Circuit Mind has announced $25M in funding, including an $18.5M Series A led by Norwest, to bring AI to electronics design. Founded by Tomide and Basilio, Circuit Mind is building an AI platform that helps engineers design, verify and optimise circuit boards, turning work that traditionally takes months into weeks. Already used by engineering teams at Emerson and Schneider Electric, the platform can cut design time by up to 90% and reduce component costs by 25%. Proud to have backed this team from day zero at EF.

ClarityCare AI has raised a $16.5M Series A led by Headline to automate prior authorizations and help patients access healthcare faster. Led by Hermine and Alexandru, ClarityCare is building AI agents that automate the administrative work behind prior authorizations, helping health plans process requests faster while keeping clinicians in control of medical decisions. Its AI agent, Electra, has already reduced authorization wait times from 12 days to 2 for one customer. ClarityCare's platform now supports workflows affecting 6 million people across the US. Proud to back Hermine & Alexandru at EF.

Today we’re announcing @ClarityCareAI’s oversubscribed $16.3M Series A, led by @HeadlineVC. Total funding is now close to $20M. One year ago we set out to bring the American healthcare system online, in real time. Electra already does it for millions of patients every month: a prior authorization that used to take 12 days now takes 5 minutes, and nobody waits by the fax. It has been quite a year: health plans, TPAs and government programs covering millions of lives now run on Electra, and every one of them is still with us. We hauled our desks 250 feet into a bigger office, took the stage at more than 10 conferences, and (literally) climbed a mountain together. Now it’s time to build the infrastructure every healthcare transaction can run on, not just this one. To our customers and to the ClarityCare team: you made this happen, thank you. It’s only the beginning. Let’s go. And in case it wasn't clear: WE'RE HIRING ACROSS ALL ROLES. Thank you to Headline for leading, to Arthur Ventures and @FjLabs for joining, and to Maverick Ventures, @firstminutecap, Top Harvest Capital and @joinef for doubling down on @alexandrei1998 and I. Watch the video to see what happens when Electra moves into the office, and meet the new look at claritycare [dot] ai. Axios story and hiring link in the comments.

I just joined a panel on how to find a cofounder hosted by @SOSV. Here are my tips on how to nail one of the most important decisions you'll ever make as a founder...

Your company wants AI to do your job. There's just one problem: it doesn't even know what you do. That's the problem Fatimah and Tjalling are tackling with Collective Intuition. They met through EF and bonded over a question: what will humans actually do in a post-AGI world? Now they're building technology that understands how work actually happens, so AI agents can learn to do it. Their first 2 contracts? One of the world's 10 largest banks and a Fortune 250 company. A few weeks ago, they pitched Collective Intuition at EF Demo Day. Watch their full pitch on the Demo Day portal.

Notion was their customer. Then it acquired their company. @ghita__ha met her co-founder Nicholas at EF. Together, they built @ZeroEntropy_AI, an AI infrastructure startup developing cutting-edge search models. Notion became one of their biggest customers. Eventually, it acquired ZeroEntropy. Today, Ghita leads Model Research at Notion. In our latest Waymo Ride, @Alicebentinck catches up with Ghita to discuss how it all happened, when founders should consider selling, and why San Francisco made all the difference.

Karol Hausman is the co-founder and CEO of Physical Intelligence. His company is betting on a future where physical labor is as readily available as electricity. And the plan is to build a single AI model that can power any robot in the world. PI’s models are already moving beyond robot arms. One partner uses them to power an autonomous wheel loader that loads a dump truck with no operator inside the machine. The parallels between @physical_int and early OpenAI cannot be ignored: a research-first company, a general-purpose model, and some of the field’s best minds working on it. @hausman_k managed to get not one but six well-known names in robotics and tech to bet on the company: @svlevine , @chelseabfinn , @lachygroom (an early Stripe employee and prolific investor), @QuanVng , @adnan_esm and @brian_ichter For a team like this to work, everyone has to be willing to question their own ideas. And as CEO, Karol sets the example. He’s intellectually honest enough to reconsider the path ahead, even when it means walking away from work he’s spent years building. During his PhD, a visiting researcher told him to scrap two years of work and change methods. Karol thought the visitor was wrong. Then he attended his lecture, changed his mind, and rebuilt his PhD around deep learning. The visitor was Sergey Levine. Today, they’re co-founders. They deliberately hire for that same intellectual honesty at Physical Intelligence to maintain the cultural DNA. @Anastasia_ELW and I traced how Karol thinks, hires, and gets some of robotics’ best minds to build together. Sidedoors Presents: Karol Hausman, The Founder Who Bets Everything on Chaos. sidedoors.co/p/physical-inte…

What are the odds this post gets 1 million views? @v4vihan's answer: make a market on it. 8 years after starting a quant trading firm from his college dorm and scaling it to nearly $100M AUM, he’s now building @Omnibook_xyz: a way to turn financial views into trades. Already on testnet: - 25,000 registrations - 4,000 daily active traders - 40% week-over-week volume growth 2 weeks ago, Vihan pitched Omnibook at Demo Day. Watch the full pitch on the Demo Day portal.

Big congrats to @alexnhaus and Edmundo. Helicon is doing incredible work!

Congrats @alexnhaus & @Esanzgadea on announcing Helicon and their $16.5M seed. These guys are obsessive and intense, and they’re industrializing critical components of our Western supply chain. I'm incredibly grateful I got to back and work with them at EF.

@joinef portco news: Helicon (F25) raised a $16.5M Seed They're building autonomous factories to build composite structures at scale Massive congrats to @alexnhaus and @Esanzgadea heliconindustries.com/

I first met @alexnhaus in November 2024. The intensity he’s taken on everything with @Esanzgadea consistently has been nuts. We at @joinef feel very fortunate to have been so close to the inception of Helicon.

Helicon is building factories to industrialize composites. We raised a $16.5M seed round led by @alley_corp (@abemurray /@JonesBrannon) with participation from @joshbuckley, @chalfs, @gokulr and other top investors. We’re ramping production at our factory in Los Angeles to deliver against millions of unmanned systems that need to be built domestically. We're building a world class team. Join us. helicon.tech

Helicon has raised $16.5M to industrialize advanced composites, with backing from AlleyCorp, Josh Buckley, Mike Chalfen, Charlie Songhurst and others. Helicon is building a new generation of factories that combine specialised manufacturing models and robotic assembly to produce advanced composite structures at scale, making it possible to manufacture faster, iterate more quickly and reduce reliance on highly specialised manual labour. Last April, we filmed @alexnhaus and Edmundo in San Francisco, just before they pitched at EF Demo Day, to hear about their vision for the future of manufacturing. Six months later, they're taking that vision to the next level. Proud to have backed Helicon from day zero at EF.

Lovart x OpenAI: Founder Vibe-Design Workshop Thursday, Oct 22 · 6–8pm · San Francisco Hands-on session for founders building with small teams. Bring a project to demo. Top 3 projects win a year of Lovart Pro and a feature on our socials. Spots are limited. RSVP ↓

From underwater robots to solving one of the biggest bottlenecks in infrastructure: energy. Grace and Vayu came to SF building underwater robots. 1 week later, they killed the idea. Then they spoke to hundreds of people in 2.5 weeks and found a much bigger problem: getting enough power, fast enough. That led to LOIs and a $500K contract. Last week, they pitched Lattice Energy at Demo Day. Watch their full pitch on the Demo Day portal.

I am a picture person mostly the one standing a step behind: a founder pitching 60 potential cofounders an hour after landing a hardware lab built overnight in a residency a cofounding team cooking side by side with a chef a boiler room in the mission a last garden lunch with founders who arrived solo and left with companies most of these stayed in my camera rolls