Standard Intelligence: The Six-Person Startup That Wants to Teach AI to Use Every Computer on Earth
Two college dropouts, a 30-petabyte video dataset, and a $75M bet that every AI lab has been training computer-use models the wrong way.
Company Overview
Standard Intelligence is a six-person AI research company headquartered in San Francisco. It closed a $75 million Series A on April 30, 2026, led by Sequoia Capital and Spark Capital, at a pre-money valuation of approximately $425 million. The post-money figure lands near $500 million. That math gives you a company worth half a billion dollars before it has publicly shipped a product, staffed a sales team, or hired its tenth employee.
The investors behind the round are not tourists. Sonya Huang and Mikowai Ashwill represented Sequoia. Yasmin Razavi led for Spark Capital. Angel investors include Andrej Karpathy, the AI researcher who co-founded OpenAI and ran Tesla’s Autopilot program; Stanley Druckenmiller, one of the most respected macro investors alive; and Milan Kovac, former head of Autopilot software at Tesla.
The founding team is Galen Mead (21) and Devansh Pandey (20). They met as teenagers through the Atlas Fellowship, a selective program for high-school students focused on AI alignment. Both concluded, independently and then together, that AGI was arriving faster than institutions understood. Both left their undergraduate programs to act on that conclusion. Mead had been enrolled at the University of Toronto. Sequoia’s written description of them is unusually pointed: “taste, scrappiness, technical courage, and ambition” in a combination the firm found rare enough to write a very large check.
