80 founders. One stage. You could be next

🚀 Applications for SR008, our next residency, are open now through November 1, 2026. Apply now to secure up to $1M and $10M in credits for your startup: http://speedrun.a16z.com/apply

🎤 Want to hang IRL? Join our XP list to get invites to pop-ups, dinners, and special events from speedrun before anyone else hears about them

🤖Congrats to Kanu (SR005) on raising a $11.7M seed to bring AGI to enterprise

Last Tuesday, 80 companies from SR007 took the stage at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Before the doors even opened, the line stretched to the next street.

More than 2,000 investors RSVP’d to be there in person, with thousands more watching the livestream. The theater’s 954 seats were packed, so for the first time, we had to open overflow seating in the demo area.

Then came the main event: back-to-back pitches from all 80 companies. It felt like every founder gave their best pitch yet. Between meetings, speedrun’s Jacqueline Young could be found in a corner coaching founders through final run-throughs (and bringing them water).

Two of the teams onstage marked a first for us. Oruk and Cybernetic Physics are the first Alpha teams to make it all the way through speedrun to Demo Day.

Oruk is building speech foundation models that understand tone, emphasis, intent and emotion in human speech. As the team puts it, when someone says “I’m fine,” the meaning is in the voice.

Cybernetic Physics deploys autonomous robots inside data centers to handle rack and stack, cabling and maintenance 24/7.

This cohort leaned into deep tech: robotics, space, manufacturing and defense. ChronoSpace is building world models for physical industries like manufacturing, retail and construction. Vound builds data and deployment infrastructure for physical AI. And Colmez is an agentic platform for the hazardous waste industry.

From top: ChronoSpace, Vound and Colmez

Once the pitches wrapped, the action moved to the demo floor, where founders and investors actually meet.

The hardware, robotics and space teams drew crowds all afternoon. The wilder the pitch, the more the buzz: take for instance PhotonSpear, which is building orbital lasers for missile defense.

Demo Day takes a village. Huge thanks to the speedrun team, who made the day run like clockwork; to our investing partners, who spent the afternoon on the demo floor connecting founders and investors; and to our production partners at Clear As Day.

That’s a wrap on SR007. Applications for SR008 are open now through November 1. If you’re building something interesting, apply to speedrun. We can’t wait to see you on that stage.

That’s it for this week!

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