These are the breakout startups hiring in New York this month — meet them on Monday before everyone else does.

Sam Kececi is building The Sentience Company that sounds like science fiction but is shipping in production: a digital version of you. Your Sentience remembers everything — becoming the best search engine for your life and the best platform to share your knowledge with others.

The approach is unlike anything else in the space. Rather than trying to map the brain neuron by neuron, Sentience mirrors the systems of the human mind in increasingly high fidelity — the way Stable Diffusion coalesces around a generated image. Translating how the mind actually works into software, from the ground up. The team is ex-Macro, ex-Amazon, ex-Salesforce, Columbia alum.

Hiring: fullstack engineer, lead AI engineer.

Daniel Caridi is building the operating system for organizations that serve people with intellectual and developmental disabilities — and it's already working. Kibu's platform handles content, compliance, and EHR in one place, purpose-built for I/DD providers who have spent years duct-taping together tools that were never designed for them. $2.7M ARR, deployed across hundreds of organizations in 46 states. $5.1M raised from GreyMatter Capital, Connecticut Innovations, and angel investors.

Hiring: senior software engineer, software engineer (content platform), account executive, account executive (government & enterprise), head of content, head of customer success, customer success rep, government relations manager, and more. Details here.

Nick Lawton built the infrastructure layer that the creator economy actually runs on. SideShift connects 800k+ creators with brands like Target, Brex, and Paramount Pictures — handling everything from creator discovery and campaign management to the payment infrastructure that moves money to creators at scale. $8M ARR. 30B+ views generated. 1,000+ active brand customers. $2.2M raised. NYC-based and profitable-feeling before most companies touch Series A.

Hiring: software engineers. Reach out to us directly!

Sophia Kianni is building the shopping agent that actually knows what you want. Phia's AI helps consumers discover the best products across 350 million items with personalized, real-time recommendations — and on the brand side, it turns shopping intent into measurable conversion, delivering performance lift for 7,200 brands through AI-targeted offers to 1M+ users. 87%+ monthly retention. An in-house product understanding system indexing 300M+ items across retail and resale. $43M raised. Stanford alum building one of the more quietly impressive consumer AI companies in NYC right now.

Hiring: principal full stack engineer, full stack engineer, senior backend engineer, senior iOS engineer, senior ML engineer, principal product designer, product manager, senior partnerships manager, and more. Details here.

Kieran O'Reilly built the infrastructure layer that lets financial institutions finally solve card-on-file switching — and the backing list alone tells you how serious this is. Knot is the first merchant connectivity platform connecting major banks and fintechs to hundreds of online merchant accounts through a single SDK. Backed by Amex, Plaid, and Mastercard, plus the founders of Twitter, Harry's, Warby Parker, Allbirds, Casper, Deel, DraftKings, and Flexport. $20M raised. Harvard alum building foundational fintech infrastructure in NYC.

Hiring: senior engineers and tech leads across infrastructure, product, and mobile (iOS & Android), GTM, sales, and a chief of staff. Details here.

Ashi Agrawal is rebuilding compliance from the ground up for financial institutions — and the traction speaks for itself. Kobalt Labs is the AI-native compliance platform that fintechs like Chime and Bilt and institutions managing billions in assets like Emprise and Celtic Bank use to slash vendor and fintech onboarding time by 60-70% and get marketing collateral reviewed and released 25% faster. $12.7M raised. Ex-Affirm, Stanford alum.

Hiring: Engineering, Ops, GTM. Reach out to us directly!

Sparrow is one of the fastest-growing technology companies serving credit unions nationwide — from $6M institutions to $34B ones. Their Crest platform deploys intelligent, automated journeys that turn single-transaction members into deep, multi-product relationships. The premise: the in-person magic moments that define great banking shouldn't disappear when a member goes digital. Sparrow extends them.

Purpose-built for credit unions. Full-funnel ROI attribution. Instant data feeds. Best-practice journeys proven across institutions nationwide. A team from finance, fintech, and tech united by one belief: the future of banking should still feel human.

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

Everyone wants access to great founders. Nobody shows up before they're obvious.

The best time to meet a breakout company is right before everyone agrees it's one. Not after the fundraise. Not when they're trending. Before that.

The problem is, that moment doesn't look impressive. The pitch isn't perfect. The story is still forming. There's no crowd, no hype, no signal that tells you this is the one.

But here's what you can see: the founder is relentlessly clear about the problem. Early users aren't just interested — they keep coming back. The team moves fast, even with limited resources. Something small is already working.

If you're waiting for validation, you're not early. You're late. And late means competing for attention instead of building real access. Surface-level conversations instead of real relationships.

Breakout companies don't announce themselves early. They're easy to overlook. Easy to underestimate. Monday is the chance to meet them before everyone else decides they should care.

The question is whether you're willing to be early enough to see it.

See you at the showcase on the 23rd.