ThriveAI, the world’s first AI-powered junior product manager, has officially launched, backed by a heavily oversubscribed $1.2 million pre-seed funding round. The round was led by 500 Global, with additional participation from Iterative and Hustle Fund. This fresh capital will accelerate the development of its proprietary multi-agent platform designed to streamline product management workflows, enhance iteration speed, and expand coverage across the product management stack.
A Purpose-Built AI Teammate for Product Teams
Founded by former product leads from Google, Slack, and Palantir, ThriveAI is not just another tool—it’s an autonomous teammate built to support product managers operating in high-velocity, data-rich environments.
The platform leverages a system of specialized AI agents, each owning distinct responsibilities within the product lifecycle—from data analysis and customer feedback interpretation to insight generation and product health monitoring. These AI agents are built to act, collaborate, and evolve over time, making them indispensable allies for product teams striving for speed and precision.
“AI doesn’t replace jobs; it replaces tasks. As AI accelerates product development, the need for specialized tools to help human product managers keep pace has never been greater. We believe ThriveAI is uniquely positioned to meet this demand, leveraging over two decades of its founders’ product expertise and a proprietary multi-agent architecture that mirrors real-world workflows,” said Vishal Harnal, Managing Partner at 500 Global.
Tackling a Real Industry Gap
The co-founders, Ishwar Dhanuka and Brian Ngo, observed that while AI was transforming domains like engineering and marketing, product managers were still bogged down with execution tasks, limiting their capacity for strategic thinking. ThriveAI was born from their conviction that product managers deserve an AI-powered teammate tailored to their unique challenges.
“Ishwar and Brian have spent a lot of time in the product management space throughout their careers, and understand its pain points better than most,” noted Hsu Ken, Managing Partner at Iterative. “Bogged down by daily execution work with little time for the tasks that really drive impact, ThriveAI provides product teams a support system they can delegate tasks to, can trust to work reliably, deeply understands the product and has the team’s back. As the industry continues to shift more toward autonomous operations, ThriveAI is impeccably positioned to support the human workers to meet that demand.”
Transforming Product Operations
Built in collaboration with fast-scaling companies, ThriveAI has already demonstrated measurable impact—catching product issues earlier, speeding up prioritization, and reducing time spent on reporting. With a growing waitlist, the platform is now expanding access to teams that want to scale productivity without scaling headcount.
“The future of product management isn’t about choosing between human or machine; it’s about using both wisely. At ThriveAI, we believe AI should handle the scale, so humans can focus on what truly moves the needle: strategic thinking, creative problem-solving, and product intuition honed through experience,” said Ishwar Dhanuka, Co-founder and CEO of ThriveAI. “Our AI Junior PM is trained to think and act like a real teammate, catching what human PMs might miss and handling the operational load so they can stay focused on leading.”
Vision for the Future
With the new funding, ThriveAI will focus on expanding the platform’s capabilities—enabling it to handle increasingly complex product management responsibilities with high trust and quality.
“Every improvement we make to ThriveAI is designed to make it a more capable, dependable teammate, from triaging feedback to tracking product health and supporting roadmap decisions,” said Brian Ngo, Co-founder and CTO. “Ishwar and I have spent years building products at Google, Slack, and Palantir, never feeling we had the support PMs truly need to be successful. So we built it.”
As organizations worldwide continue to push for autonomous, intelligent workflows, ThriveAI is stepping up as a pioneering solution that empowers product managers to lead smarter, iterate faster, and scale effectively.