By Allie Garfinkle
Publication Date: 2026-03-17 11:31:00
In 2017, Darian Shirazi and Zach Bratun-Glennon knew they weren’t exactly working on the coolest new thing.
“I remember going to happy hours with other startup investors and pre-seed founders,” said Shirazi. “I’d say I was at Gradient, and people would say ‘oh, the AI thing. I haven’t done that. Are there AI startups? I certainly don’t see them and AI doesn’t seem that interesting.’”
Shirazi and Bratun-Glennon, both engineers by background, were there at the very beginning, as Google stood up Gradient in 2017, expressly for the purpose of backing AI companies early. It was one month after Google’s famed “Attention Is All You Need” paper came out. AI, as a technology, was clearly on the precipice of change. But as a business use case, it was niche at best.
“You really had to be a nerd to actually realize that this was a big deal,” said Shirazi. “Everyone was talking about crypto and ICOs at the time.”
Bratun-Glennon points out…