In August 2022, Aravind Srinivas and Denis Yarats waited outside Meta AI chief Yann LeCun’s office in lower Manhattan for five long hours, skipping lunch for the chance to give the NYU professor a demo of their AI program. Once they showed him how their model could search through platforms like LinkedIn, GitHub and Twitter and surface content that GoogleGOOG -1.8% could not, such as the accounts that most frequently replied to LeCun’s tweets, he was impressed enough with the program’s accuracy to invest.

He was one of several tech VIPs, including Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy and prominent angel investor Elad Gil, who got similar personalized demos — and collectively invested $3.1 million in a September 2022 seed round. “It was very relatable for them to go and search about their own Twitter,” Srinivas told Forbes.

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