Jay Bartot has spent most of his career building startups and advising other founders. Now he’s joining another veteran entrepreneur in a bet that technology can do a lot of that work.
Lev, the Pioneer Square Labs spinout building an “AI co-founder” for startup entrepreneurs, announced Thursday that Bartot is joining the company as its chief technology officer, working with founder and CEO T.A. McCann to turn the venture studio playbook into software.
Lev uses AI to walk founders through ideation, validation and company formation, generating assets such as competitive analyses, customer outreach templates and product specs along the way.
This week, the company is launching Lev Learn, a free public guide to the startup terminology founders are expected to already know — what a term means, who it’s for, when to use it, and the most common mistakes. McCann said the explanations will also surface inside Lev itself, so a founder told to talk to ICPs (ideal customer profiles), for example, can get an answer in context.
Bartot is a longtime Seattle entrepreneur, best known as a co-founder of Farecast, the airfare-prediction startup acquired by Microsoft in 2008. He later co-founded Medify, a medical information company sold in 2012, and Vhoto, a computer vision startup acquired by Hulu in 2015.
He spent five years as chief technology officer of Madrona Venture Labs — Madrona’s former venture studio — where he helped create and launch new companies, similar to what PSL does.
More recently, he has mentored at Creative Destruction Lab, the University of Washington, TheFounderVC, and Foundations, in addition to co-founding Seattle startup AirSignal in late 2024.
“Lev pulls all these different pieces together, where I can be building, but also building something that helps me interact with founders at scale,” Bartot said in an interview this week.
The startup grew out of tools McCann and his colleagues built inside PSL to bring more structure to the studio’s company-building process. PSL and its AI Studio Fund have invested more than $1 million in the startup, which spun out as a standalone business this spring, led by McCann, with PSL co-founder and Managing Director Greg Gottesman on its board.
“You think about the 1,000 people who might be Techstars mentors, or all the people sitting at YC giving founders advice, or at CDL or UW or 1,000 different universities,” McCann said. “All of these can be scaled with a product like Lev.”
Monthly signups have grown 17-fold in four months, he said, with active users in more than 50 countries and more than 1,500 projects started. Nearly one in 10 of Lev’s institutional users comes from a university or research organization.
Lev remains a small operation: McCann, Bartot, Per Nilsson, who had been serving as the company’s contract CTO, and design and development engineer Sahana Narendran. The company is pre-revenue, and McCann said he expects to turn on monetization in the coming weeks.
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