​The frontier is being built on proprietary research.

​Traditional SaaS is dead. We're entering the era of the vertically integrated AI company. These teams don’t just ship products; they build engines where research progress becomes product advantage.

​And that product advantage compounds.

​Join us at Modernist for a founder-researcher happy hour and deep-dive conversation on what it takes to actually build a research-first AI startup.

​The panel

​Kunal Bhatia — Co-founder of Hexo Labs, the team building Emily, an AI scientist designed to partner with researchers through agentic, closed-loop experimentation.

Sudarshan Kamath — Founder of Smallest.ai, building low-latency voice-agent infrastructure and multimodal speech-and-text systems for production deployments.

José M. Álvarez — Director of AI Research at NVIDIA, with research leadership spanning scalable AI systems, computer vision, and autonomous vehicle applied research.

​The room

​Expect high-density networking with founders and builders from teams like OpenAI and DeepMind, alongside researchers from Stanford, UC Berkeley, and the broader SF frontier-tech ecosystem.

​The vibe

​Off-the-record, technical, and forward-looking.

​Open Bar - First 100 drinks on us!

​Run of show

​6:00–7:00 — Arrival + drinks
7:00–7:45 — Panel (45 min): Research-First AI: Building Frontier Companies
7:45–8:00 — Audience Q&A
8:00–9:30 — Networking + music

​Who should attend

• ​Founders & Technical Leaders building foundational models, agentic systems, or autonomous R&D stacks.

• ​Frontier Researchers (PhD/Post-doc) from industry labs (OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic) and top-tier academia.

• ​Technical Investors focused on defensible research moats.

• ​Research-First Teams looking to bridge the gap between "paper" and "production."

​Hosted by

​Emily is an AI Scientist that generates novel hypotheses, autonomously designs and runs experiments, critiques its own results, and iterates toward real progress on hard, unsolved problems. Built to augment researchers with agentic, closed-loop experimentation, Emily helps scientists reach the next frontier faster.

​Smallest.ai is a full-stack Voice AI platform building low-latency speech and voice-agent infrastructure for production deployments, where real-time performance and evaluation determine whether the system works in the wild.

​DeVC is a founder/operator-led venture community investing early and supporting ambitious teams from day zero, anchored by Matrix Partners India (Z47).

Frontier Syndicate is a private venture circle for frontier tech builders, researchers, and investors. We convene high-trust rooms and back exceptional companies at the frontier.

​Modernist is an Intimate private members’ club with a mission to build an amazing life-long community in San Francisco and around the world.

​Notes

​Capacity is limited. We’ll take photos and short video clips for recap and promotion. By attending, you consent to being photographed/recorded and to use of those assets by the organizers.