The Netflix Mafia

ivelina

Published

October 10, 2024

It's no surprise that Netflix attracts the top creatives in the world, but, what you'll be surprised at is some of the incredible companies these sought-after creatives and engineers have started.

If you missed our previous posts, make sure to check the Twitter Mafia, Lyft Mafia and Stripe Mafia articles. This week we dive into 17 phenomenal startups that have come out from the Netflix Mafia.

The formation of Tech Mafias is fascinating because brilliant minds and ideas exist in every company, so the opportunity to invest in the next big unicorn is likely closer to you than you think (and not exclusive to venture capital firms only).

Investing in fellow coworkers' startups, especially as a community or alumni group, is one of the best ways to get in on the best deals as well as support the ideas and ventures of people you love and admire. Who knows what's around the corner in your own network and community!

Companies Covered:

Looker
Faction
Resourcely
Noteable
Exploding Kittens
Vizion
Tubular Labs
Curai Health
Gremlin
Meetup
Numetric
Greyscale AI
Jeli
Outerbounds
Graft
Neurosity
Lasso Labs

Looker

Founder: Marc Randolph
‍Netflix Role: Founder
Capital Raised: $2.5B+
Investors: Redpoint
Stage: Unicorn

Marc is the…drum roll…co-founder of Netflix! He was the CEO for 7 years before founding Looker in 2012. Looker is a business intelligence and big data analytics platform designed to bring better insights and data-driven decisions to businesses.

Faction

Founder: Ain McKendrick
‍Netflix Role: Senior Director of Partner Products
Capital Raised: $6M
Investors: Y Combinator
Stage: Seed

Ain built the Partner Products team to deploy Netflix video streaming on connected consumer electronics devices. In 2020 he founded Faction, which develops driverless vehicles designed to focus on micro delivery and vehicle-on-demand services.

Resourcely

Founder: Aladdin Almubayed
‍Netflix Role: Senior Software Security Engineer
Capital Raised: $8.3M
Investors: Felicis Ventures
Stage: Seed

Aladdin worked for 3 years at Netflix before joining Robinhood, and eventually moved on to start his own company. Resourcely is a cloud resource creation and management platform intended to prevent misconfigurations or mistakes.

Noteable

Founder: Michelle Winters
Netflix Role: Engineering Manager
Capital Raised: $25M
Investors: Bain Capital Ventures
Stage: Series A

Michelle worked as Engineering Manager at both GoDaddy and Netflix before co-founding Noteable in 2019. Noteable is a notebook platform designed to offer a collaborative notebook experience for data-driven teams.

Exploding Kittens

Founder: Shane Small
‍Netflix Role: Executive Creative Director
Capital Raised: $200M+
Investors: TCG Capital
Stage: Series A

Shane is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to storytelling. He is a futurist and pioneer of interactive, immersive and personalized storytelling. He’s worked at industry heavyweights such as Netflix, Facebook, and Hulu. He is the creator and founder of Exploding Kittens - the highest backed Kickstarter in history which raised $8,782,571 with 219,382 backers and became the number one game on Kickstarter.

Vizion

Founder: Tyler Hughes
‍Netflix Role: Senior Software Engineer
Capital Raised: $15.5M
Investors: Tech Square Ventures
Stage: Series A

Tyler is the co-founder and CTO of Vizion, an application programming interface platform serving the logistics and supply chain industry. The platform integrates ocean freight tracking data from almost any carrier in a single and easy-to-use structure.

Tubular Labs

Founder: Rob Gabel
‍Netflix Role: VP of Marketing
Capital Raised: $32M
Investors: Canaan Partners
Stage: Series C

Rob briefly worked at Netflix as VP of Marketing before moving on to TubeBuddy, and then founding Tubular Labs. Tubular Labs is an online video measurement and analytics platform. The company works with customers such as Disney, ViacomCBS, WarnerMedia, BBC, Channel 4, ZDF, Washington Post, Electronic Arts, Mattel, Activision, and all of the major social media platforms.

Curai Health

Founder: Neil Hunt
‍Netflix Role: Chief Product Officer
Capital Raised: $39M
Investors: General Catalyst
Stage: Series B

After working as Chief Product Officer at Netflix, Neil Hunt started Curai Health, an AI-based medical platform designed to help doctors by offering predictive tools for healthcare.

Gremlin

Founder: Kolton Andrus
‍Netflix Role: Senior Software Engineer
Capital Raised: $28M
Investors: Redpoint, Amplify
Stage: Series B

After working at Netflix, Kolton founded Gremlin, a risk prevention platform designed to build resilient systems through the implementation of chaos engineering.

Meetup

Founder: Chris Fregly
‍Netflix Role: Senior Software Engineer
Capital Raised: $18M
Investors: Union Square Ventures
Stage: Series D

Chris Fregly is the founder of Meetup, an online social networking platform for members to find and join groups unified by a common interest, such as politics, books, games, movies, health, pets, careers or hobbies. It also allows users to find local events around getting fit, playing music, learning languages and other interests.

Outerbounds

Founder: Savin Goyal
Netflix Role: Software Engineer
Capital Raised: $24M
Investors: Amplify, Foundation Capital
Stage: Series A

Savin Goyal is the co-founder and CTO of Outerbounds, which develops a human-centric infrastructure for machine learning and data science teams, based on Metaflow, an open-source framework.

Numetric

Founder: Robert Sweeney
‍Netflix Role: Senior Software Engineer
Capital Raised: $22M
Investors: Insight Partners
Stage: Series A

Robert has been on both sides of the table as both a software engineer and the founder of 3 companies. In 2014 he started Numetric, a traffic safety data and analytics platform to help state and local agencies make budgetary decisions.

Greyscale AI

Founder: Paul Kirincich
‍Netflix Role: Vice President, Director of FP&A
Capital Raised: $20M
Investors: BCP Ventures
Stage: Series A

Paul was the VP of Netflix for 6 years, and in 2020 he co-founded Greyscale AI. Greyscale develops inspection systems to inspect the seals of pouches, bags and rigid containers, using high-resolution imaging technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning software.

Jeli‍‍‍

Founder: Nora Jones
Netflix Role: Senior Software Engineer
Capital Raised: $19M
Investors: Boldstart Ventures, Heavybit
Stage: Series A

Nora Jones (not Norah Jones!) worked as a Software Engineer at some of the most well-known companies, such as Netflix and Slack. In 2019 she founded Jeli, an incident analysis platform which delivers proactive solutions and identifies problems.

Rising Stars

Graft

Founder: Maria Kazandjieva
‍Netflix Role: Director of Engineering
Capital Raised: $4.5M
Investors: NEA
Stage: Pre-Seed

Maria worked at Netflix for 7 years before co-founding Graft in 2021. Graft is a cloud-native platform that empowers organizations to use the most advanced AI techniques to unlock the value of text, images, video, audio, and graphs.

Neurosity

Founder: Alex Castillo
‍Netflix Role: Senior Software Engineer
Capital Raised: $5M
Investors: Adam Morley, Myelin VC
Stage: Seed

Alex Castillo is the co-founder of Neurosity, which develops neural devices and applications designed to translate the thoughts of a human brain into actionable output.

Lasso Labs

Founder: Karthik Thiyagarajan
‍Netflix Role: Engineering
Capital Raised: $4.2M
Investors: Village Global
Stage: Seed

Karthik co-founded Lasso Labs in 2022, a platform providing real-time information about digital assets to update users with new opportunities on trading and investing.