Edge Inference Developer Tooling Founder

Job description

Edge AI is a production requirement across automotive, robotics, and industrial verticals, but the infrastructure underneath it doesn't exist. Every team deploying models on edge devices rebuilds memory management, platform abstraction, and monitoring logic from scratch. The hardware is fragmenting across dozens of chipsets and runtimes. No single vendor's tools cover the stack. The developer experience is years behind what cloud teams take for granted. The opportunity: Build the software and tooling layer that makes edge hardware usable — frameworks that abstract across platforms, memory managers that optimize dynamically, observability stacks that surface what's happening inside a deployed model running on a sensor or a vehicle. Start with the highest-cost-of-failure verticals (autonomous vehicles, industrial robotics), then expand into the full edge AI developer stack. A few examples: Edge Observability and Developer Tools Teams deploying models at the edge have no visibility into what those models are doing in the field. Inference latency, memory pressure, thermal headroom: none of it is legible. When a model degrades, debugging is manual and slow. Memory Management and Testing for Edge Deployments Edge devices operate in conditions data center memory was never designed for: temperature extremes, vibration, extended duty cycles. Memory allocation across a fleet is static and manual. Performance degradation goes undetected until failure. Hardware-Agnostic Frameworks A model that runs on one edge chipset requires substantial rework to run on another. There is no universal SDK, no abstraction layer that makes inference logic portable. Vendor lock-in is the default, not a choice. Memory Architectures and Processing-in-Memory For vision processing, sensor fusion, and real-time control, the cost of moving data between memory and compute is measured in power, latency, and heat. Data center DRAM was not designed for these tradeoffs. Application-specific memory systems for edge workloads don't yet exist at scale. We're looking for Founders to leverage their domain expertise, and care deeply about the developer experience. You've shipped inference at the edge and hit the wall on memory, latency, or platform lock-in. You've debugged a model that ran fine in the cloud and failed on the device. You know the gap isn't the model. It's the infrastructure underneath it. are convinced AI can deliver the outcomes better than humans to build full-stack, AI Native services in industries where outcomes depend on expertise, regulation, and trust. While we're actively building out these ideas, Forum Ventures is always open to hearing from founders with bold, original ideas. If you're working on an early-stage B2B SaaS company, even at the idea stage, pitch us still. Your Partners in Co-Creation: Forum's AI Studio https://www.forumvc.com/ai-studio brings together ambitious people, brilliant ideas, and capital to build the best B2B SaaS businesses in the world, from 0 to 1. In addition to capital and an idea, we provide founders with access to investor networks, fundraising support, and the resources needed to build transformational companies. We've launched 17 companies since 2023, and we're launching 7 more in 2026. We're designed to help Founders move faster, develop better insights, and build companies that have a higher success rate than startups built in any other way. Forum derisks and accelerates the Founder path by: - A $250K USD investment, and an end-to-end fundraising playbook and network to raise your seed and Series A - A validation partner with proven playbooks, networks, and the systems to validate, unlock your ICP, ignite your sales pipeline, and beyond - The support of our experienced operating team - from business design, product development, growth, recruitment, legal and more - Executing a winning GTM strategy to get to $50-100K ARR, and the right MVP to ensure early traction - A community full of mentors, peers, and leaders - $100K worth of business perks About you: - Early-stage operator experience, and expertise in the problem space you're building in. - The ability to attract, hire and lead world-class teams - A demonstrated passion for technology’s ability to change the world - A desire to be a venture-backed founder - Canada or US-based, and the ability to collaborate in North American time zones. Please note, this is not an employment opportunity with Forum Ventures. If you are currently fundraising your pre-seed or Seed round, please pitch our investment team instead here https://www.forumvc.com/pitch-us.