5 Year Frontier

The future of coding. We cover multiplying engineering output, vibe coding bottlenecks, agents as reviewer, AI roll-ups, and the future of developing software. Merrill Lutsky is co-founder and CEO of Graphite, bringing AI-acceleration and automation to code review. Founded in 2020 out of New York, Graphite has become a key part of the developer ecosystem — as more code is generated with AI, they enable developers to scale the evaluation, testing, and review process before it is released. A growing bottleneck that has become incredibly important. The startup has raised over $70M from leading VC’s such Accel, A16Z, Menlo as well as a receiving a strategic investment from model provider Anthropic. Last year Graphite grew its revenue 20X and is trusted by over 45,000 developers at top engineering organizations such as Shopify and Figma. His second startup, Merrill has helped develop and manage software products for high output engineering companies such as Square, Oscar Insurance, and SelfMade. He holds a degree in Applies Math and Economics from Harvard. Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vcSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The future of carbon conversion. We cover the global energy race, turning CO2 into biofuels, propelling interplanetary travel, modular military refueling stations, and the future of clean energy. Guiding us will be Greg Constantine CEO of AIRCO, one of the most ambitious startups reimagining the role of carbon in our economy and climate future. Headquartered in New York, AIRCO has developed a proprietary technology that captures carbon dioxide and converts it into high-value products, including sustainable aviation fuel, rocket fuel, and even consumer-grade ethanol. Rather than burying carbon underground, AIRCO turns it into something useful—fueling commercial flights, defense operations, and potentially even Mars missions. To date, AIRCO has raised over $100 million from a roster of strategic investors including Carbon Direct Capital, Patriot Capital, Toyota, JetBlue, and has secured large contracts from the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA—including recent work on developing rocket fuel from the Martian atmosphere. Greg Constantine brings a rare blend of operating and investing experience—previously holding senior roles at Diageo and serving as a venture partner at LocalGlobe, where he backed early-stage deep tech and climate companies. Now, he’s at the helm of one of the most frontier-pushing climate startups in the world, blending advanced chemistry, automation, and strategic focus to rewire how we think about carbon. Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vcSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The future of selling. We cover AI-copilots for sales, forecasting engines for CROs, real-time procurement layers, and the future of revenue intelligence. Guiding us will be Andy Byrne CEO of Clari, the #1 Enterprise Revenue Platform trusted by over 1,500 companies managing more than $4 trillion in revenue. From pipeline to close, renewal to expansion, Clari brings end-to-end visibility, control, and predictability to every revenue-critical function in the enterprise. The company has raised $520 million in funding from top-tier investors including Blackstone, Silver Lake, Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, and Sapphire Ventures. Recognized as a 2024 Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ winner and growing at 227% over three years, Clari is leading a movement to modernize how businesses run their revenue process — transforming it from siloed and reactive to unified, intelligent, and data-driven. Andy is a defining voice in the future of revenue operations. A serial entrepreneur and two-time CEO, Clari marks the fourth company he’s helped build with backing from Sequoia Capital — a rare feat that speaks to his track record and long-term vision. Known for being thoughtful, resilient, and a true builder, Byrne has helped scale Clari into a global platform used by the world’s most sophisticated sales and finance teams. Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vcSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The future of AI employees. We cover training and managing an AI workforce, instant agentic collaboration, new AI economics, the death of SaaS, AI lifting up the developing world and the future of agents. Surojit Chatterjee is CEO of Ema — short for Enterprise Machine Assistant. Ema is on a mission to reimagine how work gets done in large organizations by building “universal AI employees.” These aren’t just standalone chatbots — they’re sophisticated, mesh-like networks of specialized agents that can autonomously execute workflows across departments like HR, customer support, sales, and compliance. What sets Ema apart is its no-code, fully agentic platform — allowing non-technical users to configure, onboard, and manage AI employees using only natural language instructions. With over 150 pre-built agents and a proprietary ensemble model called EmaFusion that orchestrates over 100 large language models, the company is pushing the edge of what’s possible in enterprise AI. Ema last raised a $50M Series A led by Accel and has become a rapid riser in the AI landscape. Surojit has one of the best product resumes in tech. He was most recently Chief Product Officer at Coinbase, helping scale one of the most important companies in the crypto economy. Before that, he led product teams at Google for nearly a decade, overseeing products across Mobile Ads, Shopping, and Search, and earlier served as Chief Product Officer at Flipkart, where he helped build India’s leading e-commerce platform. In addition to building Ema, Surojit is also an active angel investor, backing startups like Udemy and Palantir. He holds a Master’s in Computer Science from SUNY Buffalo, and an MBA from MIT Sloan. Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vcSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Aman Singh is Co-founder and CTO of Contextual AI, a company helping enterprises deploy AI and agents with accuracy, control, and safety. Founded by the team that pioneered Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Contextual is building next-generation AI that is deeply specialized to each business — answering with the context of your organization, not just the internet. With customers like Qualcomm and over $100 million raised from Greycroft, Lightspeed, Bain Capital Ventures, and Nvidia, Contextual is fast becoming one of the most important startups in enterprise AI. Aman leads the company’s technology development and brings a deep background in research engineering. He previously worked at Hugging Face, a leading force in open-source AI, and at Meta’s FAIR lab, where he contributed to the development of RAG and cutting-edge multimodal models. He holds a master’s in computer science from NYU, where he focused on the intersection of language and vision. Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vcSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The future of autonomous driving and robotics. We cover simulating physical environments, helping car makers leapfrog Tesla, real world AI models, the economics of self driving cars, autonomous mines, and the future of autonomy. Vlad Voroninski is CEO and co-founder of Helm.ai. An early pioneer in training AI for autonomous cars, robotics, and aviation, Vlad has been instrumental in shifting the industry toward advanced simulation and synthetic data—a radical alternative to the traditional reliance on large-scale, manually labeled training sets. Helm.ai has raised over $100M from top investors, including Freeman Group and Goodyear Ventures, and works with major automakers like Honda and Volkswagen. Vlad Voroninski, Helm.ai's co-founder and CEO is a UC Berkeley PhD, former MIT instructor, and author of 20+ research papers on machine learning. He has been at the forefront of unsupervised learning—an approach he believes will define the future of AI. Before founding Helm.ai, Vlad was Chief Scientist at Sift Security, a machine learning cybersecurity startup that was later acquired by Netskope in 2018. After that, he set out to build Helm.ai, rethinking how AI can be trained for autonomous systems. Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vcSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The future of the US healthcare system. In it we cover the mission for radical transparency, challenging entrenched insurance providers, personalized healthcare, and AI’s empowerment of patient choice. Cobi Gantz is CEO of Chapter, a company revolutionizing how Americans navigate the complexities of Medicare and optimize their healthcare coverage. Founded in 2020, Chapter has rapidly become a leader in providing personalized, technology-driven Medicare guidance, aiming to simplify decision-making for seniors across the nation. They have taken on the enormous task of bringing greater transparency to the complex and multi-layered US healthcare system for the benefit of consumers. The company has raised over $100M in funding from investors such as XYZ Venture Capital, Susa and Marverick. Before founding Chapter, Cobi spent 6 years at Palantir, a $230B big data, analytics, and AI company embedded into the public and government sector. Cobi holds degrees from University Pennsylvania, an Economics degree from Wharton, and Masters in Public Policy from Cambridge. Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vcSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The future of data infrastructure. We cover the explosion in compute demand, the petabytes of untapped enterprise data, energy-efficient GPUs, DeepSeek, the $500B Stargate project, and how AI is transforming data processing. Craig Dunham is CEO of Voltron Data, a company at the forefront of accelerating data processing for AI, analytics, and enterprise-scale workloads. Voltron provides the infrastructure necessary to handle enormous amounts of data — transforming bottlenecks into breakthroughs. By championing open-source frameworks like Apache Arrow, Voltron is building the connective tissue that allows businesses to process data at orders-of-magnitude speed and efficiency, reshaping industries from finance to healthcare to national security — partnering with the likes of Snowflake and Meta. Voltron have established themselves as a key part of the AI infrastructure stack and have raised a total of $110M from the likes of Coatue, LightSpeed, Google Ventures and BlackRock. With a deep background in scaling data infrastructure businesses, Craig is Voltron’s CEO. Before Voltron Data, Craig was the CEO of Lumar, a leading SaaS technical SEO platform. Prior to that, he held significant roles including General Manager at Guild Education and Seismic, where he led the integration of Seismic’s acquisition of The Savo Group and drove go-to-market strategies in the financial services sector. Craig began his career in investment banking with Citi and Lehman Brothers before transitioning into technology. He holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vcSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The future of AI infrastructure. We cover Open Source supremacy, DeepSeek disruption, building small expert models, and staying ahead of the blazing pace of AI innovation. Lin Qiao is the CEO and co-founder of Fireworks AI, a company pioneering scalable AI infrastructure to help businesses build, customize, and deploy AI models and applications with speed and efficiency. Fireworks provides seamless access to over 100 AI models, including those from OpenAI, DeepSeek, and other leading providers, making enterprise AI adoption faster and more flexible. Founded in 2022, Fireworks AI has already gained high-profile customers such as DoorDash, Verizon, and Upwork. Backed by Sequoia, the company has raised $77 million to date and is currently valued at $550 million. Lin brings a wealth of experience in AI infrastructure and engineering leadership. She has held key technical roles at IBM and LinkedIn, but is best known for her tenure at Meta, where she led a team of 300+ world-class engineers in AI frameworks and platforms. She played a pivotal role in scaling PyTorch, deploying it across Facebook’s global data centers and billions of devices, cementing it as one of the most widely used open-source AI frameworks today. Lin holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara and a Master’s in Computer Science from Fudan University in China. Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vcSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The future of material science. In it we talk about discovering new materials with AI, carbon neutral compute, data centers in space, and the convergence of biology and materials. Jonathan Godwin CEO of Orbital Materials, a material sciences company that leverages AI to discovery and design of advanced materials, particularly for clean energy, carbon capture, and data center applications. Founded in 2022 out of London, Orbital have raised over $20M in funding from the likes of Radical Ventures, Nvidia, and Toyota. They have already developed the world fastest and most accurate AI model for simulating advanced materials, including their own proprietary foundation model. The startup has also entered a multi-year collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop new data center decarbonization and efficiency technologies. Jonathan’s impressive background includes a tenure as a senior researcher at Google DeepMind, where he honed his expertise in artificial intelligence. He holds advanced degrees in physics and computational sciences, with a degree from University College London. Sign up for new podcasts and our newsletter, and email me on danieldarling@focal.vcSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.