a16z speedrun SR004 companies

Alpaka Games builds hybrid-casual action mobile games, applying a rapid-testing studio model to the action genre. The team iterates on core mechanics quickly, combining proven gameplay loops with novel variations to avoid long production cycles. This replaces the traditional mobile game development approach of extended, costly builds before market validation.

Atorie operates a marketplace connecting high-end manufacturers, including Italian leather and cashmere producers, directly to consumers at a fraction of traditional retail prices. Factories gain higher margins by bypassing conventional wholesale and retail chains, while shoppers access premium goods they would otherwise pay multiples more for at a brand-name retailer. AI tools handle merchandising, design, and personal shopping, replacing work typically done by editorial and wholesale teams.

Checkmate builds an AI-native vertical SaaS product targeting complex, high-impact problems in fintech. The company is in stealth, so the specific workflow or customer job it addresses is not yet public. It is founded by a former Google product manager and an AI researcher with prior experience building and exiting a startup.

Cheddr builds a real-money sports wagering app designed for casual bettors, operating legally in 46 states by running on a sweepstakes model that sidesteps the state-by-state licensing constraints that limit traditional sportsbooks. The platform targets the broad adult sports-betting audience, including users under 21 and those in states where conventional online sportsbooks are blocked. It replaces clunky, odds-table-heavy interfaces with a simplified UI, in-game micro-betting, and social and gamification features built around live NFL action.

Chronicler builds an AI assistant that lives inside messaging apps, turning self-sent notes, reminders, and voice memos into an organized, searchable personal knowledge base. It handles task management, deadline reminders, and calendar updates through plain-text chat, replacing dedicated to-do apps and note-taking tools for individuals who already capture thoughts by texting themselves.

Circle Games builds mobile puzzle games for casual players, targeting mechanics with strong market growth. Its current title, Sort Express, tasks players with organizing and matching 3D objects across escalating levels. The studio replaces generic puzzle templates with tightly tuned core mechanics, social systems, and mini-games designed to drive long-term retention.

Clubs Poker builds an online sweepstakes poker and casino platform where players across the United States compete in real-money-style tournaments and cash games without requiring a purchase to play. The platform covers a wide range of poker formats, from Texas Hold'em and Omaha to mixed games and progressive knockout tournaments, replacing both physical card rooms and traditional real-money poker sites. It targets casual players and high-stakes enthusiasts who want accessible, prize-eligible poker available in states where regulated online gambling is restricted.

Coverd builds a gamified spending platform that turns everyday purchases into chances to win cash back or prizes. Users play free casino-style games, rip collectable card packs, and hold a Visa credit card with variable cash-back rates, all under a single account and app. The product replaces flat, passive rewards programs with an active, game-driven loop designed to make personal finance engaging.

Coverstar builds a social platform for kids aged 9 to 16, combining short-form video creation, AI-powered personal avatars, and multiplayer social games in a single app. It replaces general-purpose platforms like TikTok with a purpose-built alternative that has no direct messages, proactive AI and human moderation, and content designed around daily creative challenges rather than passive feed scrolling. Parents and regulators are the secondary audience the safety architecture is built to satisfy.

Darwin builds a search and execution layer for the agentic web, indexing AIs, software, services, experts, and products so that humans and AI agents can find the right capability for a given goal and act on it directly. It replaces fragmented, manual discovery across tools and marketplaces by resolving an intent, shaping scope and terms, and coordinating the work through to completion.

Dial gives AI agents a real phone number with access to voice calls, SMS, iMessage, and WhatsApp through a single API. It targets developers and teams shipping agents into production who would otherwise spend months building their own telephony layer from scratch. The product removes the blocker that stops agents cold when a workflow requires receiving a verification code or placing a call.

Double Dusk builds two-player cooperative video games designed to grow alongside long-term friendships. Each title pairs character-driven design with mechanics that encourage repeated, social play, replacing the solitary or large-group formats that dominate the current market. The studio targets players who want a dedicated co-op experience built specifically for pairs rather than adapted from solo or squad formats.

Double Fifth builds a unified API that gives developers structured access to users' personal data held across third-party platforms, such as watch history, order history, and ride data. It handles the scraping, connector maintenance, and schema normalization that would otherwise fall to each development team. The API targets use cases like onboarding flows and personalization engines that depend on real behavioral history rather than self-reported inputs.

Edgar builds a sweepstakes-powered game engine that brings real-money engagement to free-to-play games. Its first product is a next-generation social casino developed in partnership with Betty Gaming. The engine replaces conventional F2P monetization with sweepstakes mechanics that give players a stake in outcomes without requiring a traditional gambling license.

Figment builds an end-to-end platform for AI-powered interactive storytelling, combining a consumer app with professional authoring tools for visuals and narrative. Readers and creators use it to produce stories that adapt in real time, replacing static, linear formats with personalized, open-ended worlds. The team's background spans Pixar and Epic Games, grounding the technology in both cinematic craft and interactive experience design.

FLORA builds an agentic creative workspace that unifies leading text, image, and video AI models on a single infinite canvas. Visual design teams use it to concept, generate variations, and share production-ready generative workflows with clients, replacing the manual work of stitching together separate AI tools. The product targets professional creative agencies as its primary user.

Ghosted builds a dating app for Gen Z that enforces an unedited-photos-only policy, using AI to detect and remove filtered, retouched, or AI-generated images before they reach other users. It replaces the heavily curated, filter-laden experience common on mainstream dating apps with dynamic, story-style profiles that show people as they actually look. The goal is to eliminate the gap between someone's profile and the person who walks through the door.

Greathorn Games builds socially-driven multiplayer games for PC and console that are designed to spark conversation between players. Where most multiplayer titles treat communication as a side effect, Greathorn makes it a core mechanic, with systems that push players to talk through tactics and strategy during play. Deep integrations with Discord and similar platforms extend that social layer beyond the session to build lasting communities.

Hooper turns a smartphone into a personal sports media crew for recreational basketball players. The app uses video AI to automatically generate game highlights, stats, mixtapes, and leaderboards, replacing the camera operators, editors, and tracking systems that only professional teams could previously afford. Athletes get pro-level storytelling and performance data from a pickup game with nothing beyond the phone already in their pocket.

Intangible builds an AI-native 3D studio for creative teams producing high-stakes visual work across advertising, film, retail, events, architecture, and deep tech. Users build scenes from their own assets and CAD references, direct cameras and animation, and generate pro-quality renders, replacing the complexity and cost of traditional 3D tools like Autodesk or game engines. A proprietary spatial intelligence engine gives generative models a semantic understanding of objects and space, eliminating the hallucinations and loss of control that come with prompt-only workflows.

Kitbash builds Lark, a realtime database for web apps, games, and mobile applications that need state synced across large numbers of concurrent users. It targets developers who rely on Firebase Realtime Database, replacing it with a drop-in compatible alternative that requires changing a single config variable. Teams can run Lark on Kitbash's cloud hosting or self-host the open-source version.

Layerpath turns a single recorded browser workflow, video, or image set into interactive product tours, step-by-step guides, and training videos. Product, marketing, sales, and customer success teams use it to document and teach software without rebuilding walkthroughs from scratch each time the product changes. It replaces manual screen recording, slide decks, and live walkthrough calls.

Mara builds autonomous counter-drone systems for military and critical infrastructure operators facing coordinated FPV drone attacks. Its first product, Spike, is a portable, low-cost interceptor system that provides hemispherical 360-degree coverage in RF-contested, GPS-denied environments, handling detection and defeat without requiring operator input. The autonomy stack is trained inside a video game, using simulation and player data to develop tactics that adapt continuously, replacing slower, centralized, and more expensive traditional counter-UAS approaches.

Marlo builds an AI agent for talent agencies and creators that sits inside email inboxes and social DMs to manage brand deal flow end to end. It ingests historical threads to construct a deal graph, scores new inbound against past performance, drafts replies, and tracks deliverables and payments. The work it replaces is the manual triage, outreach, and coordination that talent coordinators handle across high volumes of brand partnership inquiries.

Mini Studio builds personalized animated films for young children, placing each child as the protagonist using a single uploaded photo. Parents choose from themed stories covering milestones like starting school, bedtime routines, and building confidence, replacing generic children's media with narratives written by child development experts. The product targets families seeking keepsakes and emotionally resonant content tied to specific moments in a child's early life.

Moku builds a launch and distribution platform for web3 game developers, letting studios take a game from MVP to paying users without the usual publishing overhead. Developers list their game, attract early players who buy and trade in-game assets, and collect revenue from day one. The platform replaces the cold-start problem of finding an aligned early audience and setting up monetization infrastructure.

Nativ adapts visual and audio content, including images, video, and graphics, for brands expanding into new regional markets. Its AI platform goes beyond text translation to rework the cultural framing of creative assets so they resonate with local audiences, replacing the manual, agency-driven localization process. Brand and marketing teams use it to produce market-specific content from a single master asset across dozens of languages and cultures.

Nexad builds AI-native marketing products for growth teams running paid ads across Google, Meta, TikTok, and ChatGPT Ads. Its flagship product, Soku AI, is an autonomous marketing agent that continuously analyzes performance, generates and tests ad creative, and applies optimizations around the clock, replacing the manual work done by agencies and human media buyers. The system operates a perceive-decide-act loop and escalates decisions to the user only when human judgment is required.

Nilo builds a browser-based generative AI platform that lets players create 3D models, worlds, and animations from text prompts, sketches, or images in seconds. It targets young creators, particularly those building for Roblox, replacing traditional 3D modeling pipelines with instant generation, rigging, and animation tools. Creators share and play in their worlds together via a simple link, on desktop, mobile, or chat platforms.

o1.exchange builds a unified onchain trading platform for crypto traders who need a full-stack venue in one place. It combines a multi-order-type terminal (spot, limit, sniper, and TWAP), a meta-aggregated cross-chain swap, and a token launchpad built on Uniswap v4. The launchpad replaces the standard fair-launch setup with permanent on-chain liquidity and a decaying fee structure that penalizes snipers rather than rewarding them.

Outcome builds TeamOS, a platform that helps large companies eliminate the coordination drag that accumulates as they grow. It ingests activity data from tools teams already use, such as Jira, GitHub, and calendars, and maps it into a knowledge graph that surfaces where work is blocked by cross-team dependencies. AI-driven recommendations then tell operators what to change in team structure, ownership, or priorities to restore flow, replacing the work of periodic org-design consultants and manual retrospectives.

Plots builds an event discovery platform for Gen Z, surfacing local in-person events and the people attending them. It replaces passive social feeds and generic listings by connecting users to curated real-world experiences and the social layer around those events.

Rehearsals builds a self-serve simulation platform that lets marketing and product teams test decisions against AI digital twins of real customers. Teams upload ad creatives, pricing concepts, or product flows and get predicted outcomes across thousands of parallel simulations in minutes. The platform replaces traditional research cycles: focus groups, surveys, and waiting weeks for customer feedback on pricing, messaging, churn, and launch strategy.

Sitch builds an AI-assisted matchmaking service for singles who want a more curated alternative to swipe-based dating apps. It pairs AI with human matchmakers to handle the search and screening work that users would otherwise do themselves through endless app browsing or chance encounters. The product targets people frustrated by low-quality matches and conversations that go nowhere on conventional dating platforms.

Spekter Games publishes games on Telegram and its own platform, Spekter.xyz, targeting mainstream players who currently play mobile and browser-based titles. Its first slate starts with rogue-lite games distributed through Telegram, where blockchain features run in the background rather than as a central mechanic. The studio is also building AI-native open-world RPGs in which a conversational AI game master runs within authored world rules, replacing the static quest and dialogue systems traditional RPGs rely on.

Sunflower builds a sobriety support app for people managing addiction, replacing or supplementing human sponsors and therapists. The product combines an AI sponsor, CBT-based journaling, visual progress tracking, and educational content into a single toolkit. It targets the broad population of individuals seeking structured, ongoing support for recovery.

SweatPals builds a marketplace for grassroots fitness communities, connecting people who want to discover local run clubs, workout groups, and wellness events with independent hosts who create and lead them. It gives community organizers tools to list, manage, and monetize their offerings, replacing the patchwork of group chats, manual signups, and word-of-mouth coordination that most grassroots fitness hosts rely on today.

Talus Robotics builds robotic guide dogs for blind and visually impaired people, replacing trained animal guides that cost roughly $80,000 and are out of reach for the vast majority of those who need them. Its robotic alternative delivers the same navigation assistance at a fraction of the price. The company plans to extend the same platform into elder care and emotional support.

trophi.ai builds Kairos, a real-time AI coaching platform for high-skill, high-stakes domains. Kairos observes a learner's performance, identifies critical decision points, and delivers expert-level verbal guidance in under a second, replacing or augmenting human instructors in sim racing, commercial and defense aviation, oil and gas operations, and drone qualification. The platform does the work of a dedicated human instructor: watching, interpreting, and intervening at the exact moment feedback can change the outcome.

Unbound builds a 3D creation and game development tool built on signed distance fields (SDF), replacing the mesh-based architecture that has underpinned professional 3D software for decades. It targets both newcomers and experienced developers who want to model assets, add game logic, and publish playable games, without the complexity of traditional tools like Blender or Unity. The longer-term goal is a web-scale platform where anyone can create, share, and remix interactive 3D content.

Valor builds an automatic cashback platform for active-duty military, veterans, and their families. Members link an existing payment card once, and Valor detects eligible purchases at participating local businesses and deposits cashback without requiring the member to ask, present an ID, or show proof of service. The product replaces the manual, often awkward process of claiming military discounts at the point of sale.

Waveful builds an AI-powered social app for creators and fans to form communities, share content, and earn from their audience. AI tools handle discovery and distribution, lowering the bar for ordinary people to build a following without relying on established platform algorithms. The product targets creators who want to grow an audience and monetize it, replacing the manual grind of cross-posting and community management on legacy social platforms.