We’re back with our latest spotlight on early stage Seattle-area startups. This edition features founders building software for video editing, releasing music, AI chats, SaaS sprawl, coding with AI agents, and making in-person connection.
Read on for brief descriptions of each company — along with pitch assessments from “Mean VC,” a GPT-powered critic offering a mix of encouragement and constructive feedback.
Check out past Startup Radar posts here, and email me at [email protected] to flag other companies and startup news.
Gatefolded
Founded: 2026
The business: A music tech platform that helps artists securely share unreleased tracks while also building direct relationships with fans. Since launching in January, the bootstrapped startup has signed up dozens of artists and begun converting early trial users to paid plans at $49 per year.
Leadership: Founder and CEO Jasen Samford spent a decade at DistroKid, a music tech company that helps musicians get their work onto streaming and video platforms.
Mean VC: “You’re addressing a clear need around pre-release security and direct fan engagement, and early paid conversions suggest some initial product-market resonance. I’d focus on demonstrating consistent artist retention, measurable fan engagement metrics, and a scalable acquisition strategy that shows this can grow beyond early adopters without relying on high-touch onboarding.”
HYV Social
Founded:
The business: A mobile app designed to help remote and busy professionals turn spontaneous interest in going out into real-world connection. The bootstrapped startup, which launched a beta in Seattle at the end of last year, uses geo-location and consent-based signals to show who nearby is open to meeting in the moment, aiming to reduce social hesitation and awkwardness for busy professionals.
Leadership: Co-founder Jason Lee is a longtime security leader who spent nearly 14 years at Microsoft and was CISO at both Zoom and Splunk. Co-founder Brandon Sene also worked on security at Microsoft, and co-founder Cody Cronberger was a software engineer at Amazon.
Mean VC: “There’s something compelling about turning fleeting ‘I should go out’ moments into action, especially for time-constrained professionals. But this only works if you can create critical mass and a clear reason to open the app repeatedly — so I’d focus obsessively on retention, safety, and proving strong engagement in a single neighborhood before expanding.”
PrimeOrbit
Founded: 2024
The business: An operating layer for AI conversations focused on turning chat-based interactions into completed actions and workflows across channels. The bootstrapped company aims to help AI-driven products increase growth and engagement by closing the loop after a conversation ends.
Leadership: Founder and CEO Mahadev Alladi spent 17 years at Microsoft, where he helped lead teams working on advertising tech.
Mean VC: “This tackles a real problem — AI chats rarely translate into completed actions — and closing that loop could drive meaningful lift for AI products. The priority should be narrowing to one high-value workflow and proving measurable impact, since broad infrastructure positioning will struggle in a crowded market.”
SageOx
Founded: 2026
The business: Tools for AI-native teams where humans and coding agents work side by side. The company describes its product as an “agentic hivemind” designed to capture shared context and keep human developers and AI agents aligned as software increasingly ships with minimal human intervention.
Leadership: CEO Ajit Banerjee previously founded three startups and most recently was at Hugging Face. His co-founders include Milkana Brace, who previously founded Jargon (acquired by Remitly), and Ryan Snodgrass, who spent 15 years at Amazon.
Mean VC: “The vision is timely — AI-native teams need better coordination between humans and agents — and shared context could become critical as autonomous coding scales. The risk is abstraction: focus on a concrete workflow where misalignment is painful today and prove clear productivity gains, or ‘agentic hivemind’ will sound more conceptual than indispensable.”
StackIQ
Founded: 2025
The business: A decision intelligence platform to help enterprises figure out which SaaS and AI tools they actually need — and which are redundant. StackIQ is working with early customers and design partners, and raised a friends-and-family round.
Leadership: Founder and CEO Jana Schuster held leadership roles at Groupon, Sears, Farmer’s Fridge, Visibly, Amazon, The Honest Company, and most recently Deputy.
Mean VC: “You’re going after a real and growing pain point — SaaS and AI sprawl is expensive and chaotic — and if you can consistently surface redundant spend, your value to enterprises is clear and budget-aligned. To make this investable, you need to prove hard ROI with specific numbers and show how you’ll become embedded in procurement or IT workflows so you’re not just another analytics dashboard that gets replaced or absorbed.”
Vivu
Founded: 2025
The business: The bootstrapped startup is working with early pilot customers on an “agentic video workspace” for marketing and growth teams that already have footage but need help turning it into a steady stream of videos. Teams upload real campaign assets, and Vivu drafts multiple editable variants — including hooks, cutdowns, captions, and formats — to speed up production without relying on fully synthetic AI content.
Leadership: Founder Shawn Neal was a manager at Google and Microsoft, and more recently led product at a video AI startup.
Mean VC: “This is a pragmatic wedge — marketing teams sitting on unused footage care about increasing output without going fully synthetic, and editable variants fit how teams actually work. The key will be proving you can deliver materially faster production cycles or higher-performing creatives than internal teams and existing AI tools, or you risk blending into a crowded video tooling market.”
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