This Week’s Top Talent Pools

Etched, a San Jose-based company building frontier inference clusters, emerged from stealth with $800M raised across multiple rounds — most recently a $500M round at a $5B post-money valuation in December 2025. Backers include VentureTech Alliance, Peter Thiel, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Jump Trading, Two Sigma, Stripes, Ribbit Capital, Radical Ventures, Primary VC, Positive Sum, Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, and Fei-Fei Li. The company also disclosed $1B+ in signed customer contracts.

  1. Raghu Balasubramanian in SF (Stealth)

    1. Role: MTS @ Etched (1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: ASIC Design Engineer @ Waymo, Staff Hardware Engineer @ Google, Design & Verification Engineer @ Infineon, UW-Madison MS CS

    3. Description: "Custom silicon for next-generation edge AI systems"

  2. Raghavan Ramadoss in SF (Stealth)

    1. Role: Head of Interface IP @ Etched (1.5 yrs)

    2. Other Experience: Senior Hardware Engineering Leader @ Cisco, Technical Intern @ Qualcomm, Technical Intern @ Intel, Penn State MS Computer Engineering

    3. Description: "Ultra-efficient AI silicon for edge applications"

  3. Colin Zhao in SF (Potential Founder)

    1. Role: MTS @ Etched (1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: Early Eng & Research @ Cursor, Co-Founder & CTO @ Toppings (50K users, $15M valuation), UCLA CS

    3. Description: Left Etched 1/25

    4. Contact: [email protected]

  4. Sathvik Redrouthu in US (Potential Founder)

    1. Role: MTS @ Etched (<1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: Founder & CEO @ Instachip (YC W25, backed by Thiel Fellowship founders, OpenAI staff), Visiting Research Scientist @ TrainLoop, MIT CSAIL Researcher, Caltech BS Math

    3. Description: Left Etched 6/25

    4. Contact: [email protected], Site

  5. Julian Q. in SF (Potential Founder)

    1. Role: Intern @ Etched (1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: MTS @ World Labs, Undergrad Researcher @ Stanford SAIL, Intern @ MosaicML, Eng @ Chord, Stanford BS+PhD CS

    3. Description:

  6. Cat Tang in SF (Stealth)

    1. Role: Core Ops @ Etched (1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: Product Specialist @ Parabola, Summer Associate @ BCG, USC Cognitive Science

    3. Description: "Something new!"

  7. Michelle Wei in SF (Potential Founder)

    1. Role: MTS @ Etched (<1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: MTS @ Modal, MIT CSAIL Researcher, Jane Street FTTP, USA EGOI, MIT BS Math + CS

    3. Description: Left Etched 8/25

Chai Discovery, an AI drug-discovery company, raised $400M at a $3.8B valuation led by Index Ventures, with Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Dimension, BCV, Thrive, OpenAI, and Yosemite.

  1. Zhuoran Qiao in SF (Stealth)

    1. Role: Founding Scientist @ Chai Discovery (1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: Lead ML Scientist @ Iambic Therapeutics , Caltech PhD Theoretical Chemistry, Peking University BS Chemistry

    3. Description: "Frontier chemistry and beyond"

    4. Contact: [email protected]

Together AI, a four-year-old San Francisco startup that provides computing infrastructure for companies to train and run open-source AI models at scale, raised an $800 million round at an $8.3 billion post-money valuation. The deal was led by Aramco Ventures, with Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, Nvidia, March Capital, Pegatron, and S Ventures also investing.

  1. Michael Zhang in SF (Potential Founder)

    1. Role: AI Consulting @ Together AI (1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: Founding Team @ Periodic Labs ($300M seed at $1B from a16z, Nvidia, Accel, DST), Stanford PhD CS, Harvard BA Statistics + CS

    3. Description: “new stuff, tasty agents”

    4. Contact: [email protected], Site, Twitter, GitHub

  2. Charles Srisuwananukorn in SF (Co-Founder @ Jaccard AI)

    1. Role: Founding VP of Engineering @ Together AI (3.5 yrs)

    2. Other Experience: Head of Applied ML @ Snorkel AI, Senior SWE Manager @ Apple, SDE @ Microsoft, Stanford BS CS

    3. Description: Stealth since 2/26

  3. Bryan Gopal in SF (Stealth)

    1. Role: Staff Research Scientist @ Together AI (1.5 yrs)

    2. Other Experience: Research Scientist @ Stanford SAIL, SWE Intern @ Meta, Stanford MS CS

    3. Description: "Accelerating inference"

  4. Dhruva Bansal in SF (Co-Founder & CEO @ FlowGen Labs)

    1. Role: ML Engineer @ Together AI (<1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: Founding ML Engineer @ Refuel (acq by Together AI; backed by General Catalyst), Research Engineer @ Google DeepMind, SDE @ Amazon Robotics, Stanford MS CS

    3. Description: "Building frontier intelligence that executes"

    4. Contact: [email protected], Site

CRED, the Indian fintech for credit-card bill payments and premium consumer finance, raised $900M at a ~$4.5B valuation in a round led by Meta, bringing total funding to ~$1.84B. Founder Kunal Shah is departing to lead WhatsApp globally, with senior product and founding talent following him out.

  1. Krunal Chauhan in SF (Founder @ HelloCounsel.ai)

    1. Role: Founding Team & Product @ CRED (5.5 yrs)

    2. Other Experience: Director of Product @ Coupang Pay

    3. Description: "The AI workforce for consumer lawyers"

  2. Rathin Shah in SF (Potential Founder)

    1. Role: Product Lead @ CRED (2.5 yrs)

    2. Other Experience: Co-Founder & CEO @ Spenny (YC W20 → acquired by CRED), EIR @ Entrepreneur First, IB Analyst @ J.P. Morgan

    3. Description: Left CRED 2/26 and "tinkering with AI, product, growth"

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