Investor @insightpartners | prev @dukeu, @a16z, @contrary_res
New York, NY
Joined December 2022
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Rayan Malik retweeted
Kastle is building AI employees for banks. Its agents automate operations across mortgage servicing, consumer lending, and other back-office functions.
Today, Kastle works with 10 of the top 25 mortgage servicers and has processed more than $2 billion in transactions. The company recently raised a $24M Series A, just two years after going through YC.
In this episode of Founder Firesides, founders @therishic and Nitish join @sdianahu to share why they started over just one month before Demo Day, how they found their way into one of the hardest industries for deploying AI, and what it takes to make agents reliable enough to handle real financial transactions.
00:05 — What Kastle Does
01:00 — Why Banks Need AI Employees
02:50 — Going Back to Zero Before Demo Day
05:00 — Finding the Idea for Kastle
06:43 — Landing Their First Customer
08:18 — Moving Into a Customer’s Office
08:59 — The Future of AI Employees in Banking
Rayan Malik retweeted
Last week, we brought together 40+ founders, builders, and enterprise leaders for a data and AI dinner in NYC.
Lots of interesting conversations & discussion points -- a few that stood out:
- the latest advances across models, harnesses, data infrastructure, security, etc.
- how the most innovative companies are leveraging LLMs and agents for internal and customer-facing use cases.
- gaps, blockers, and opportunities in enterprise deployment and in bringing AI into both individual lives and large organizations at further scale.
- what’s ahead for AI and how we get there, safely.
Always great to bring together so many friends and new faces to talk about all that is happening in data and AI, and the many opportunities ahead. Thank you to everyone who joined and made it such a wonderful evening.
Rayan Malik retweeted
We’re excited to announce our $15M Series A, led by @insightpartners.
Passionfroot is the execution layer for creator-led growth — the way the next generation of companies reach the market.
As AI makes software easy to build, distribution becomes the real moat. Buyers no longer discover products through ads or SEO; they find them through the independent voices they already trust — the creators, operators and builders they follow. Passionfroot makes working with them something any team can actually run, end to end: discovery, contracts, campaigns and global payments, unified by AI.
Today we power creator-led growth for Figma, Replit, Airtable, Luma and countless category-leading AI-natives and Fortune 500s.
This raise lets us open our New York office, invest deeply in the product, and grow the team across New York, Berlin and São Paulo.
Huge thanks to Insight Partners for leading the round, to Creandum, Supernode and s16vc for doubling down, and to our customers for building this with us.
Read the story in TechCrunch 👇
Super excited to be partnering with @jenpphan, @_elledienne, and the incredible team @passionfrootme on their next chapter of growth!
They're scaling rapidly and hiring across all roles in NY, Berlin, and São Paulo 🚀
Passionfroot raises $15M to expand its B2B creator marketplace to the US techcrunch.com/2026/07/22/pa…
Wrote some thoughts on the scale of real data we need for a GPT in robotics, the cost of collecting that data, how surrogate data can reduce that cost, the drawbacks of surrogate data, and how I’d think about reaching 1.1 trillion tokens.
rayansmalik.com/robotics?v=1
We're nearing the GPT moment for robotics.
But to get there, we need models that combine broad generalization with high task success.
That’s why I’m covering @physical_int – the company building a foundation model for robotic intelligence – in this edition of Startups to Join.
If joining @adnan_esm, @chelseabfinn, @lachygroom, @hausman_k, @brian_ichter, @svlevine, and @QuanVng sounds exciting, they're actively hiring and recently raised $475M from @bondcap, @JeffBezos, @khoslaventures, @Lux_Capital, @OpenAI, @Redpoint, @sequoia, and Thrive!
@openevidence is perhaps the fastest-growing healthcare company in history with 25% of US doctors already using the product to help them at the point of care.
Read more about how they are using AI to improve patient outcomes in this week's Startups to Join edition. Link below!
Rayan Malik retweeted
Excellent post on the gaps in data acquisition for autonomy in the real world
Zeromatter is one of the most exciting companies I have the fortune to work with and will bring this to bear
They are growing fast and hiring across functions 🚀
zeromatter.com/jobs
As @sama recently wrote, we're very close to the arrival of robots that can do tasks in the real world.
But the missing ingredient is still data.
That's why I'm covering ZeroMatter – the startup using simulation to accelerate how robots are built, tested, and trained – for the latest edition of Startups to Join (link below).
As @sama recently wrote, we're very close to the arrival of robots that can do tasks in the real world.
But the missing ingredient is still data.
That's why I'm covering ZeroMatter – the startup using simulation to accelerate how robots are built, tested, and trained – for the latest edition of Startups to Join (link below).