BrainGrid Raises $1M Pre-Seed to Bring the First AI Product Planner to Non-Technical Builders

Today we're excited to share that BrainGrid has raised a $1M pre-seed round led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Next Tier Ventures and Brainstorm Ventures.

This funding supports our mission to make it possible for anyone with an idea to turn it into a real product. Build in minutes. Launch in hours. Sell to real customers without needing engineering teams, complicated frameworks, or months of fixing bugs in a prototype.

#The New Bottleneck Is Not Code. It Is Planning.

We've been building software for over 25 years. Between us, Nico and Tyler, we've shipped products across startups, enterprise teams, and everything in between. We've lived through every major era of software development, from waterfall to agile, from monoliths to microservices, from on-prem to the cloud, now from managed teams to solo founders.

AI has changed how software gets built. Domain experts, creators, and entrepreneurs who've never written a line of code are now building real applications through natural language. That is extraordinary.

But the theory of constraints hasn't changed. The bottleneck has just moved.

Writing code is no longer the constraint. AI coding tools can generate code faster than any team we have ever worked with. What they can't do is think through the entire product, this takes more than coding.

The constraint is now planning.

And this will only become more true over time. As AI coding agents run for longer, handle more complexity, and operate with greater autonomy, the quality of the plan they start with matters more, not less. Today's agents can build entire features end-to-end. They manage their own task breakdown, make implementation decisions based on what the code actually looks like, and run for hours without intervention. The builder's job is no longer to manage implementation steps. It's to define what needs to be built and why it matters. The requirement is the unit of leverage and a vague one produces a fragile app while a clear, structured specification produces software that works that leads to a successful product.

In traditional teams, this thinking is done by a Product Manager. In the new era of AI-native development, that role doesn't exist. So the builder gets stuck.

BrainGrid exists to fill that gap, as the AI Product Planner.

#Introducing the AI Product Planner

BrainGrid is the AI Product Planner for the new generation of builders. It turns messy ideas into designs and structured product plans that coding agents can actually build part by part. It ensures that features are scoped, built in the right order, and the outcome matches the intent.

Builders use BrainGrid alongside Cursor, Claude Code, and other AI coding tools. Builders are not locked in using a particular agent.

#Builders Are Already Shipping Real Products

BrainGrid has already helped over 500 builders ship real AI-native SaaS products. These aren't prototypes sitting in a repo. These are live products with real users and paying customers.

Here are some of their stories.

#Kaleen Canevari — Motra Studio

Kaleen is a mechanical engineer and certified Pilates instructor who set out to build a multi-tenant SaaS platform where studio owners can host video content and manage client subscriptions. She describes herself as a "vibe coder", someone who excels at outlining a vision and using AI tools to translate it into code.

Before BrainGrid, she hit a wall. While building a feature to analyze class transcripts with an LLM, she broke her application and couldn't fix it, even after multiple attempts with her existing AI tools.

She turned to BrainGrid, and had the feature working immediately. Since then, she has integrated Stripe Connect for multi-party payments, deployed to Vercel, and onboarded her first paying studio owner.

"I spent a couple of days spinning in circles trying to integrate this transcript-analysis feature. I tried rebuilding it twice without BrainGrid, and every time something broke. Finally, I decided to start fresh with BrainGrid. I had it rebuild the whole thing from scratch, and it just worked."

Read Kaleen's full story →

#Matt Bernier & Clay Unicorn — Unicorn.love

Matt and Clay run a venture studio in Denver, building multiple SaaS companies while advising a portfolio of startups and public companies. They are deeply technical, Clay has been building software for nearly 24 years. Their challenge wasn't whether they could code. It was whether they could translate messy real-world inputs into clean, executable work across many projects without becoming the bottleneck.

Matt discovered BrainGrid at a Denver vibe coding meetup. On a call with Tyler, BrainGrid's co-founder, he shut down the open source tool he had been hacking on, signed up, and started using it immediately. BrainGrid was already solving the exact problems he had been trying to patch together.

The team has since shipped over 200 features using BrainGrid as their central planning system. Non-technical team members now submit bug reports and feature requests directly through BrainGrid, producing specifications that agents can execute without a human in the loop.

"BrainGrid is the most agnostic piece of my stack. I'll drop models. I won't drop planning."

Read Matt and Clay's full story →

#Audrius — Deep Focus

Audrius comes from a marketing background with years of corporate experience. He's not an engineer. He learned the basics of Python, HTML, and CSS, enough to read code but not write it from scratch. When the vibe coding movement took off, he saw an opportunity to finally build the tools he had been thinking about for years.

He is building Deep Focus, a focus timer application with Google Calendar syncing, shared sessions, and analytics. What sounded simple turned out to be anything but simple, persistent state across devices, OAuth flows, calendar API integration, and session management across tabs and browsers.

BrainGrid's follow-up questions were the turning point. When Audrius submitted an idea, BrainGrid came back with clarifying questions that surfaced edge cases and technical concerns he hadn't considered. In roughly three months, he went from no engineering background to a live, functional application with Google sign-in, cross-device sync, shared focus sessions, analytics dashboards, and full Google Calendar integration.

"Those follow-up questions, it's a goldmine. I did not think about that and that. That's where your product helped me a lot."

Read Audrius's full story →

#Saymon — Core Care

Saymon is a software engineer from Brazil with eight years of experience. He has led teams of eight, shipped features for apps with over 9 million daily active users, and taken products from concept to seed funding. He's not a vibe coder learning to build. He is a senior engineer who recognized that the bottleneck was never the code itself.

He is building Core Care, an all-in-one platform for therapists in Brazil that covers patient management, financials, telemedicine, and video sessions, essentially seven startups consolidated into a single product.

As a solo consultant working across multiple client projects, Saymon faced a recurring problem: great product management tools had no awareness of the codebase, and powerful coding agents didn't understand product context. He was the bridge between the two, and that bridge was expensive. BrainGrid gave him something no other tool could — the ability to do requirements planning and task breakdown with knowledge of the codebase.

The results speak for themselves. On one client project, planning that would have taken two full days was completed in 30 minutes. The feature was delivered in just over two weeks instead of three to four, and the client used it for an event that generated $1 million in revenue.

"The feeling I have when using BrainGrid is that I have a PM with me."

Read Saymon's full story →

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The pattern across every builder is the same. AI coding tools are powerful. BrainGrid makes them productive, by giving builders the planning layer they didn't know they needed.

#The Vision: A Product Factory for Non-Technical Builders

BrainGrid is the product factory for people who know what they want to build but not how to build it.

That is a different product from developer tools. Developer tools assume you already know how to build and bring your own workflows. We're serving a different audience entirely, domain experts, founders, and creators who have deep knowledge of their problem space but need a system to turn that knowledge into working software.

The BrainGrid platform is built around four stages:

Capture → Structure → Build → Verify

Capture your thinking. Structure it into a product plan. Orchestrate the build with your AI coding tool. Verify that it works.

Today, the AI Product Planner handles Capture and Structure. Next, the platform will expand to orchestrate the full lifecycle from idea to live, revenue-generating product.

Our long-term vision: anyone with an idea can build an AI-native SaaS business. Not someday. Now.

#Why We Partnered With These Investors

Menlo Ventures, Next Tier Ventures, and Brainstorm Ventures understand the significance of AI-native software business creation. They've backed iconic platforms and developer tools that shaped previous eras of software. They see BrainGrid as the missing layer in the emerging ecosystem of AI-powered development.

"Nico and Tyler deeply understand how software gets built at scale," said Shawn Carolan, Partner at Menlo. "BrainGrid brings that experience to the millions of new founders empowered by AI."

#A Thank You to Our Early Community

To everyone who tried BrainGrid, gave feedback, or pushed the boundaries of what's possible: thank you. You're building the first generation of AI-native SaaS products, and we are honored to support you.

You showed us that this role — the AI Product Planner — is essential for the future of AI development.

Try BrainGrid at braingrid.ai