BrainGrid, an AI product planning platform designed for non-technical founders, has raised $1 million in a pre-seed funding round. The round was led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Next Tier Ventures and Brainstorm Ventures. The company plans to use the funding to accelerate its mission of helping users turn ideas into revenue-generating software products.
The company is positioning itself around a shift in how software is built in the AI era. While AI coding tools have made it easier to generate software through natural language, BrainGrid argues that the main bottleneck has shifted from coding to planning. Without structured planning, products often break down as they scale, with issues such as conflicting features, failed integrations, and unreliable outputs from AI agents.
BrainGrid aims to fill this gap by acting as a structured planning layer. Traditionally, this role would be handled by a product manager who defines scope, sequences dependencies, and ensures alignment between vision and execution. BrainGrid brings this function into an AI-native workflow, enabling non-technical builders to create more reliable software products.
The platform has already been used by more than 500 builders to launch AI-native SaaS products across sectors including fitness, healthcare, productivity, and venture studios. According to the company, these are live applications with paying customers, not just prototypes, and they have been built by users ranging from first-time founders to experienced engineers working independently.
Founded by Nico Acosta and Tyler Wells, both former Twilio product and engineering leaders, BrainGrid leverages more than 25 years of combined experience in software development. The platform operates through a four-stage framework, Capture, Structure, Build, and Verify, and is designed to integrate with AI coding tools such as Claude Code and Cursor.
KEY QUOTES:
“As AI agents run longer and handle more complexity, the quality of the plan they start with matters more, not less. That’s the problem we’re solving.”
Tyler Wells, Co-Founder And CTO Of BrainGrid
“Nico and Tyler deeply understand how software gets built at scale. BrainGrid brings that experience to the millions of new founders empowered by AI.”
Shawn Carolan, Partner At Menlo Ventures
“BrainGrid is the most agnostic piece of my stack. I’ll drop models. I won’t drop planning.”
Clay Unicorn, Founder Of Unicorn.love
