AI Founder, Edge Hardware
Forum Ventures · Remote US; Remote Canada; Chicago; San Francisco; Boston; New York
Extracted from the posting
Founder role in Forum's AI Studio for an edge AI company building a neutral runtime and compiler abstraction across heterogeneous NPUs, plus inference routing across NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, and custom ASIC fleets. Target vendors named include Qualcomm, Apple, Intel, and MediaTek. Forum provides a $250K USD investment, fundraising support, and an operating team; the founder should have shipped models to multiple edge silicon targets or built mixed-hardware inference infrastructure. Not an employment opportunity with Forum Ventures.
Forum's Venture Studio brings together ambitious people, brilliant ideas, and capital to build the best B2B SaaS businesses in the world, from 0 to 1. In addition to capital and an idea, we provide founders with access to investor networks, fundraising support, and the resources needed to build transformational companies. Our AI Studio has launched 17 companies since 2023, and we're launching 7 more in 2026. We're designed to help Founders move faster, develop better insights, and build companies that have a higher success rate than startups built in any other way.
What We're Looking At:
Edge AI scaled before edge AI got standards. Every NPU vendor built proprietary toolchains, and none of them interoperate. A team shipping to Qualcomm, Apple, Intel, and MediaTek is not writing one codebase. They are maintaining several, each with its own optimization pass every time something changes. No neutral runtime exists when multiple AI workloads compete on the same chip. Vendor lock-in is the bottleneck, and the company that removes it captures outsized value. Forum AI Studio is looking for a Founder exploring any of these themes:
- Edge runtime and compiler abstraction across heterogeneous NPUs
- Intelligent inference routing for mixed NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, and custom ASIC fleets
- Unified operational planes for edge and on-prem hardware cost and placement visibility
- and more!
Maybe you've shipped the same model to five NPU targets and felt the toolchain tax. Maybe you've built inference infrastructure for mixed hardware fleets and know where placement and cost decisions break down. That's who we build with.
Forum derisks and accelerates the Founder path by:
- A $250K USD investment, and an end-to-end fundraising playbook and network to raise your seed and Series A
- A validation partner with proven playbooks, networks, and the systems to validate, unlock your ICP, ignite your sales pipeline, and beyond
- The support of our experienced operating team - from business design, product development, growth, recruitment, legal and more
- Executing a winning GTM strategy to get to $50-100K ARR, and the right MVP to ensure early traction
- A community full of mentors, peers, and leaders
- $100K+ worth of business perks
About you:
- Early-stage operator experience with a proven track record of building, selling, and navigating the edge ML and on-device inference world.
- You may have shipped models across multiple NPU or edge silicon targets and felt the per-vendor toolchain and optimization tax firsthand.
- You may have built inference deployment, compiler, or mixed-silicon fleet infrastructure and know where fragmentation blocks product teams.
- The ability to attract, hire and lead world-class teams
- A demonstrated passion for technology's ability to change the world
- A desire to be a venture-backed founder
- Canada or US-based, and the ability to collaborate in North American time zones.
Please note, this is not an employment opportunity with Forum Ventures. If you are currently fundraising your pre-seed or Seed round, please pitch our investment team instead here.
