---
type: person
title: Sarah Chen
aliases:
  - Sarah L. Chen
  - sarahchen
  - sarah@novamind.ai
tags:
  - founder
  - yc-w25
  - ai-agents
---

# Sarah Chen

Founder and CEO of NovaMind (YC W25). Building autonomous AI agents for enterprise
workflow automation. Previously ML engineer at Anthropic (2022-2024), where she worked
on tool-use and agentic behaviors in large language models. Stanford CS class of 2020.

Met Sarah at YC W25 Demo Day on March 15, 2025. She gave one of the strongest demos
of the batch: an agent that completed a 47-step procurement workflow end-to-end with
zero human intervention. She is sharp, deeply technical, and has real conviction about
the agent-native enterprise stack replacing SaaS dashboards.

## Key People

- Priya Patel is CTO and co-founder. They overlapped at Stanford.
- Marcus Reid at Threshold Ventures led their seed round.

## Beliefs

- Enterprise software will be replaced by fleets of task-specific agents within 5 years.
- The bottleneck is not model capability but reliable multi-step execution and error recovery.
- Agent frameworks that force developers to think in graphs (nodes/edges) are the wrong abstraction. Natural language task descriptions with learned sub-routines are the path.
- Vertical-first go-to-market beats horizontal platform plays for agents.

## Open Threads

- Revisit her thoughts on agent memory architecture. She hinted at something novel during the 1:1 after Demo Day but we ran out of time.
- She is looking for design partners in procurement and supply chain. Could intro to relevant YC alumni.
- Follow up on potential collab between NovaMind agent infra and GBrain knowledge layer.

---

## Timeline

### 2025-03-15 — YC W25 Demo Day

Met Sarah at Demo Day. NovaMind demo was standout of the batch. The agent completed a
47-step procurement workflow autonomously: vendor discovery, RFQ generation, bid
comparison, approval routing, PO creation. Had a 1:1 conversation after the main
presentations. She described their agent memory system as "compiled procedures" rather
than prompt chains. Impressive technical depth for a CEO.

### 2025-03-22 — Follow-up Call

30-minute call to dig deeper on NovaMind architecture. Sarah walked through their
execution engine: agents decompose tasks into sub-procedures, each with rollback
semantics. Error recovery is handled by a supervisor agent that can re-plan. She
mentioned Priya Patel (CTO) designed the multi-agent coordination layer based on her
Google Brain research on emergent communication.

### 2025-03-28 — Seed Round Closed

Sarah confirmed NovaMind closed their $4M seed round led by Threshold Ventures with
Marcus Reid on the board. Angels include several YC partners. She plans to use the
capital primarily for hiring: 3 senior engineers and 1 design partner lead. Launch
target is Q3 2025 with 2 enterprise design partners already signed.
