Helping Founders Build Directly with AI Agents

Founder Institute Alumni & Members

We prioritize FI founders because you've validated your commitment through the program. You understand lean startup principles and are ready to take ownership of your technical journey.

AI-Era Opportunities We Focus On

The traditional SaaS model is crumbling. Why pay for inflexible legacy platforms when AI makes it easier to build custom solutions that evolve with your needs and preserve your IP? We help founders build in areas where AI doesn't just enable—it multiplies opportunity:

• •Robotics, Physical AI & the abundance revolution: In robotics, DDD stands for Dull, Dirty, and Dangerous—a framework describing tasks that are repetitive (dull), messy (dirty), or hazardous (dangerous) for humans, making them ideal for automation to improve safety and efficiency. Humanoids and autonomous systems are flipping the script on real-world work—laundry services, car washes, lawn care, tree trimming, plumbing, skilled trades. Robotaxis unlock previously cost-prohibitive use cases: safely transporting kids to sports practice, taking grandma to visit friends, picking up groceries on the way home. What was once expensive, unsafe, or unavailable through capital-intensive services is becoming accessible and affordable. As autonomous driving and humanoids go mainstream, the opportunities are limitless. The bravest founders can even think about participating in the race to space-bound datacenters. Why not? Only the unreasonable change the world; the reasonable just fit in.
• •Healthcare automation & clinical efficiency: Amid nursing shortages and burnout, AI handles the mundane yet critical tasks that drain healthcare workers—automating follow-up patient calls, streamlining documentation and charting, managing scheduling, triaging incoming patients, providing clinical decision support for lab results, and optimizing billing and supply chains. Real-time monitoring and smart alerts catch deteriorations early in understaffed wards. These aren't futuristic—they're implementable now with existing EHR integrations, freeing overworked clinicians to focus on direct patient care while reducing errors and improving outcomes.
• •Meet Consumers Where They're Going: Small businesses—restaurants chained to reservation giants, family entertainment centers stuck with outdated booking software, youth sports leagues reliant on clunky team-management tools—are trapped by legacy providers with fragmented, friction-filled experiences. Consumers are increasingly delegating search, recommendations, booking, and payments to AI agents via natural text, voice, or video on phones, TVs, and cars. Build AI-native products that make businesses easily discoverable and engaging for these agents—handling prompts and closing payments directly, without clunky POS terminals or vendor lock-in. Liberate industries with seamless, agent-first experiences that scale effortlessly.
• •Blockchain & AI convergence: The regulatory floodgates opened in 2025. The GENIUS Act (signed July 2025) and Clarity Act created a framework for crypto adoption. The U.S. government has committed to moving financial trade and real-world assets onchain. Build products that bridge real-world use cases with blockchain and agentic AI—fast, trustless stablecoin payments via x402, AP2, ACP protocols, and zero-knowledge proofs for privacy-preserving transactions. This isn't coming—it's here. Ride the wave before mainstream adoption hits.
• •Network Effects That Compound: Build platforms where every new user makes the product exponentially more valuable—like AI agent marketplaces that get smarter with every integration, shared training datasets that improve models for all participants, community-driven meme coins that rally thousands around a shared vision, or utility tokens that unlock better features as the network grows (holders earn governance, rewards, or exclusive access). These blockchain-inspired flywheels (Metcalfe's Law on steroids) create unbreakable moats: the bigger the community, the stronger the value, and the harder it is for clones to catch up. We obsess over helping founders engineer these winners-take-all dynamics from day one.
• •AI-Accelerated Differentiation: Legacy systems trap pieces of the business puzzle in disconnected silos. The most valuable knowledge and experience of any business lies in the links between these silos—the decision traces that flow from customer feedback through sales or support interactions, executive consideration, product prioritization, development, testing, deployment, and back into support tickets later. These deep business decision traces are lost in legacy architectures. But when modern AI is given access to your unique proprietary data and constructs deep semantic knowledge graphs, it becomes an unmatched source of wisdom for everyone in the company. Build products that leverage unique assets or insights AI can't easily replicate, but can dramatically accelerate once you've achieved initial traction.

Based in Austin, TX—a thriving hub for AI innovation and ambitious builders—we're here to help you capitalize on these transformational shifts. The question isn't whether to build in the AI era. It's whether you'll be among the first wave of founders who do.

Growth Mindset

We work best with founders who embrace learning, understand that early products are about validation, and want to build genuine fluency with AI tools. If you're ready to roll up your sleeves and build alongside an experienced guide, you'll thrive here.