This year, we had 60+ attendees from SF, St. Louis, Detroit, LA, Portland, San Diego, New York, and Toronto gather at the Golden Gate Club in the Presidio.

As a firm focused on technical storytellers, we primarily highlight company-building stories from our portfolio founders at our Annual Summit. It’s also an opportunity for our community to come together and build more meaningful collaborative relationships.

Behind Genius’s Early Stage Applied AI Focus

The past few years have been exciting and filled with change: advances in AI are unlocking incredible opportunities in early-stage applied AI.

With these advancements in mind, our 2026 Annual Summit centered on the stories of four portfolio CEOs building real-world AI applications, especially in legacy industries:

• Textla: SMS Marketing Infrastructure
• Maneva: Edge AI on the Factory Floor
• Intramotev: Electrified Autonomous Trains
• Hostie: Voice AI for Restaurants

I also shared three lessons from my experience as a GP and investor deploying our second Behind Genius fund, and Chinwuba presented our Annual Study of the 100 Most Recent $1B+ Exits. More on this in another post soon.

Textla: SMS Marketing Infrastructure

This year, Luke Brickman, CEO of Textla, took the Behind Genius stage (for the second time) and shared his story of Textla’s astounding breakout trajectory. I’m looking forward to sharing more 🔜 publicly, but for now I’ll give you this:

Luke was the youngest hire in Twilio’s history and went on to lead the top-performing sales teams in North America. While he was there, he noticed they were disqualifying thousands of leads because they didn’t have developers, and sending them to competitors that cost 10x more. A question kept ringing in his head.

Why wasn’t there an easier, better, lower-cost tool for SMS marketing?

Luke left Twilio to build Textla as the answer to that question, and Behind Genius invested $250k very, very early on after being introduced through our network. Some of my favorite founders to back have deceptively simple questions they devote their lives to answering, and Luke is very much that type of founder.

One of my favorite moments of the Annual Summit was hearing Luke talk about his experience working with Behind Genius:

“Paige is one of the investors you will always remember. She has this insane talent for 1) finding cracked founders. Every founder I’ve met in her portfolio has blown me away, and I feel so lucky to have made the cut. And 2) the sense of community Paige brings is unmatched - she’s always been there for us when we need advice, a different perspective, or someone to grill us on our pitch.”

Maneva: Edge AI on the Factory Floor

Rae Jeong’s passion for automating the dangerous parts of manufacturing stems from his childhood in industrial Alberta, Canada (the Texas of Canada). He went to a trade high school and worked as a welder on semi trucks. He studied Mechatronics at U Waterloo, Canada’s top engineering school, then became one of the youngest AI researchers at Google DeepMind in London.

After being introduced by a founder in our network, Behind Genius invested $500k in Maneva’s seed round, led by Bling Capital and Freestyle Capital. This investment is our largest commitment to any company, reflecting our conviction in Rae, his team, the technology, and the size of the market.

In our fireside chat, I asked Rae what it was like to make the leap from an impactful role at DeepMind to becoming a founder.

He described the turning point when his colleagues began to question whether to stay in research, as it was clear there was an incredible opportunity to apply and commercialize the technology. As he reflected on his choice, he could either remain a researcher on the bleeding edge or apply what he had learned to an industry he cared deeply about: manufacturing.

Maneva was born from his decision to apply his robotics research, and Rae teamed up with a friend from Waterloo Mechatronics - Kelvin Chan - who had spent years at one of Canada’s leading self-driving car companies on the manufacturing floor.

Maneva started out with specialized video-to-action AI agents that handle core factory issues: downtime, quality assurance, and safety. They’ve expanded their offering to an Orchestration Platform that allows factory operators to monitor production live.

After our Annual Summit, Maneva announced its $27M Series A, led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), with participation from returning investors Bling Capital and Freestyle Capital, as well as a group of leading angel investors and funds. This fundraise brings Maneva’s total capital raised to $38.4M, accelerating its mission to close the $18 trillion global manufacturing efficiency gap.

Intramotev: Electrified Autonomous Trains

Intramotev Founder Tim Luchini from St. Louis joined us to share his story growing up in a small rail town in Ohio, his experience working on autonomous technology at Boeing, and the paper on electrifying trains that changed his life.

Their long-term vision is to reinvent the next generation of rail. By placing motive power directly into the railcar instead of relying on locomotives, Intramotev allows freight to move itself from point to point autonomously and without the use of fossil fuels. They also employ an innovative approach to retrofitting rail cars with sensors, battery packs, and autonomous technology.

Intramotev is based in St. Louis with a team of 45 & has raised $38M+ in venture capital from Flybridge Capital Partners and Alpaca VC, Behind Genius Ventures, Advantage Capital, Aera VC, Band VC, Cantos, Cathcart Rail, Collide Capital, Decisive Point, and Idealab Arizona.

After the Annual Summit, I got to visit the Intramotev team in St Louis & drive a TugVolt on a tablet. Moving 66,000 pounds with just a finger blew my mind:

Hostie: Voice AI for Restaurants

Randall Hom, cofounder and CEO of Hostie, first presented at our 2025 Annual Summit. At the time, we’d just invested in their seed round. Just a year later, Randall shared that their revenue had grown 10x.

After nearly a decade as a product designer at Flexport and Instacart, Randall started a restaurant in SF called Back to Back with his sister. After a few successful years operating, he decided to take another leap by starting a tech company to solve the exact problems he had faced as a restaurant operator: Hostie.

A highlight of the summit was Randall’s live demo of Hostie, calling Back to Back and asking edge cases questions about bringing dogs, gluten-free options, large parties, and their specials.

After our Annual Summit, Hostie announced its $12 million Series A led by Obvious Ventures. The Series A round—which brings Hostie’s total funding to $16 million—included participation from Gradient, Scribble Ventures, Burst Capital, and Behind Genius Ventures. The round also featured strategic investments from notable restaurant operators, including Tim Stannard of Bacchus Management Group and Stuart Brioza of Atomic Workshop.

An Intimate Portfolio Dinner

After the summit, some of our portfolio founders, our team, and family joined us for an intimate dinner, “Friends and Family Round,” imagined and executed by my dear friend Abena Anim-Somuah. A sampling of the menu:

A Note of Gratitude

Each year, our annual summit reminds us why we do what we do - finding exceptional founders, amplifying their stories, and bringing our community together. As we reflect on this year’s annual summit, we’re grateful for the continued trust of our LPs, the drive and energy of our portfolio founders, and the spirit of the broader Behind Genius community.

Thank you to Andy and Chinwuba, our LPs, our founders, Max Toshiro & Alexandra Stancheva, Goodhart Coffee, and all the folks who helped us brainstorm and execute on this gathering.

As Behind Genius continues to grow, we look forward to building, learning, and celebrating together with our community each April.

See you next year in San Diego!

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