Our latest Startup Radar spotlights Seattle-area companies building software for everything from insurance commissions to leadership training.
This regular series features early stage startups across the Seattle region that are getting off the ground with innovative ideas.
Read on for brief descriptions of each company — and a pitch assessment from GPT-powered “Mean VC,” which we prompt to offer both positive and critical feedback.
Check past Startup Radar posts here, and email me at [email protected] to flag other companies and startup news.
CodeChimp
Founded: 2025
The business: A project management platform that aims to turn vibe coding into a “multiplayer experience” by using multi-agent orchestration and other AI-powered tools. Helps developers with code generation, reviews, and automated testing. Part of a newly coined “agentic swarm coding” trend. Company was originally known as Bili and just joined the latest Plug and Play cohort in Seattle.
Leadership: Sylviane Zhao recently graduated from Cornell University. Co-founders Tehani Cabour and Shawn Yang both worked at French software giant Dassault Systèmes.
Mean VC: “Riding the ‘agentic swarm coding’ wave with a multiplayer twist could make CodeChimp the darling of dev teams sick of solo LLM prompts and endless PR reviews. But buzzwords and cohorts don’t ship stable code — unless you prove clear productivity gains and developer trust, you’ll drown in the same hype pool as every other AI-coding startup chasing GitHub’s shadow.”
EvolvArts
Founded: 2024
The business: CRM designed for nonprofit arts organizations. Handles donor development, ticketing, marketing, communications, class registration, tuition, and more. Self-described as “Ticketmaster for the performing arts.” The company has about 20 customers and is bootstrapped.
Leadership: CEO Christopher Lin was a principal engineer at Numbers Station AI and a research scientist at Meta. Co-founder Max Thayer was a founding member of Anker US and helped lead business development manager at e-commerce agency Oceanwing.
Mean VC: “Targeting arts organizations with a unified CRM and ticketing platform is smart — this niche is underserved, loyal, and still trapped in spreadsheet purgatory. But calling yourself ‘Ticketmaster for the performing arts’ is a dangerous flex unless you plan to match its scale, integrations, and uptime — otherwise, you’re just a boutique tool with Broadway dreams and community-theater resources.”
Rem
Founded: 2024
The business: AI-powered operating system for insurance distribution that automates commission tracking and reconciliation. Initially focused agents and carriers in healthcare. The company has raised a pre-seed round from AI2 Incubator and other investors.
Leadership: CEO Jorge Banuelos was head of core prediction at Opendoor and held managerial roles in data science at Meta and Microsoft. Co-founder and CTO Zhongxia Zhou was an engineering manager at Opendoor and Compass.
Mean VC: “Automating commission tracking and reconciliation in insurance is a rare combination of boring and brilliant — exactly where real enterprise value hides. But insurance tech is a graveyard of integrations and edge cases, so unless Rem nails data accuracy and carrier cooperation, it’ll spend years debugging spreadsheets instead of scaling revenue.”
Simsola
Founded: 2024
The business: AI training platform built on a developmental psychology framework to help leaders improve how they communicate, coordinate, and collaborate — both internally and with customers. Also partners with training providers to turn their frameworks into AI simulations and coaching tools. Simsola has raised $1 million and is generating revenue.
Leadership: CEO Tammy Wang held data science leadership roles at Korn Ferry and Riviera Partners, and was a senior director at Zillow. Co-founder Dr. Zachary Van Rossum is an organizational psychologist and and adjunct assistant professor at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Mean VC: “Blending developmental psychology with AI-driven leadership training is a clever way to move beyond generic chatbots and into measurable behavioral change. Still, the corporate training market is littered with ‘transformational’ tools that never survive budget season — Simsola will need undeniable ROI data, not just eloquent theory, to stay in the lineup.”
Vergent
Founded: 2025
The business: Developing an SDK for spatial AI reasoning and memory. The idea is to allow LLMs to answer questions about 3D space with high degrees of accuracy. The company is pre-launch and has not generated revenue. Vergent recently won a pitch event at AI House in Seattle.
Leadership: CEO Benjamin Liang and CTO Andrew Liang were founding AI engineers at decentralized deepfake detection startup BitMind. They are also twin brothers and both studied computer science at NYU where they co-authored research in computer vision/graphics together.
Mean VC: “Building an SDK that gives LLMs genuine spatial reasoning is ambitious and could open up massive new verticals — from robotics to AR design to autonomous inspection. But ‘pre-launch, no revenue, won a pitch’ is startup bingo for ‘impressive demo, unclear business,’ and unless Vergent quickly proves a commercial use case, it’ll stay more sci-fi than SDK.”
