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33rd percentile
55th percentile
Serial founder and CEO building Amari AI, backed by Pear VC and First Round Capital
Credibility
Traction · 47th percentile
- Past founder of multiple ventures including hightime.ai, Duo, and Hustlebeez Technologies.
- Amari AI raised $4.5M in a seed round co-led by Pear VC and First Round Capital.
Relationship Matrix
Most Complimentary
Founder score
- 95%Probability of being accurate (95%)Current Co-Founder and CEO of Amari AI, an AI platform for customs brokers.
- 92%Probability of being accurate (92%)Amari AI raised $4.5M in a seed round co-led by Pear VC and First Round Capital.
- 90%Probability of being accurate (90%)Amari AI was co-founded with Arushi Vashist, a former senior software engineer.
- 80%Probability of being accurate (80%)Past founder of multiple ventures including hightime.ai, Duo, and Hustlebeez Technologies.
- 65%Probability of being accurate (65%)Stack Overflow account identified with 986 reputation.
Investor score
- 60%Probability of being accurate (60%)Publicly identified as an angel investor via AngelList.
- 55%Probability of being accurate (55%)Has made at least one active investment as an angel investor.
What you likely need
You're at the inflection point between seed traction and Series A, so the highest-value Festival moments for you are warm-intro dinners with Tier 1 growth investors and roundtables with founders who've recently closed A rounds in vertical AI or logistics. You also need to move fast on founding engineer hiring, so curated gatherings that put you in front of ex-Google and ex-Stripe AI engineers will compound your team-building faster than any job post. Sprinkle in a co-founder wellbeing session and a press/positioning workshop to keep the narrative tight as you scale.
Would you attend these IRL Festival events?
We will tune and customize your Founder Festival experience to make sure you get invited to the events that would be most valuable to you.
- introsA Pear VC and First Round Capital co-hosted dinner with their Series A–stage portfolio founders and 6–8 Tier 1 growth investors (Benchmark, Sequoia, Bessemer) to give Sam warm face-time ahead of a formal Amari AI raise process
- hiringAn ex-Google and ex-Stripe AI engineer happy hour for founders actively hiring their first or second founding engineer, where Sam can pitch the Amari AI mission directly to candidates who've already cleared the bar he trusts
- fundraisingA Series A narrative roundtable for vertical AI founders who've closed $10M–$20M rounds in the last 18 months, focused on how to quantify ARR, NRR, and retention metrics into a headline story the way Amari AI's $1.5B in goods cleared deserves
- positioningA trade-tech and supply-chain founder dinner anchored to the Trump tariff moment — bringing together founders building in customs, freight, and cross-border compliance to sharpen the 'trade chaos as wedge' positioning Sam surfaced in TechCrunch
- tacticalA post-TechCrunch press momentum workshop for recently featured early-stage founders, focused on turning a single media hit into a sequenced data-driven press release cadence timed to milestones like $5B cleared or 50 broker customers
- positioningAn enterprise sales roundtable for B2B vertical AI founders selling into relationship-driven industries, where Sam can workshop how to structure named customer case studies with customs brokers to accelerate deal cycles and Series A diligence
- wellbeingA two-person founding team dinner for seed-stage duos scaling past their first 10 hires, facilitated around explicit role clarity and decision-making frameworks — directly relevant to Sam and Arushi Vashist navigating fast growth without friction