Foundations, the startup community with hubs in Seattle and San Francisco, launched a service Tuesday that lets businesses contract with its members — many of them technical founders building companies of their own — to plan, develop and implement AI systems and applications.
The service, called Foundations Design and Engineering, is designed in part to give those founders a new way to pay their bills as early-stage investment gets harder to raise. It also reflects how AI is changing tech, making software easier to build and leading some startups to act more like services firms, customizing their work for individual customers.
“I think the world of traditional consulting and startups is just absolutely going to merge,” said Aviel Ginzburg, the Seattle venture capitalist who co-founded Foundations in 2024.
Except, in the case of Foundations Design and Engineering, the consulting won’t have the trappings of the traditional kind, he said. There is no staff of consultants and no billing by the hour. Work is priced by the project.
The pitch on the website: “Not consultants studying AI. Builders using it every day.”
The idea, he said, is to create something that “acts more like a router.” A request from a business might go to a member company already building a product in that area, a founder who knows the customer’s industry, or an early-stage founder looking for paid work.
Ginzburg said the work could have another benefit, giving founders a close look at the problems businesses are trying to solve, which can help them decide what to build.
The initials, FDE, are a play on “forward deployed engineer,” the term for engineers who embed with a customer to get technology working inside its business. Palantir popularized the role, and companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Amazon have adopted it.
Some of the details have yet to be determined. For example, Foundations is still working out how much of each contract it will keep. Ginzburg said it will vary case by case, from nothing to a double-digit percentage. Also unsettled is whether a business will sign its contract with Foundations or directly with the founder doing the work.
Prices aren’t set. In terms of a starting point, Ginzburg said founders in the community have charged $1,000 to $2,000 to spend a couple of hours with a company’s team and as much as $5,000 for an audit of how a business could use AI, with larger projects varying widely.
Foundations Design and Engineering has its roots in a group of 10 founders who were already doing consulting work and helped put the offering together. Foundations opened the service to the rest of its members Tuesday morning. A veteran Seattle startup founder will run FTE part time at first. (Ginzburg said he wasn’t ready to announce who the person is.)
Foundations counts more than 300 founders in its community, including about 30 in its founder-in-residence program. It is a public benefit corporation, a legal structure for companies that aim to turn a profit while also serving a public purpose.
It doesn’t take equity in the startups that go through the residency program, and Ginzburg said the new service is meant to bring in revenue without pulling the organization away from its mission of making founders successful.
“This is a startup,” he said. “We’ll see how it goes, but it’s going to be fun.”