Applications are open for our September cohort, a solo founder just raised $1B from Sequoia for nuclear reactors, and Flo Crivello wants to kill the AI agent. Let's get into it!
Solo, Together
The Solo Founders Program is three months in San Francisco building alongside other solo founders, with weekly 1:1s with Julian and $100K in funding.
Founders in the program have:
Passed 20,000 GitHub stars and 3 million downloads
Crossed $2M in ARR before making a single hire
Secured a formal partnership with a major U.S. government institution 5 months after incorporating
Yakko Majuri is in the current cohort. He was PostHog's sixth employee before going solo to build Railcode, a secure home for internal apps and agents. The problem he's after: anyone can build an internal tool with Claude Code now, but before that tool can touch real company data, DevOps has to vet it, which takes weeks, so most people stop building. With Railcode, the company sets up one secure space where that's already handled, and tools go live in seconds. He launched it live on the podcast last week.
The next cohort kicks off September 10, and if that feels too close to apply, it isn't. 40% of our current cohort applied within 30 days of kickoff.
$1B for a Solo-Founded Nuclear Startup
“I've always just kind of known what I wanted. So why wait?”
Isaiah Taylor started Valar Atomics three years ago, at 24, as a solo founder. He's a high school dropout who taught himself to code, and he went after nuclear power, one of the most regulated industries in America.
In June, Valar became the first company ever to take a nuclear reactor critical outside a national lab. A week later, that reactor generated electricity to power an NVIDIA chip in front of a live audience. NVIDIA is now partnering with Valar on a 30 megawatt AI factory matched to its reactors.
Last week, Sequoia led a $1B Series B into the company.
Solo founding doesn't stop at software.
Two days later, Chris Power, also a solo founder and an ODF alum, raised $1.37B at an $8B valuation for Hadrian, which mass-produces parts for submarines and military aircraft in automated factories.
Solo Launch: Lindy Teammates
“Today, we kill the AI agent and introduce the AI employee.”
Flo Crivello launched Lindy Teammate this week: an AI employee anyone on your team can Slack like a coworker. Ask it for something and it does the work, and it keeps learning until it becomes, as Flo puts it, “the self-updating brain of the whole business.”
The launch comes from his diagnosis of why agents haven't taken over yet. They're hard to create. Nobody has time to build them. And when someone finally does, the agents break and are impossible to fix. So people skip the automation and do the task themselves.
His fix is cutting the friction until building an agent is as easy as messaging a teammate.
Flo came on the podcast earlier this summer. Read the full story: a co-founder breakup with his best friend of ten years, raising $50M as a solo founder, and more.
That's all for this issue. Thanks for reading.
Solo, together.
Kieran
