Founder Vault: 33 Startup Problems From Founder Talks

Catalog last updated: 5 October 2026. Every entry is reviewed and scored against a published rubric before it goes live. Exactly 100 problems are live; entries below the 7.0 opportunity-score bar are archived.

Where these problems come from

50 of the 100 live entries carry a direct link to the primary source they were drawn from, across 21 publications and communities including reddit.com, news.ycombinator.com, cloud.google.com, github.com, community.shopify.com, youtube.com. The rest record the community or discussion the signal came from in the source label, without a single canonical link.

37 founders working in this area (not affiliated with Real Problem AI)

Profiles are compiled from publicly available information. Not affiliated or endorsed. To update or remove a profile, email hello@realproblem.ai.

Nikhil Kamath, Co-founder, Zerodha; founder, WTFund. Hosts the WTF is podcast and People by WTF, where many of the problems in our vault were raised.
Aman Gupta, Co-founder, boAt. Co-founded the consumer electronics brand boAt and appears as an investor on Shark Tank India.
Ankur Warikoo, Co-founder and former CEO, nearbuy; author and educator. Co-founded nearbuy and led it as CEO until 2019, and now writes and teaches about money, careers and entrepreneurship.
Raj Shamani, Co-founder, House of X; host of Figuring Out. Hosts the Figuring Out podcast, interviewing founders and operators.
Andrej Karpathy, Pre-training research, Anthropic; founder, Eureka Labs. Joined Anthropic in May 2026 to work on pre-training research, after founding the AI education company Eureka Labs and earlier roles at OpenAI and Tesla.
Greg Isenberg, CEO, Late Checkout; host of The Startup Ideas Podcast. Runs Late Checkout and hosts The Startup Ideas Podcast.
Taranjeet Singh, Co-founder and CEO, Mem0. Mem0 is a memory layer for AI agents and apps. It condenses chat history into compact memories so an assistant keeps context across sessions, with an open-source core.
Alex Reibman, Co-founder, AgentOps. AgentOps is an observability and compliance platform for AI agents, giving teams monitoring and an audit trail of what agents did in production.
Harjot Gill, Co-founder and CEO, CodeRabbit. CodeRabbit is an AI code review tool that reviews pull requests on GitHub and GitLab.
Or Weis, Co-founder and CEO, Permit.io. Permit.io provides authorization infrastructure: fine-grained permissions for applications, APIs and AI agents, with RBAC, ABAC and ReBAC models.
Han Wang, Co-founder, Mintlify. Mintlify is a documentation platform that offers self-updating, markdown-based docs for startups, enterprises and agents.
Arcjet. Arcjet is a security platform for AI agents and applications, covering prompt injection detection, agent tool authorization, PII redaction, bot detection, rate limiting and a WAF. (source)
Granola. Granola is an AI notepad for meetings. It transcribes from your computer audio instead of sending a bot into the call and turns your notes into organized summaries. (source)
James Cadwallader, Co-founder and CEO, Profound. Profound tracks how often and how favourably AI assistants mention a brand, and helps the brand improve how it shows up in those answers.
lemlist. lemlist is an outreach platform for email, LinkedIn and calls. Its lemwarm tool warms up inboxes by exchanging real emails with a user network, checks email setup and gives daily deliverability scores. (source)
Ben Colman, Co-founder and CEO, Reality Defender. Reality Defender detects deepfakes and synthetic media across audio, video and images, including live video calls, hiring and identity verification flows.
Shiv Rao, Co-founder and CEO, Abridge. Abridge uses generative AI to turn patient and clinician conversations into clinical documentation, with versions for clinicians, revenue cycle teams and nursing.
Andrew Adams, Co-founder and CEO, Headway. Headway helps behavioral health clinicians accept insurance by handling billing, reimbursement and admin through software, so patients can find therapy covered by their plan.
Neal Shah, Co-founder and CEO, Counterforce Health. Counterforce Health is a free AI tool that reads a denial letter and plan details and drafts an evidence-based appeal letter for patients, caregivers and clinicians.
Jason Kulatunga, Founder, Fasten Health. Fasten Health began as an open-source, self-hosted personal and family medical record aggregator that used FHIR to pull records from providers, insurers and labs. That app was archived in July 2026, and the company now offers Fasten Connect, a medical record API for developers.
Jessica Kim, Co-founder and Executive Chairman, ianacare. ianacare supports family caregivers with tools to coordinate care with a personal team of family and friends, plus resources and programs offered through employers, health plans and providers.
Michael Yan, Co-founder, Simplify. Simplify builds an AI job search tool whose Copilot browser extension fills in application forms and helps job seekers find and apply to roles.
Connor Zwick, CEO and Co-founder, Speak. Speak is an AI-powered language learning platform that aims to give learners an AI tutor for reaching spoken fluency.
Samuel Lam, Co-founder and CTO, PermitFlow. PermitFlow is an AI platform that helps general contractors and developers manage preconstruction and building permits.
Arjun Mahadevan, CEO and Founder, doola. doola helps founders form a US LLC, open a bank account, accept payments and manage ongoing compliance.
David Kang, Co-founder and CEO, Keeper. Keeper pairs AI with human accountants to find deductions and file returns for freelancers, contractors, small business owners and people with side income.
Ashok Hariharan, CEO and Co-founder, IDfy. IDfy is an identity verification platform. Its Privy suite helps organizations collect, manage and audit user consent under India's DPDP Act, including consent capture in 22 languages.
Gautam Rajesh Shelley, CEO and Founder, AiSensy. AiSensy is a WhatsApp Business API platform for broadcasts, retargeting, catalogs, WhatsApp payments, chatbots and click-to-WhatsApp ads.
Archit Gupta, Founder and CEO, Clear. Clear offers GST filing and lifecycle management, e-invoicing, accounts payable automation and tax compliance software for Indian businesses.
Alakh Pandey, Co-founder and CEO, Physics Wallah. Physics Wallah is an e-learning platform with lectures, doubt-solving sessions and practice tests for classes 6 to 12 and entrance exams such as JEE and NEET, in free and paid batches.
Chris Andrew, Co-founder and CEO, Scrunch. Scrunch helps companies monitor how they appear in AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, find information gaps and correct inaccurate answers.
Peec AI. Peec AI is an AI search analytics platform for marketing teams: it tracks how brands perform in AI search answers, benchmarks them against competitors and shows the sources that influence those answers. (source)
OtterlyAI. OtterlyAI monitors brand mentions and website citations across AI search surfaces such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Copilot, based on a set of tracked prompts. (source)
Jerry Paffendorf, Co-founder, Regrid (formerly Loveland Technologies). Regrid, which began in Detroit as Loveland Technologies, maps land parcels and publishes parcel boundary and ownership data.
Dan Pinto, Co-founder and CEO, Fingerprint. Fingerprint is a device intelligence platform that identifies browsers and devices and detects bot activity to help websites prevent fraud.
Langfuse. Langfuse is an open-source platform for LLM applications: traces, evaluations, prompt management and cost metrics so teams can see what their agents did and what it cost. (source)
Merge. Merge sells a unified integration layer so a software product or AI agent can read and write customer data in many third-party systems through one connection. (source)