tl;dr: we flagged Jacob Zietek in stealth on august 19th. 21 days later Ixian Robotics raised a pre-seed from a16z and Accel. here are 10 more founders from OpenAI, xAI, Google DeepMind, Thinking Machines and Ramp. all still in stealth.
we built frontrun to find startups early. now we're going earlier: finding the founder before there's a company to find.
already working. we flagged @JacobZietek in stealth on august 19th. 21 days later: @ixianrobotics, pre-seed from @a16z and @Accel.
here are 10 more founders. all still in stealth.
1. Aakanksha Chowdhery (@achowdhery)
former tech lead on PaLM 540B and Gemini at Google DeepMind, then senior staff research scientist at Reflection AI. adjunct professor at Stanford. now co-founder and CEO of a stealth AI startup, likely focused on self-improving AI agents.
flagged september 11 2026 · LinkedIn · website · Stanford, CA
2. Sandeep Pani (@skcd42)
former member of technical staff at xAI who shipped Grok Code Fast 1. previously co-founded CodeStory (YC S23), the team behind the AI code editor Aide, and was a tech lead at Meta. left xAI in august and is building something new, likely in AI coding agents.
flagged august 22 2026 · LinkedIn · Bay Area
3. Chen Shen (@scv119)
former member of technical staff at OpenAI scaling training infrastructure, then on the training stack at Cursor. previously led Ray core at Anyscale and co-created Delos at Facebook. left Cursor in july and is building something new in stealth.
flagged september 14 2026 · LinkedIn · website · San Francisco
4. Rafit Jamil (@RafitJamil)
former member of technical staff at OpenAI, previously at Google and Reality Labs. left OpenAI in august to co-found a stealth startup already backed by speedrun, likely in long-running AI agents.
flagged september 11 2026 · LinkedIn · San Francisco
5. Han Hua (@hhua_)
former engineer and PM at Google, then principal at GV investing in AI and deep tech, most recently at SemiAnalysis. now co-founder of a stealth company reimagining supercomputers.
flagged september 12 2026 · LinkedIn · Palo Alto
6. Raman Khatri (@ramankhatri)
former member of technical staff at xAI who led the Starfleet team and built Grokipedia. now co-founder and CTO of a stealth startup automating the supply chain for data centers.
flagged september 12 2026 · LinkedIn · San Francisco
7. Chelsea Zou (@boson2photon)
researcher at the Stanford AI Lab, previously an ML engineer at Gridspace building LLM agents and a VC associate at Scale Asia Ventures investing in AI infrastructure. now co-founding a stealth startup in AI x health.
flagged september 12 2026 · LinkedIn · website · San Francisco
8. Seb Goddijn (@sebgoddijn)
former internal AI lead at Ramp who shipped Glass, the AI workspace behind Ramp's company-wide AI adoption. previously an investor at 8VC, Stanford CS. left Ramp in august to start a company and is recruiting a team to "bring AI to the masses."
flagged august 21 2026 · LinkedIn
9. Alexander H. Liu (@alex_h_liu)
former member of technical staff at Thinking Machines Lab and speech researcher at Mistral AI on Voxtral. MIT PhD. now co-founder of a stealth startup, likely in voice AI.
flagged september 11 2026 · LinkedIn · website · San Francisco
10. Shubh Mittal (@Shubh_Mit)
former member of technical staff at xAI. previously founded Seleste, a funded smart glasses startup for blind users. now building in stealth.
flagged september 12 2026 · LinkedIn · website · San Francisco
what's next
founders move before companies exist. we're building the tool that sees it happen. the stealth discovery pipeline is coming soon to frontrun. want early access? message @frontrunvc.
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