David Gabeau

I build things that expand the surface area of human connection.

I've spent ten years building and investing in open networks, social apps, and climate: the infrastructure of discovery, trust, and coordination between strangers.

Founder · Tinkerer · Investor

Say hi →
2022–2026
Tapestry
Tapestry · Founder & CEO

Founded on the thesis that new social apps needed open infrastructure to compete. We built Zumi, an AI companion that grew to 160k users, and raised $12.5M from USV, Redpoint, Slow, Stellation, and Fabric before winding down in difficult markets.

Four years of building and leading a team, shipping 0-to-1 across consumer and infra. The most formative work I've done.

Focused on early crypto, climate, and education. Spent most of my time thinking about open infrastructure, where I started building the conviction that would become Tapestry.

Made sure the rider-pickup experience was seamless through IPO.

Member of the early Stories team. Helped ship new features pre-IPO.

Studied psychology. Dropped out, learned to code.

Projects

Company

Products built by Tapestry

  • ZumiAn embodied AI companion for Gen Z, built on the idea that persistent relationships with AI characters could meaningfully reduce loneliness. It grew to 160k users across voice, chat, and video, with people spending 17 minutes a day with it. Under the hood: a multi-model stack across OpenAI, Minimax, and Gemini, with continuous in-production evals and voice latency tuned down to 400ms.#zumichat →Product Hunt →Introducing Zumi 2.0 →
  • PrimitivesPlatform for collecting digital art and building community around on-chain objects. Artists and collectors minted 500k NFTs from their camera roll.Art show →Journal →Art Basel exhibit →
  • SSE, Solana Social ExplorerOpen-source trading platform for Solana memecoins and emerging tokens. Did $50M in trading volume in its first two months.GitHub →

Side Projects

Solo projects I work on in my spare time.

  • BrambleA macOS desktop app that runs in the background while you work in Claude Code or Codex, capturing the full event stream — prompts, tool calls, file edits, model responses — and turning it into a structured dev log. Local-first: a SQLite event store and an Anthropic pipeline that drafts a session summary the moment you stop recording. Nothing leaves the machine unless you choose to ship something.
  • AI Atlas NYCA market map of New York's early-stage AI ecosystem, rebuilt nightly. An agent pipeline scrapes funding announcements, LinkedIn signals, and founder activity, re-clusters companies by category, and publishes a new version by morning.

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Writing

10 essays

Personal Investments

  • Loula (angel)Insurance billing platform for doulas — credentialing, claims submission, and guaranteed payments so they can focus on clients
  • Valiu (angel)Cross-border remittance app using crypto-dollars to help unbanked Venezuelans send and store money against hyperinflation

Talks

4 talks
github.com/davidjgabeau →

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