The First Move. The people and capital behind the AI race. |
Small teams, giant checks The AI labs that just raised, what they're building, and the 100+ roles they're trying to fill. Written by Jack Leyden |
| Together with Accelera Growth Partners, helping AI founders learn, build, and scale. |
Hey Movers,
Somewhere in San Francisco, about two dozen people with no product and no revenue are sitting on $1 billion in fresh funding. Normally that's a punchline. This month it was a trend.
Since the end of September, ten small AI labs have raised nearly $3 billion between them. Some are just a couple dozen people. Half of them are building for the physical world: factories, chemistry labs and robot hands. And together they're hiring for more than 100 open roles, which is the part we suspect you'll scroll to first. (It's near the bottom. We'll wait.)
Here's who raised, what they're betting on, and who they want to hire.
The October check list Amount raised in each lab's latest round, announced Sept 29 to Oct 22. Bar length is to scale.
Models and software Physical world: robots, factories, chemistry Total: about $2.96 billion across ten labs. |
🛩️ A year-old lab with no product just raised $1 billion
Flapping Airplanes is a couple dozen people in San Francisco, founded by brothers Ben and Asher Spector (both Stanford PhD students) and Aidan Smith (a Thiel Fellow who spent three years at Neuralink). On Oct 21 it raised a $1 billion Series A co-led by Index and Lux, at a valuation Bloomberg puts around $6 billion. Its seed, nine months ago, valued it at $1.5 billion.
What are investors paying for? A bet that AI is wildly wasteful. The founders argue humans learn from vastly less data than today's models, and they're building around a GPU "megakernel" that can train a model, serve it and play a video game at the same time. Advisors include Andrej Karpathy and Jeff Dean. Sequoia's David Cahn calls it the "young person's AGI lab."
The move: When the biggest checks go to research with no product, the scarce asset isn't revenue. It's a small group of people investors believe can find the next breakthrough. Flapping has no public job board, so if that's you, the website has a contact link.
🤐 TypeSafe built a model that can't say hello. It's worth $7.5 billion.
Most models chat. TypeSafe AI's model, Jev, doesn't. It returns structured decisions that other software can act on, and it was trained entirely on synthetic data. The name is a nod to the Jevons paradox: make something cheaper and people use more of it. Jev doesn't charge for its output.
Co-founder Diogo Almeida helped build ChatGPT at OpenAI. TypeSafe raised a ~$40 million seed in mid-September. About three weeks later, on Oct 9, it raised an $870 million Series A at $7.5 billion, led by a16z, with Martin Casado joining the board. Demand briefly knocked its API offline.
The move: TypeSafe posts pay openly: most engineering roles list $210K to $285K plus equity, and the "Data Demons" role is a real job title. All 15 roles are in person in San Francisco.
🏭 OpenAI's alumni are building in the real world
Two of the month's biggest raises came from OpenAI veterans who left chatbots for physical industries.
Arda, led by former OpenAI chief research officer Bob McGrew, came out of stealth on Oct 20 having raised about $230 million at $1.5 billion, from Accel, Founders Fund, Altimeter and Khosla. Its AI agent reads engineering CAD files and writes the instructions for assembly lines. Anduril is the anchor customer. McGrew's stated goal: "a fully automated version of Shenzhen in West Texas."
Warp Sciences, from former OpenAI product chief Kevin Weil, launched Oct 22 with a $215 million Series A led by Lightspeed. It's a US chemistry lab where chemists, AI and robots make and test molecules for drug companies. Co-founders include Mano Paluri, a founding member of Meta's FAIR lab, and DJ Patil, the first US chief data scientist.
The move: The software-only AI startup is no longer the default. If you've worked in hardware, manufacturing or a wet lab and you understand AI, the market for you just got a lot better.
🤖 Robots had a very good month
Physical AI took four of the ten rounds on our list.
Eka Robotics raised a $150 million Series A at $1.45 billion (a16z and F-Prime). Co-founder Tuomas Haarnoja came from Google DeepMind and wrote a widely used robot-learning algorithm. Eka's gripper costs under $1,000 and, the company says, handles about 1,500 picks an hour.
Dream Labs raised a $90 million seed (B Capital and Kindred). CEO Joel Jang led the world-model work on Nvidia's humanoid robot project. Its model runs robots from different manufacturers through one API.
Enact Intelligence in Zurich raised a $30 million pre-seed, reportedly Switzerland's largest ever, with Yann LeCun and Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch among the backers. CEO Manuel Galliker came from Physical Intelligence.
General Intuition raised $220 million at $6.2 billion on Sept 29. It trains agents and robots on billions of gameplay clips from Medal, the gaming app its CEO co-founded. OpenAI reportedly once offered $500 million for that data.
The move: Robotics labs are hiring a different mix of people: mechanical engineers, test engineers, robot operators and controls specialists, alongside ML researchers. Eka is also hiring a Head of People, a sign it's about to grow quickly.
💼 Who's hiring: 101 open roles
Every lab we could find with a public job board, plus two we're watching. Pay is shown only where the company posts it.
| Lab | Roles | Where and what it pays |
| General Intuition | 19 | New York, plus Geneva, London, Paris and Zurich. $110K to $600K plus equity. Member of Technical Staff: $250K to $600K. |
| TypeSafe AI | 15 | San Francisco, in person. $126K to $350K plus equity. Most engineering roles: $210K to $285K. |
| Nous Research | 15 | Mostly remote, plus New York. Engineering, product and security. Pay not posted. |
| Hone | 12 | San Francisco, in person. Research, applied AI, design and marketing. Pay not posted. |
| Enact Intelligence | 12 | Zurich, in person. Pre- and post-training research, FPGA and controls engineering. Pay not posted. |
| Eka Robotics | 11 | Boston area, in person. ML and reinforcement learning, mechanical and test engineering, plus a Head of People. Pay not posted. |
| Warp Sciences | 9 | South San Francisco, in person. AI training, robotics, chemistry and a Head of Finance. Pay not posted. |
| Idler ON OUR RADAR | 6 | San Francisco, in person. Builds training environments for frontier labs; $9M seed led by Paradigm in August. Forward Deployed Engineer posted at $125K to $400K plus equity. |
| Centaur ON OUR RADAR | 2 | Expert data labeling for health and science AI, spun out of MIT. Technical PM and a remote US Senior Sales Engineer. Pay not posted. |
⚡ Quick moves
Open source, real revenue: Nous Research raised a $90 million Series B at $1.5 billion led by Robot Ventures. It's one of the few labs here to report revenue: about $36 million annualized as of September, per the Wall Street Journal.
Agents with a P&L: Hone raised a $60 million seed from Benchmark and Index for AI agents that are judged on profit and loss. Its CEO was Cognition CEO Scott Wu's chief of staff.
AlphaGo goes back to the board: Thore Graepel, an AlphaGo co-creator who left Google DeepMind this summer, launched Metis Reasoning in London with tens of millions in funding and about 12 people.
DeepSeek goes shopping: DeepSeek has agreed to lead a seed round for Winverse AI, a robot-brain lab from a former Tencent AI scientist, at about $400 million, per Bloomberg. The deal isn't final.
♟️ First Move fact: Flapping Airplanes is named after the ornithopter, the flapping-wing flying machine people tried for centuries before fixed wings won. Its site even lists an email address for people who think its thesis is wrong.
♟️ YOUR MOVE
You get one offer letter. Which lab are you joining?
That's it for this week, Movers. Know someone looking for a job in AI? Forward this to them. There are 101 open roles in here.
Jack
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Funding figures as publicly reported; valuations for Flapping Airplanes and Arda are press reports, not company disclosures. Job counts and pay are from each company's job board on Oct 31 and change often. Not an endorsement of any employer. Nothing here is legal or investment advice.
