Future Unicorn #230: Fixie
Reimagining how software is developed using AI as a foundation
The Quild Future Unicorn is a weekly product-focused note highlighting early-stage startups with statistically significant signals of becoming unicorns.
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Also, I’ve moved back to Substack with a new domain quild.io (in case you find something’s out of place).
Fixie is using AI to rethink how the world builds software systems. The building blocks of computing are shifting from complex, brittle, hand-coded services to flexible, general-purpose AI models that, given appropriate instructions, can perform a wide range of tasks.
They envision a future in which systems, composed of AI-powered agents, interact with people as well as each other using natural language and rich media. From this vision, they are building a new computing platform that aims to usher in a new era of software.
Since they’re still in stealth, there are no in-depth product notes this time.
Founders: Matt Welsh (CEO), Hessam Bagherinezhad (Chief AI Officer), Zach Koch (CPO), Justin Uberti (CTO)
Signals:
Venture-backed experience
Matt was the SVP of engineering at OctoML (2+ yrs) and a principal engineer at Xnor.ai (1 yr)
Hessam was the head of machine learning for Xnor.ai (<3 yrs)
Zach has worked in multiple startups the latest being a PM at Verbling (<2 yrs), an online language learning platform
Justin was a distinguished engineer at Clubhouse (1+ yrs)
Top company alumni
Matt was an engineer at Google (8+ yrs) and Apple (<1 yr)
Zach was a product lead at Google (6+ yrs) and Shopify (1+ yrs)
Justin was a distinguished engineer at Google (15 yrs) and was the chief architect at AOL (9+ yrs)
Top university alumni
Matt graduated from UC Berkeley (PhD) and Cornell University (BS)
Hessam graduated from University of Washington (PhD)
Top investor
Signal Fire invested
They’re hiring founding AI, backend, and frontend engineers. Check them out.
The updated Foundation Model Primer for Investors and Builders is out. Since its first publication last August 2022, the report has expanded: >2x in length, 3x in the number of companies include in the market map, and an outlook for next year. Check it out here:
