Hot Off The Furnace 🔥

• Celebrating: 1 Year of The AI Furnace 🎉

• Reality Defender Spotlight

• The AI Hot 100 Conference

• Upcoming Events

👋 Hey Fam - The AI Furnace is 1 Year Old!

We made it. This month marks one year of The AI Furnace 🎉.

We started The AI Furnace just 12 months ago, because we believed that AI startups could be built anywhere in the world, not just San Francisco, with the right community and talent density in place.

This time last year, everyone told us that AI founders had to be in San Francisco to be building in AI. We saw many founder friends moving there. Coming from NYC and London, we just did not believe that we had to move out of our cities to be successful. We ❤️-ed our local cities and believed in creating financial and economic value to the cities we live in.

So, we decided to take matters into our own hands.

We started bringing founders and researchers together in NYC and London, and this ignited a movement — to support AI founders + operators building in cities outside of San Francisco. In just one year, we’ve hit some amazing milestones including:

• 15,000 community members 🎉 

• Chapters in 6 cities and 4 countries, with requests to expand to over 25 global cities (we can’t even handle it right now 🤯)

• Headlined at NY Tech Week and did a takeover tour across multiple cities in Europe and the US

• 50+ founder / researcher meetups, with partnerships with some of the biggest brands in the world including Harvard Business School, MIT, Oxford, Imperial, UCL, Snap, Fidelity, DLA Piper, Orrick, SVB, Metronome, NEAR Foundation and more

• 10,000+ connections between founders building in AI worldwide

• 500 Founder-investor introductions

• 300 Founder-researcher introductions

• National coverage on Forbes Magazine

• Becoming the most recognized AI community and media brand in the world

🙏 We want to thank you, the community, for the huge support. We couldn’t have done this without you all!

To celebrate our 1 year anniversary, we’re offering a Special Promo Code for The AI Hot 100 Conference ✨ 35% off general admission. Use code: 1YEARANNI. Promotion ends 8/25, midnight.

Now that we got here, get ready for The AI Furnace 2.0. More announcements coming soon 🚀

✌️ Yours truly, Angela & Hamza

Want to see Ben Coleman (Founder of Reality Defender) in action? Come to The AI Hot 100 Conference where he’ll be speaking LIVE and IN-PERSON.

About The AI Hot 💯 Conference

September 18th. NYC.

The Who’s Who of Early Stage AI. 100 of the Hottest Funded Startups in the World, All in One Place. 500+ Investors, Founders, Corporate Leaders and Researchers.

Promo Code✨ For our loyal community, we are offering a 35% off discount for our valued newsletter followers to celebrate our 1 year anniversary

Promo code is 1YEARANNI. Discount ends 8/25, midnight.

Make sure to get yours here!

Some of the AI Startups we’re bringing together for this incredible event include:

• Maven AGI (raised $28M from M13)

• Arcee.ai (raised $29M from Emergence)

• Nomic AI (raised $17M from Coatue)

• Reality Defender (raised $15M from DCVC)

• LastMile AI (raised $10M from Gradient Ventures)

• Piramidal (YC W24, raised $6M from Lionheart Ventures)

• +More

We’ll have some dope AI VCs joining including:

• A16Z

• Flybridge Capital

• Eniac Ventures

• M13

• Firstmark

• Leftlane Capital

• Link Ventures

• IBM Ventures

• Apprentis Ventures

• Left Lane Capital

• +More

Thanks to our sponsors

NEAR Foundation (Platinum), Rho (Gold), Metronome (Gold), Fidelity Private Shares (Silver) and Civic Hall (Silver).

Need help with your startup or stealth project? 🙋‍♂️🙋‍♀️

We’ve recently had numerous founders reach out for GTM/Marketing, Product, Legal and Recruitment support. We’ve decided to accept some select consulting projects. If interested, reach out to [email protected].

About the AI Furnace Community

The AI Furnace is a global network of 15,000+ AI founders, developers and researchers. It was started by Angela Mascarenas and Hamza Zaveri, AI founders from NYC and London who started the org to support fellow AI founders and operators building in local cities outside of Cerebral Valley (San Francisco).