The next showcase is Sept 28, and this lineup has a theme: AI going where software never worked before. Pharma compliance. Hospital billing. Government itself. Here's who's taking the stage, and every one of them is hiring:

Aris Saxena and Yiwen Li built Solstice, the agentic marketing engine for biopharma, backed by Transformation Capital and trusted by Pfizer, AstraZeneca, AbbVie, and Sanofi. Getting a single pharma marketing asset through medical, legal, and regulatory review used to take months. Solstice's customers launch campaigns 12x faster, cutting review rounds from 3.2 to 1.2 per asset in a market where biopharma spends $100B+ a year on commercialization. $21M Series A led by Transformation Capital, with Twelve Below, Virtue, and the founders of Datavant, Commure, and Paradigm.

Hiring: MTS Fullstack, MTS Fullstack AI, MTS Applied AI, MTS Data Engineering, MTS QA (Agentic Systems), Senior MTS Applied AI, and Manager, Commercial Engagement. Details here.

Michal Miernowski (CEO) and Alvin Wu (CPO) built Amperos, an AI workforce that runs healthcare revenue cycle on autopilot, so providers get paid in full for the care they deliver. Billing is the quiet reason hospitals bleed money; Amperos makes it autonomous. $20.7M raised from Bessemer Venture Partners, Uncork Capital, and Neo. Want the deeper read? Next Play wrote a whole piece called "Should you join Amperos?"

Hiring: Engineering, product, GTM, and CS, nearly all in NYC. Engineering: AI Research Engineer, Software Engineer, Full Stack, Software Engineer, Infra, and Software Engineer, Integrations. Product: Product Manager and Product Designer. GTM: Enterprise Account Executive and SDR (remote). Ops & CS: AI Deployment Strategist, Client Engagement Manager, and Customer Success Manager. Plus RCM specialist roles. Details here.

Cherie Chung is building Holly, the AI-native workforce operating system for the public sector, already used by 70+ agencies that collectively serve over 10% of Americans. Government software is famously where good tools go to die; Holly grew 100x in the past year anyway. $10M raised, and the team of 25+ is made up of former public servants, civic techies, and builders who want government workers to finally have the best tools.

Hiring: engineers and a chief of staff. Details here.

Rick Huang and Matt Ko founded Pascal to equip the physical, offline economy with foundational intelligence. Here's the problem in one image: somewhere right now, someone is logging into yet another data portal, downloading screenshots buried in PDFs and fax scans, and re-keying the details into a decade-old spreadsheet. Multiply that across a $2T US industry and the bottlenecks become cash left on the table, missed sales, and empty shelves. The foundational data layer that unlocks AI agents doesn't exist in the offline economy yet, so Matt and Rick are building it, starting with consumer packaged goods.

The team is math and science Olympiad competitors from MIT who went on to build at Nuro, Glean, Blackstone, and Marshall Wace, backed by premier Silicon Valley investors and executives from category-defining businesses like Decagon, Cognition, Kalshi, and Uber.

Hiring: Founding Engineer, NYC, in person, $150K to $250K base with significant early-stage equity. One of the first employees, shaping the culture from day one.

Logan Brown left a $900-an-hour seat at Cooley to build Soxton, the AI-powered legal platform for founders at their earliest stages, streamlining everything from incorporation to equity, fundraising, and compliance with automated workflows plus human-in-the-loop lawyer review when it matters most. The results founders actually feel: standard contracts papered for around $100 with 24-hour turnaround, priced rounds for a fraction of Big Law rates, and an average of $45K saved in legal fees in a customer's first month. Over 270 companies used it before it even publicly launched. A Harvard J.D. who interned at her local DA's office at twelve, Logan raised a $2.5M pre-seed led by Moxxie Ventures, with Strobe, Coalition, Flex, and Caterina Fake in the round, on a mission to become the default law firm for the next generation of entrepreneurs: faster, smarter, and more affordable than Big Law.

They are hiring!

Applications are open now: apply for your spot here.

One more room before the showcase, and this one's for the engineers. On Wednesday, September 30, Ivor is sitting down with three of the city's engineering leaders at Datadog's NYC HQ to get into one thing: how you actually go from engineer to CTO.

On stage:

Not the LinkedIn version. The real one, with the wrong turns, the lucky breaks, and the moments that mattered. We'll get into the career decisions that actually moved the needle, what separates engineers who progress fast from everyone else, and the hardest shift in the job: going from writing the code, to leading the people who write it, to helping run the company.

And yes, we're talking AI. Not "will it replace engineers," but what matters more when everyone has a coding agent, what juniors still have to learn the hard way, and what a great engineering team looks like five years from now.

Wednesday, Sept 30, 6:00 to 8:30pm at Datadog. Doors at 6, and come early: the first thirty minutes is where the conversations happen. Then the fireside, then a mixer. The room is small and every RSVP is approved by hand. Request your spot here and send it to your most cracked engineer friends. The best rooms are the ones you help build.