What is The Shortlist?
The Shortlist New York is a monthly event series and newsletter connecting exceptional talent with breakout founders in NYC.
Every two weeks, we send you a curated newsletter featuring under-the-radar opportunities at companies that are actually moving.
Every month, we host a founder showcase where eight founders take the stage and tell YOU why you should grab a seat on their rocketship.
How to get involved:
Join our talent network → Tell us what you're looking for. We'll connect you with companies that match before roles go public.
Founders: Apply to pitch → Raising pre-seed through Series B? Hiring for key roles? Wanting to collaborate on a private event with top talent? Email: [email protected]
The events will be highly curated, free to attend, and application-only.
February Recap
As many of you know, February 23rd threw us a curveball — a full NYC blizzard. We pivoted the showcase to remote, pulled it together quickly, and honestly? The turnout was incredible. Then we followed it up with an in-person mixer, and the energy in the room matched the chaos of the week. Two very different formats, both packed. That's the Shortlist community doing what it does.
Photo by Kevin Weatherman
Who Presented?
Six companies. Seed to Series B. Spanning financial services, consumer AI, consumer social, commodity risk management, and home services. Each founder had 8 minutes to pitch what they're building, why it matters, and what roles they're hiring for.
Upscale AI
Upscale AI is an AI-native platform that generates, launches, and optimizes high-performing video ads across Streaming TV and YouTube for fast-growing consumer brands. They sit at the intersection of creative, media, and measurement — using AI to automate production, accelerate experimentation, and drive real business outcomes. Founded by Mike Chang and Kevin Weatherman. Backed by Microsoft's Venture Fund and Eniac Ventures.
Hiring: account executive, technical PM, and senior backend engineer. Details here.
Brij
Brij is an AI-powered platform that helps consumer brands unify their offline and online customer experiences—and finally own their first-party data. They work with brands like Feastables, Caraway, Heineken, Chobani, Lowe's & Skullcandy. Founded by Kait Stephens and Zack Morrison. Series A company.
Hiring: SDR, commercial account executive, mid-market account executive, enterprise account manager. Details here.
Hanover Park
Hanover Park is the AI-native fund administrator that bundles full-service fund administration with products like AI Portfolio Management, an AI Inbox Analyzer for board decks, KPI collection, and an investor portal. They've raised $31M from Emergence, have $10B+ in assets on the platform, and support approximately 10,000 LPs, including top endowments and financial institutions. Founded by Chris Hladczuk and Nick Puljic. Series A.
Hiring: engineers, fund accountants, product designer, operations associate, and a founding talent lead. Details here.
Bustem
Bustem protects ecom brands from copycats, counterfeiters, and unauthorized sellers that siphon revenue and damage trust. They combine AI detection with a hands-on enforcement team to find and remove bad actors across marketplaces, ads, and fake domains, putting real dollars back into the brand's pocket. Founded by Oliver Brocato. Series C company.
Hiring: account executive, chief of staff to CEO/founder, founding customer success manager, social media content creator, founding engineer. Respond to this!
Speechify
Speechify is an Applied AI Research Lab that has built the largest consumer Voice AI platform in the world, focused on text-to-speech reading, voice chat, AI podcasts, and AI voice typing. Used by 50M+ people, it's a top 5 AI Assistant on the App Store alongside Gemini, Grok, ChatGPT, and Claude. Series B company founded by Cliff Weitzman and Tyler Weitzman.
Hiring: multiple engineering and product roles. Details here.
FLORA
FLORA is Cursor for creatives: a professional AI creative tool with every single creative AI model across text, image, and video, which you can connect together to accelerate your creative process. Used by teams like Nike, Pentagram, Netflix, and Lionsgate. They just raised a $42M Series A from Redpoint, with existing investors including a16z, Menlo Ventures, and the founders of Frame.io, Vercel and MSCHF. Based in the Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg. Founded by Weber Wong and Harish Venkatesan.
Hiring: multiple roles across engineering, product, and design. Details here.
These weren't companies hoping to raise a seed round. These were companies scaling, hiring, and moving fast.
Photo by Kevin Weatherman
What People Said
"The mixer after felt like the real event. Stayed way longer than I planned."
"Ended up talking to a founder for like 45 minutes. Didn't even realize how much time had passed."
"First time I've left something like this and immediately texted my friend to come next time."
"The mixer was so good. Like actually good, not 'networking event' good."
What’s Next?
We're doing this again on March 23rd. Same format. Different founders. More roles you won't find on job boards.
If you want in on the next one, get on the list. Spots fill before we announce.
High demand. Limited spots.
If you're a founder and want to pitch or collaborate, reach out to [email protected].
If you're hiring and want to work with us, we're selective but always looking.
Photo by Sangavi Suresh
Upcoming Events
March 23: The Shortlist March Founder Showcase (RSVP)
Our third showcase. 100 people, 6 founders, one room in SoHo. Founders pitch what they're building, why it matters, and what roles they're hiring for. You get to ask questions, meet the team, and decide if this is your next chapter. These spots fill fast.
March 24th: Junto Founder Dinner (RSVP)
A curated dinner with 24 Seed–Series B founders in NYC.
March 26th: Founder Breakfast Club (RSVP)
Every month, we bring together a select group of people from the venture community for an intimate breakfast to discuss industry trends, collaborate, and make friends.
Photo by Alex Mexicotte
The Shortlist Spotlight
These are the breakout startups hiring in New York this month — meet them before everyone else does.
Rogo
Rogo is building Wall Street's first true AI analyst, reimagining how the world's top banks, hedge funds, and private equity firms approach research and analysis. They develop specialized AI agents purpose-built for finance — helping institutions move faster on the research and deal work that matters most. Founded in 2021 by CEO Gabriel Stengel, COO John Willett, and CTO Tumas Rackaitis. Backed by Sequoia Capital, who led their $75M Series C.
Hiring: backend, full-stack, platform, and iOS engineers, an AI researcher, plus sales, product, design, security, talent, finance, and marketing roles. Details here.
Sixfold AI
Sixfold AI is the AI brain behind insurance underwriting — handling the heavy lifting in submissions so underwriters can focus on building more profitable portfolios. Founded by CEO Alex Schmelkin, COO Jane Tran, and CTO Brian Moseley. Just raised a $30M Series B led by Brewer Lane, with strategic investment from Guidewire and continued support from Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures.
Hiring: solutions engineering, site reliability, product, customer success, and demand generation roles in NYC. Details here.
Pasito
Pasito is the AI-native workspace for group health, life, and retirement benefits — giving employers, brokers, and carriers a single intelligent platform to eliminate the manual, error-prone work that has defined the industry for decades. Their AI ingests messy plan and employee data to power workflows like plan design, quoting, enrollment, and ongoing support. Founded by Pauline Roteta and Julie Scotland. Series A company backed by Insight Partners.
Hiring: early GTM, product, and engineering roles focused on benefits infrastructure and AI-driven operations. Details here.
Basis
Basis is building AI agents that do real accounting work end-to-end — automating tax prep, audit testing, workpaper generation, and reconciliation for the world's top accounting firms. They believe AI will transform finance and accounting the way the spreadsheet once did, and they're already deployed at roughly 30% of the top 25 firms. Founded by Matthew Harpe and Mitchell Troyanovsky. Series B company backed by Accel, GV, Khosla Ventures, and Lloyd Blankfein.
Hiring: sales, revenue operations, and product marketing roles. Details here.
WithCoverage
WithCoverage is replacing the traditional insurance brokerage with AI-powered risk management built for the modern economy. Instead of a fragmented, manual brokerage stack, they've built a proprietary Agency Management System that gives elite risk advisors and AI agents full visibility into policies, exposures, claims, and commissions — enabling the kind of speed and service that high-growth companies actually need. Clients include GoPuff, Eight Sleep, Bombas, Chomps, and Blank Street Coffee. Founded by JD Ross (co-founder of Opendoor) and Max Brenner. Series A company backed by Sequoia, 8VC, and Khosla Ventures.
Hiring: AI agent, applied AI, and ML engineers, plus sales, growth, product design, and risk advisor roles. Details here.
Sequence
Sequence is the AI revenue platform for modern B2B finance teams, unifying quoting, billing, and receivables in one automated system. Their AI agents parse contracts, generate invoices, and run collections on autopilot — so finance teams can support complex custom deals at scale without drowning in manual work. Founded by Riya Grover, Eamon Jubbawy, and Enda Cahill. Series A company backed by 645 Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.
Hiring: backend, frontend, and product engineers, plus account executives, BDRs, a product designer, and a founding marketer. Details here.
Rillet
Rillet is the AI-native ERP replacing legacy systems like NetSuite for mid-market and enterprise finance teams. Their platform rebuilds the general ledger from scratch — with native integrations, automated journal entries, and AI embedded directly into workflows — making zero-day close a reality. Customers like Windsurf run their entire finance function on Rillet with just two people. Founded by Nicolas Kopp. Series B company backed by a16z, ICONIQ, and Sequoia.
Hiring: frontend and backend engineers, ML/AI engineers, product managers, designers, account executives, BDRs, and marketing roles. Details here.
One Thing We’re Thinking About
Everyone is waiting for the right time.
The right time to make a move. The right time to take a risk. The right time to join something early before it's obvious.
But the right time doesn't announce itself. It just quietly passes while you're waiting for more information, more certainty, more proof that it's going to work.
Here's what we keep noticing: the people who end up at the right company at the right moment didn't have better information. They just moved while everyone else was still thinking about it.
The window is open right now. Freshly funded teams. First and second hires. Equity that actually means something. And a talent pool so frozen by layoff headlines that the competition for these seats is lower than it's been in years.
You don't need more proof. You need to decide if you're the kind of person who moves early — or the kind who reads about it later.
See you next week.
Know a founder who should be featured? Reply to this email.
Looking for a role we didn't list? Tell us what you're looking for.
Are you a founder wanting to collaborate on a private event with top talent? Reach out to [email protected]
Want to grab coffee? We're always around.