July 2026 Update
Founder Fellowship Apps Due, Summer Demo Faire
July brought our largest Demo Faire yet, a hands-on robotics hack day in New York, exciting new company launches, and a packed calendar across SF, NYC, and Bangalore.
The $1M Founder Fellowship closes August 2nd
Founder Fellowship applications are due August 2nd. The time to be maximally ambitious is now. Fellows join a community whose members have gone on to build companies like Luma, Profound, Render, Doppel, Baseten, and Goodfire. Apply here.
Summer Demo Faire
This week we hosted our most ambitious Demo Faire yet: over 25 companies demoed live in San Francisco to a packed room of investors and builders. The lineup spanned hypersonic ground launchers, wildfire-detection sensors, new drug chemistry once thought impossible, agents handling real enterprise workflows, and generative fashion intelligence.
Fund Updates
Preseen raised a $5.6M seed round led by SPC to build forecasting agents for global macro events.
Nirva raised an $8M seed round led by Lightspeed with participation from SPC, to build an AI wearable that listens only to you and turns your day into a journal, coach, and companion.
Member Updates
Product Launches & Company News
Chip Motors publicly launched their LUV: Life Utility Vehicle.
Lumin launched on the App Store, an accessibility-first AI voice assistant that lets you talk to your inbox instead of staring at a screen.
Personal Projects, Explorations & Publications
Eric created Ghost Font, a font only humans can read.
David built NYC sim, a digital twin simulation of New York City.
Jake created (and livestreamed) armcade.tv, letting anyone remote-control two robots playing chess against each other.
Achyut released a benchmark for long-list extraction from messy, long documents.
Jasper wrote a post on bottom-up learning in models
Events at SPC
In addition to Demo Faire, we hosted a large slate of events across locations. In NYC we brought experts in for The Future of Biosecurity panel (moderated by member Amit Gupta) digging into how quickly AI is lowering the barrier to engineered biological threats. Our Design Tools Demo Night with Ramp, Anthropic, Clay, Hebbia, and Browserbase followed, turning the room over to the tools teams are building for themselves. The month closed with a Hack Day with Viam Robotics, where builders spent a Friday getting robots to do something real.
In SF, Guardant Health CEO Helmy Eltoukhy chatted with us about building a cancer diagnostics company for more than a decade.
SPC India hosted a fireside chat with Thejo Kote, founder of Journal, Airbase, and Automatic, and a conversation on foundational science with Prof. Rajesh Gopakumar, Director of ICTS-TIFR.
Recent Content
We released a conversation between SPC GP Evan Tana and SPC alum Thariq Shihipar, who leads Claude Code at Anthropic, on what it takes to build a product that developers reorganize their work around.
Thanks for reading!
Founder Fellowship applications close August 2nd. Apply to SPC now.
The SPC India fireside chat with Thejo Kote stands out — Indian founders face a different fundraising reality.
Capital is scarcer, so financial planning from day one matters more.
I keep seeing founders treat personal and business money as one pool; separating them early avoids painful corrections later.