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From top left, clockwise: GradPilot founder Nirmal Thacker; HA Arts founder Harshitha Amit; CaseGuild co-founder Vikas Rajvanshy; GenSX co-founder Evan Boyle; and Harte founder Christian Hammer.
We’re spotlighting another batch of early stage Seattle-area startups — learn more about CaseGuild, GenSX, GradPilot, HA Arts, and Harte below.
Check out past startup radar spotlights here, and email us at [email protected] to flag other companies and startup news.
CaseGuild
Founded last year, CaseGuild leverages AI to help legal teams wade through massive troves of evidence. “Our AI-driven evidence reasoning platform helps lawyers and paralegals quickly sift through documents, pinpoint key facts, and ultimately build stronger cases,” said CEO and co-founder Vikas Rajvanshy. The company is bootstrapped and just brought on its first paying customers. Rajvanshy spent nearly 19 years at Microsoft and most recently served as SVP of engineering at SeekOut. He co-founded CaseGuild with Vivek Garg, a former engineering leader at TaxBit and Meta who also worked at Microsoft.
GenSX
After stints with Microsoft, Convoy, Amazon, and Pulumi, Evan Boyle made the startup leap with GenSX, a programming tool for building AI agents and workflows. The startup just launched its initial open source project and plans to roll out a paid offering later this year. Boyle was most recently director of engineering at Pulumi, a Seattle-based cloud infrastructure startup. Other GenSX employees include Derek Legenzoff, a former Google and Microsoft product manager, and Jeremy Moseley, a former engineer at Convoy and ClassDojo. GenSX has raised an undisclosed amount of funding.
GradPilot
GradPilot wants to use AI to help students craft college essays — but not by simply suggesting actual words and sentences. The company’s “AI counselor” provides feedback that encourages students to highlight their own strengths and align essays with the qualities sought by admission committees. “Traditionally this is a high premium service offered by premium counselors and affordable only for a small part of the population,” said GradPilot founder Nirmal Thacker. “I want to use AI so more students can benefit and college admissions are more accessible to everyone.” Thacker previously worked at Cerebras Systems and Stockwell AI. He’s bootstrapping GradPilot and has paying customers.
HA Arts
Harshitha Amit is making moves at the intersection of art and artificial intelligence. Amit, most recently head of engineering at Stripe, just launched HA Arts, which blends generative AI and human creativity to produce commissioned artwork. AI helps customers explore a vision for their art, which is ultimately handcrafted by artists. “My main motivation and drive are to align AI as a superpower for artists, rather than treating it as a threat to their creative and human artistry,” Amit said. The company has worked with a handful of early customers.
Harte
Founded in February, Harte aims to consolidate disparate software systems within a company’s tech stack into a unified model. “We help companies — especially those managing complexity from acquisitions or legacy systems — unify fragmented tools like ERP, CRM, HRIS, and more into a single semantic layer,” said CEO and co-founder Christian Hammer, a veteran of Wayfair, TradeLens, and AppNexus. Hammer previously founded a Seattle-based enterprise software startup called Vala AI. He’s bootstrapping Harte so far, and the company plans to collaborate with early design partners this summer.
