Jay Bartot
Jay Bartot is currently Co-founder/CTO at AirSignal, CTO at Lev, Technical Advisor/CTO at TheFounderVC, Startup Mentor at Creative Destruction Lab, and Affiliate Professor at University of Washington. He has founded several startups, including Farecast and Medify, both acquired, Lev and Zeitworks, where he remains active. His expertise spans technology entrepreneurship, generative AI, machine learning, and strategic leadership in startup environments.
T. A. McCann announces Jay Bartot as Lev’s new CTO to advance founder support at getlev.co
T. A. McCann announces Jay Bartot as Lev's new CTO, describing collaboration as a joy and stating that together they aim to help more founders thrive through their work at Lev (getlev.co).
Lev names startup veteran Jay Bartot as CTO to build its ‘AI co-founder’ and productize PSL playbook
Lev, a Pioneer Square Labs spinout building an 'AI co-founder' for entrepreneurs, named veteran startup builder Jay Bartot as CTO to help productize the venture-studio playbook and launched Lev Learn, a free guide to startup terminology.
Seattle-San Francisco Fund TheFounderVC Launches $5M Inaugural Vertical AI Early Stage Fund
TheFounderVC (TFVC), a new early stage fund based in Seattle and San Francisco, publicly launched its inaugural $5 million fund focused on vertical AI startups. TFVC plans to invest $100,000 to $250,000 in 25 to 30 pre-seed and seed companies, mostly with ties to Seattle, including startups in AI-powered knowledge storage, science automation, weather risk planning, and more.
Madrona Announces PitchBook Data Partnership for 2022 IA40 Ranking After IA40 Firms Raised $3B
Madrona, which has been investing in intelligent applications for over a decade, launched the IA40 list in 2021 and says IA40 companies have since raised over $3 billion; for the 2022 IA40 it has added a data partnership with PitchBook to enhance the ranking using PitchBook's private and public equity data.
Zeitworks Raises $2M, Jazz Ventures and Madrona Back ML Startup as Jay Bartot Becomes CEO
Seattle startup Zeitworks raised $2 million in new funding from Jazz Ventures and Madrona Venture Group and appointed Seattle tech veteran Jay Bartot as CEO, succeeding Ryan Windham. The company uses machine learning to analyze user interactions and recommend automation or augmentation to improve repetitive business processes and plans to expand pilot customers.
Madrona Venture Labs raises $8M and turns investors like Spencer Rascoff into co‑founders of spinouts
Madrona Venture Labs has raised $8 million for its fourth fund and introduced a model that makes investors — including Spencer Rascoff, Julie Larson-Green and Elena Donio — co-founders, board members, and advisors of its spinouts to attract talent and accelerate startup formation. Founded in 2014, the Seattle-based studio has spun out more than a dozen companies, including recent spinouts Zeitworks, Simplata, and Stratify.
Madrona Ventures Announces Investment in Rec Room, Citing 10M Players and 1M Creators
Madrona announced its investment in Rec Room, an online social gaming universe with over 10 million players and 1 million creators that offers easy cross-platform play and low-code content creation tools. The firm praised Rec Room’s founders, community-first approach, and alignment with trends in online communities and maker-focused development.
Madrona Venture Labs names entrepreneur Jay Bartot as CTO, joining May 2017 to lead ML and big-data initiatives
Madrona Venture Labs has hired Jay Bartot as Chief Technology Officer; Bartot is a four-time cofounder with expertise in big data, machine learning, and computer vision, and his startups include Farecast, AdRelevance, Medify, and Vhoto.
Hulu buys Vhoto assets, shuts down service and hires most of Seattle startup’s team; Noah Heller joins Hulu
Hulu purchased the assets of Seattle video startup Vhoto last fall, shut down the Vhoto service, and hired most of its team to work in Hulu’s Seattle engineering office. Vhoto founder Noah Heller has moved to Hulu as vice president of audience development and data partnerships; financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Organizations
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Lev CTO 2026–present · current
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TheFounderVC Technical Advisor/CTO 2026–present · current
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University of Washington Affiliate Professor 2025–present · current
Education
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University of Iowa Music, Anthropology, Computer Science · 1988–1992
