recommendations from Sound Ventures
a list of startups to check out how are hiring
✨ Hey there! This edition is only available to friends of next play subscribers. Joining friends of next play gives you access to our private Slack community and discounts to our favorite products. Join friends of next play today.
To help you find interesting companies we talked to the team at Sound Ventures for recommendations on some of their portfolio companies they would check out and explore if they were in the job market. Below you’ll find their answers, as well as explanations as to what makes each company particularly special.
World Labs, founded by AI trailblazer Fei-Fei Li (CEO) and computer vision and graphics experts Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall, is building foundational models that understand and interact with the 3D world. The company calls these “large world models” (LWMs) that are designed to imbue AI with spatial intelligence. World Labs came out of stealth in September 2024 and has been turning heads fast, landing over $200M of backing from investors like Sound Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Radical Ventures, NVentures of NVIDIA, and AMD Ventures. The company today is a team of less than 30, yet has achieved a valuation of over $1B. Fei-Fei is a Stanford professor widely known as the “Godmother of AI” and was named in the Time 100 AI Most Influential People list in 2023. She is the original creator behind ImageNet, the first significant training and benchmarking dataset in AI and is building a team of scientists and engineers pushing the boundaries of AI as it relates to the physical world.
GC AI is an AI platform for in-house legal teams. The company is led by Cecilia Zeniti (CEO), who most recently served as General Counsel and Head of Business Development at Repit, and Bardia Pourvakil (CTO), who most recently served as Head of Developer Relations at Replit. The platform handles daily tasks like document synthesis, legal research, and policy generation for in-house legal departments across contract work, employment law, IP law, and more. The mission is to build AI agents that can use company knowledge, leverage external resources, and connect with internal tools to provide better and faster legal advice within companies. GC AI has experienced explosive product-market-fit since inception in Spring 2024, and today serves 300+ customers including Figma, Snyk, Eventbrite, Redis, and more.
Antimetal is transforming how engineers understand, interact with, and manage cloud infrastructure using AI. Today engineers are drowning in fragmented tools, siloed data, and tribal knowledge trapped in people’s heads. Managing infrastructure has become an exercise in firefighting rather than forward progress—a tax on innovation that forces the brightest minds to focus on maintenance instead of breakthroughs. Antimetal believes that infrastructure should be an enabler, not a burden: a foundation that helps teams ship ideas to the world faster and more effectively. If you’re passionate about solving these challenges, Antimetal is hiring across engineering, operations, and growth in NYC. The company is led by Matt Parkhurst (CEO) and Shreyas Iyer (CTO). Reach out to matt@antimetal to learn more.
Healthcare Stealth Company
Cole O’Brien and Ben Braverman (former CRO at Flexport) are building a new consumer healthtech company in stealth and are looking to make several key early hires: Frontend Software Engineer Backend Software Engineer Product Designer Product Engineer. If you have experience building products 0-1 and are looking to play a part in transforming global access to healthcare, reach out here: ryan@essos.ai (NYC, In-Office)