.

Regan Jayne and Sarah Ganzenmuller building the platform that turns customers into communities — and communities into brand moats. Rediem's AI-native platform uses behavioral psychology to drive genuine, cross-channel engagement that strengthens AI discoverability and keeps customers coming back. Forbes 30 Under 30. Backed by Work-Bench and Ivy Ventures. $3M raised, $1M+ ARR. Already working with brands like Sun Bum.

Hiring: account executives (2-3), software engineers (3), and partnerships. Details here.

Brian Distelburger has raised $250M+ across his career as a founder — and his latest bet is on fixing the most dreaded ritual in the modern workplace: performance reviews. Windmill builds a living performance record by pulling data from tools your team already uses, pairing it with continuous feedback, and using AI to synthesize it all into calibrations that are actually data-driven. No more blank page. No more guesswork. Something worth watching — there may be a funding announcement coming very soon.

Hiring: founding design engineer, ML engineer, software engineer, account executive. All roles NYC. Details here.

Daniel Kahn and the Sparrow team are turning a 6-week process into a 6-minute one. Sparrow helps financial institutions build targeted, personalized digital relationships with their members at scale — deploying intelligent, automated journeys through their Crest platform that drive cross-product adoption and deepen engagement. Purpose-built for credit unions and financial institutions nationwide. Backed by SHAKTI VC. Just shy of $7M raised.

Hiring: product engineers, software engineers, account executives, senior account managers. Reach out directly to Lauren Stein, Chief of Staff: [email protected]

Everyone talks about joining a startup before it blows up. Nobody talks about what that actually requires.

It requires being okay with not having all the answers. The roadmap isn't finished. The brand isn't built. The process you're used to doesn't exist yet because you're the one who's supposed to build it.

The problem is, most people are trained to evaluate safety. Good name. Clear role. Defined path. And those things are fine. But they're the opposite of what early looks like.

Here's what early actually looks like: a founder who has done it before and is doing it again. A product with real customers who didn't need to be convinced. A problem so obviously broken that you can't believe nobody fixed it sooner. Traction that exists before anyone told the world to pay attention.

If you're waiting for it to feel safe, you're not early. You're just late with better excuses.

The people who move early don't have more information. They're just better at recognizing the signal before it becomes obvious to everyone else.

That's what Monday is. Six founders. Early signal. The room before the room fills up.

The question is whether you can see it.