The concept of building holds mythic status in the world of new venture creation, and the mythos often obscures the difficulty. In construction, there are no such illusions. Construction is a $2 trillion U.S./$13 trillion global industry where automation has barely scratched the surface of possibility. Beneath that surface is dirt—unfathomable amounts. For new housing subdivisions, commercial real estate developments, data centers to power the AI boom, highway expansions, and countless other projects, American abundance begins with dirt.

Ask anyone who’s ever begun a term paper the night before it’s due: there are stark tradeoffs between research time and research quality. This is especially true of primary user research, one of the fundamental ways large enterprises can ensure their products resonate with customers. Historically, this has required a choice between user interviews, which are high-fidelity but slow, manual, and expensive, and surveys, which are scalable, cheaper, and faster, but often result in unrefined, low-signal data. Although there have been some strong companies on the survey side, e.g. Qualtrics and Medallia, this uneasy compromise has always persisted—until now.

We were thrilled to feature Charles Srisuwananukorn from Together AI at January’s Chat8VC. Charles is the Founding Vice President of Engineering at Together AI, where he leads the company’s work on AI infrastructure and clusters. Previously, he was Head of Applied Machine Learning at Snorkel AI and held engineering roles at Apple. He studied Computer Science at Stanford and has helped steer Together from an early contributor to open-source AI to a full-stack infra platform.