Startups Directory

Beacon Software is a permanent holding company that acquires profitable, mission-critical software businesses serving Main Street sectors—education, finance, logistics, recreation—and modernizes them using AI and applied technology rather than cost-cutting. Founded by Nilam Ganenthiran (ex-President of Instacart) and Divya Gupta (ex-Sequoia partner), Beacon acquires roughly one company every two weeks and has expanded acquired companies' Rule of 40 by an average of 1,000 basis points within one year. Unlike private equity firms focused on 3-7 year exits, Beacon commits to permanent ownership, reinvestment in growth, and building net-new technology capabilities across its portfolio.

Code Metal is an AI-powered development platform that automatically translates high-level research code (Python, Julia, MATLAB) into optimized, production-ready code for any hardware target (CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs). It uses formal methods to mathematically verify translation accuracy, ensuring compliance and correctness for mission-critical systems. The platform enables engineers to write once and deploy across multiple languages and hardware platforms while maintaining code safety guarantees that LLMs alone cannot provide.