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🌁 Based in SF? Check out SF IRL, MLOps SF, GenerativeAISF, or Cerebral Valley’s spreadsheet for more!

This week, Raindrop’s $15M seed round led by Lightspeed dropped, building on early adoption from AI-native teams including Replit, Speak, Clay, Framer, Portola, Avoca, and AngelList. Co-Founder Alexis Gauba notes that the last two years moved the industry from chatbots to agents that can run for hours and use thousands of tools, and the old testing playbook just couldn’t keep up.

Raindrop is positioning itself as monitoring for AI agents in production, where failures are often subtle and expensive. The company highlighted automatic issue detection for silent failures, powerful search across production AI data, and an agent-native A/B testing platform. Gauba’s longer arc is a “flywheel” for continuous agent improvement, with hiring underway across ML, infra, and product.

Momentic CEO Wei-Wei W. announced Momentic’s $15M Series A led by Standard Capital, with adoption from teams including Notion, Quora, Webflow, and Xero. Since launching last year, Momentic has pitched itself as the system teams use to confirm releases behave as expected, even as development cycles accelerate.

The thesis is that as AI generates more of the world’s code, advantage shifts to verification, not generation. Momentic describes itself as the “verification layer,” a source of truth, and a guardrail for software behavior, built to help teams ship faster with confidence. The company also signaled scale-up mode, hiring across engineering, sales, and marketing.

At the AWS Builder Loft, The AI Collective closed out the year with an SF Demo Night to remember alongside Roam and FlexAI, putting 8 pre-Series A teams on stage. Founders demoed product instead of decks, took live questions, and used an interactive event app to help attendees follow up and join waitlists in real time.

The format reinforced what San Francisco does best when incentives are aligned. Builders showed WIPs and the crowd responded like a demanding user base, with community voting producing clear preferences rather than polite applause. Winners were recognized across categories, with Crucible named Best Overall, Attentio earning Best Technology, and coreviz recognized as Most Creative. Thanks for helping us close out our last SF Demo Night of 2025 with a bang. More next year!

In San José, The AI Collective Costa Rica hosted its fourth meetup at TD SYNNEX with a practical session on value creation through agentic AI. Daniel Arrieta, a Senior Partner Success Solutions Architect at AWS for Central America and the Caribbean, walked the group through foundations that teams actually need to build and operate autonomous systems, including agent architectures, orchestration patterns, and decision-loop design.

The session connected technical design to concrete enterprise use cases across retail, fintech, and healthtech, moving from inventory optimization to fraud detection to clinical decision-support pipelines. Attendees left with a clearer understanding of where agentic systems deliver measurable efficiency, and what it takes to translate demos into operational workflows. Look out for more information about future meetups from our Costa Rica team.

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About Noah Frank

Noah is a researcher, innovation strategist, and ex-founder thinking and writing about the future of AI. His work and body of research focus on aligning governance strategies to anticipate transformative change before it happens.

About AJ Green

AJ Green is a founder, writer, VC scout, chairman, and respected community leader in the AI and startup space. A former athlete turned tech entrepreneur, AJ is on a mission to make AI the great equalizer scaling startups, connecting ecosystems, and turning disruption into opportunity.