The Dormant Hundred, Filed by Trip-Wire

Every company below is Ignore-until-trigger. One verdict repeated a hundred times carries no information, so the verdict is not what you're reading for. Read for the trigger.

That is also why nothing here is grouped by sector. The last dormant edition, Not Now. Here's When, sorted by what companies sell. Wrong axis. Signals don't show up organized by industry; they show up as events, and the event is the thing you have to recognize fast. Each cluster is named for one.

The title-scope rule, stated once. A qualifying search means Staff, Principal, Director, Head, or VP product design. Senior and mid-level IC postings appear below as context and never as signal. Brand, marketing, and web design postings never qualify at all. All 100 boards were pulled directly from the company's own Ashby, Greenhouse, or Lever feed on August 1. No aggregators. Anything with a live qualifying search sits in Hidden Gems — Active instead.

On dates. Most of these companies have no dated design milestone in the public record. No announcement, no departure, no posting history you can time. I could invent a timeline. I'd rather flag the gap, because the absence is the finding: these are design organizations with no public surface whatsoever.

What I cut and why. The entire inference-and-vector layer is gone. Pinecone, Modal, Fireworks, Weaviate, roughly twenty peers. They clear on funding and fail on design influence, and design influence is a threshold, not a modifier. When the buyer is a backend engineer, a design leader is a delivery function with a good title. I also capped Total comp at 2 almost everywhere. Across twenty currently-posted Staff and Director design roles with disclosed bands, the median midpoint is $230K and exactly two start at $250K. Some role scores land at 9. Those stay on the bench because the company clears 8 and the hypothetical role re-scores upward the instant a posting names a reporting line into product.

1. The CPO-Shaped Hole

Tier: AI-native · Confidence: high

Application-layer AI with a real end-user surface and nobody above the founder owning product. Value concentrates where model output meets a paying customer, which is the only place design scope actually exists, and none of these companies has anyone holding it. I treat a new product chief as live for ninety days; the thirty-to-sixty-day slice is where your message lands before the scope document gets written. No dataset sits behind that interval. It's the rubric's window, not a measured lag, and it still beats arriving after the requisition. Your edge with this buyer is structural: you're a design leader currently running product at an enterprise agent platform, so a new CPO reads you as a peer instead of a portfolio.

1. Writer. Enterprise generative writing. Series C · SF/NYC · 9/11. Trigger: CPO or VP Product named. Lead: Alibaba's $50B GMV B2B rebuild and the +2.2 NPS move. Buyers transacting on machine-ranked results.
2. Replit. Browser IDE with agentic app generation. Growth · SF · 9/11. Founder-run product. Trigger: first non-founder product chief. Lead: TinyFish as current agent-deployment context. The autonomy ladder from "Trust Is the New Interface" carries the design argument.
3. Descript. Video and audio editing by transcript. Series C · SF · 8/10. Trigger: CPO or Head of Design search. Lead: Equinox+. Five brands, shipped MVP, three months.
4. Runway. Generative video models and production tooling. Series D · NYC/SF · 9/10. Trigger: VP Product or Head of Product Design. Lead: Brand Pulse. Probabilistic output made legible to a non-technical reviewer.
5. AssemblyAI. Speech and audio intelligence APIs. Series C · SF, US-remote · 8/10. No application-layer owner. Trigger: first application product hire. Lead: Carrier IQ's sign-off flow, for the moment a transcript becomes evidence somebody attests to.
6. Pika. Consumer generative video. Series B · Palo Alto · 8/10. Trigger: CPO or first design leadership posting. Lead: Allē. 30M members, $42 CAC. Your only consumer unit-economics proof.
7. Speechmatics. Multi-accent speech recognition. Growth · Cambridge UK, US presence · 8/9. Trigger: US product leadership hire. Lead: Red Cross. Six systems collapsed into one, operated nationally by volunteers with no training.
8. HeyGen. AI avatars for business video. Series C · LA/SF · 8/10. Trigger: VP Product or Head of Design. Lead: the disclosure section of the Trust essay. Synthetic likeness is a consent problem before it is a rendering problem.
9. Cartesia. Real-time voice models for agents. Series B · SF · 9/10. Trigger: first product leadership hire. Lead: TinyFish's production agent-latency context plus Retail Velocity's time-critical alerting. Nearest thing you own to sub-second interruption design.
10. Cohere. Private-deployment models for regulated enterprises. Series D · Toronto/SF/NYC · 9/11. Trigger: North America product or design executive. Lead: TinyFish as current governance context. Thermo Fisher mySupply is the design proof: 100% adoption across six partners.

2. Brand Hiring, No Product Hiring

Tier: Enterprise platform, except Decagon and Tavus (AI-native) and Current (Growth-stage platform) · Confidence: high

Every company here is posting brand, marketing, or web, and nothing product-side. Under the title-scope rule that's the premise, not the signal. Two readings, both actionable: design sits under marketing, or a product designer left and nobody re-scoped the seat. These are midstream platforms whose commercial story has outrun their product surface, which is exactly why there's a brand budget and no product one. You've built the function from zero twice. Describe the first ninety days before they've written the requisition.

11. Baseten. Model inference and deployment. Series C · SF · 8/10 (design influence 2). Trigger: first product design posting. Lead: Carrier IQ. Model behavior made inspectable to the person accountable for it.
12. Chainguard. Hardened container images. Series D · Kirkland, US-remote · 8/10. Trigger: product design posting. Lead: Thermo Fisher's $20M+ margin outcome, retold as remediation throughput.
13. Docker. Developer container platform. Late private · Palo Alto, US-remote · 8/9. Trigger: product design leadership posting. Lead: the delegation ladder, for the move from command line to agentic build.
14. Persona. Identity verification and fraud decisioning. Series C · SF · 9/11. Trigger: first product design posting. Lead: Carrier IQ's override interface. A reviewer reversing an automated identity decline in the moment.
15. Illumio. Zero-trust segmentation. Series F · Sunnyvale · 8/10. Trigger: product design leadership posting. Lead: Red Cross's consolidation work. Three fragmented policy consoles into one view a network operator can act from.
16. Axonius. Cyber asset inventory and control validation. Series E · NYC/Tel Aviv · 8/10. Trigger: US product design posting. Lead: Alibaba's search and PDP work on tracing a ranked result back to its source.
17. Webflow. Visual web development. Series C · SF, US-remote · 8/10. Staff brand only. Product design conspicuously absent. Trigger: product design leadership posting, especially inside 90 days of the July 2026 product leadership change. Lead: Equinox+. One surface serving five visual mandates.
18. Tavus. Conversational video agents. Series B · SF · 9/10. A combined brand-and-product posting, which usually means neither. Trigger: dedicated product design posting. Lead: the Trust essay on synthetic presence and the disclosure moment.
19. Decagon. AI customer support agents. Series C · SF · 10/11. Conversation design and brand only. Trigger: Head or Director of Design. Lead: Retail Velocity's escalation logic. What the human sees at the handoff.
20. Current. Consumer mobile banking for underbanked customers. Series D · NYC · 8/9 (AI centrality 2). Trigger: permanent product design leadership posting. Lead: Red Cross's $847K disbursement flow. High-consequence money decisions made by people with no expertise.

3. Mature Org, ICs in Place, No US Design Leader

Tier: Enterprise platform · Confidence: moderate

Downstream applications with large installed bases, designers already on payroll, and no visible US design leadership. A correction first, because I owe you one. I went looking for evidence that a design-ops or design-systems hire reliably precedes a product design leadership posting. It isn't there. The operating models I could source place design ops beneath existing leadership, in orgs already past thirty designers. Ops is corroboration. It is never the trigger. The trigger is a US design leadership posting or a change in product leadership. Alibaba is the only line you have that proves you ran a design function at this installed-base scale.

21. Glean. Enterprise search over internal data. Late private · Palo Alto · 10/11. Trigger: Head of Design posting or new CPO. Lead: Alibaba's attribution work. Direct analogue to enterprise retrieval trust.
22. Postman. API development and collaboration. Series D · SF/Bangalore · 8/9. Trigger: US design leadership posting. Lead: Thermo Fisher. One workflow spanning six partner organizations with six different approval regimes.
23. LaunchDarkly. Feature flagging and progressive delivery. Series D · Oakland, US-remote · 8/10. Trigger: any design posting. Confirm it reports to product and not engineering. Lead: the reversibility section. A kill switch is a trust surface.
24. Algolia. Hosted search and recommendations. Series D · SF/Paris · 9/10. Trigger: US design leadership posting. Lead: Alibaba's relevance-to-conversion work, +20% transactions, spoken in merchandiser vocabulary.
25. Contentful. Composable content platform. Series F · Berlin/Denver/SF · 8/9. Trigger: US design leadership posting. Lead: Equinox+'s five-brand governance model.
26. Bloomreach. Commerce search and merchandising. Series F · Mountain View/Boston · 8/10. Trigger: any US design leadership posting. Lead: the Alibaba PDP redesign, told from the merchandiser's side of the screen.
27. Iterable. Cross-channel messaging and journeys. Series D · SF/Denver · 8/10. Trigger: Director+ posting. Lead: Allē's dual-surface architecture. Consumer and provider views of one journey.
28. 6sense. Predictive B2B account intelligence. Series E · SF, US-remote · 9/10. Trigger: design leadership posting. Lead: Brand Pulse. Model-scored accounts a seller trusts enough to dial.
29. Culture Amp. Employee experience and performance analytics. Series F · Melbourne/SF/NYC · 8/9 (AI centrality 2). APAC-centered leadership. Trigger: US-based design leadership posting. Lead: Red Cross's non-expert trust calibration, applied to managers reading sensitive scores.
30. Grafana Labs. Open-source observability dashboards. Series D · NYC, remote-first · 8/9 (design influence 2). Trigger: first product design leadership posting. Lead: Retail Velocity's alert-to-action path, the point where a dashboard stops being a dashboard.

4. Geography-Gated

Tier: Enterprise platform, except Mistral and Helsing (AI-native) · Confidence: high, with a mechanic attached

Design hiring here is real and it is not in the US. The trigger is a US location appearing, and there's a mechanic worth carrying. When a company adds a location, most applicant-tracking systems hang the new public posting off the same underlying job record. Babylist's board right now shows two separately numbered postings sharing one internal job ID, and Ashby's documentation confirms that every posting attached to one job feeds a single pipeline. So when the US location appears, check the job ID. Same parent job means the slate is already mature and the portal is theater. Go straight to the hiring manager, within days. Your edge in this cluster is literal: you held Head of Design and Research, North America. That is the seat these companies are opening.

31. Mistral AI. Open-weight frontier models. Series B · Paris/London/Palo Alto · 10/12. EU-only design. Trigger: any US-located design posting. Lead: TinyFish as current agent-deployment context. Carrier IQ as design proof.
32. Helsing. AI for European defense sensing. Series D · Munich/London/Paris · 10/12. Trigger: US entity or US design posting. Lead: the supervision ladder, where a missed override costs lives.
33. Legora. AI workspace for law firms. Series C · Stockholm/London/NYC · 10/12. Trigger: NYC or US-remote leadership posting. Lead: Carrier IQ's attestation flow. Exactly the shape of an attorney signing off on an AI-drafted clause.
34. Pigment. AI enterprise planning and forecasting. Series D · Paris/NYC/Toronto · 9/11. Trigger: US-located leadership posting. Lead: Thermo Fisher's $20M+ margin outcome, framed as forecast credibility.
35. DeepL. Neural translation for enterprises. Late private · Cologne/Berlin/NYC · 9/10. Trigger: NYC design leadership posting. Lead: Alibaba's cross-market work. Buyers and sellers in different languages and different legal regimes.
36. commercetools. Headless API-first commerce. Series E · Munich/Durham/London · 8/9 (AI centrality 2). Trigger: US design leadership posting. Lead: Alibaba's catalog-scale information architecture.
37. Mirakl. Enterprise marketplace platform. Series E · Paris/Boston/NYC · 8/9. Trigger: US design posting. Lead: Alibaba's supplier-trust surface. Third-party sellers get evaluated on trust long before catalog depth.
38. Celonis. Process mining and execution management. Series D · Munich/NYC/Bay Area · 9/11. Trigger: Bay Area or NYC leadership posting. Lead: Thermo Fisher, where every process deviation carried a named owner and an exception path.
39. Beamery. AI talent lifecycle and workforce planning. Series D · London/Austin · 9/10. Trigger: Austin or US-remote leadership posting. Lead: the Trust essay on algorithmic decisions about people and what disclosure the subject is owed.
40. Nabla. Ambient clinical documentation. Series C · Paris/NYC · 10/12. Senior brand designer only, Paris-side. Trigger: NYC product design posting. Lead: Carrier IQ's sign-off design, mapped onto a physician signing an AI-generated encounter note.

5. Heavy Machinery, No Design Leader

Tier: Growth-stage platform · Confidence: moderate · False-positive risk: cycle length

Vertically integrated physical-world platforms where the operator interface is the product and design owns it by default. All well past a large round, all with nothing design-side on the board. The false positive is cycle length: procurement and defense sales let a requisition sit open six months with no urgency behind it, so never read a posting here as a window. Be honest with yourself about domain interest before you chase any of these. Manufactured enthusiasm surfaces in a panel interview every time. What you carry that a strong generalist doesn't: Thermo Fisher is design shipped into a physical supply chain, not a screen about one.

41. Motive. Fleet telematics, safety AI, spend. Series F · SF · 9/11. Trigger: Director+ posting or new CPO. Lead: Retail Velocity's alerting, where one false positive costs a driver's trust permanently.
42. Formlabs. 3D printers with print-prep software. Series E · Somerville/Berlin · 8/9 (AI centrality 2). One senior UX role, no leader. Trigger: design leadership posting. Lead: Thermo Fisher's 100% partner adoption on a hardware-adjacent workflow.
43. Augury. Machine health monitoring. Series E · NYC/Haifa · 9/10. Trigger: US design leadership posting. Lead: Retail Velocity's threshold tuning. What a maintenance lead does with a prediction they cannot verify.
44. Aurora Solar. Solar design, sales, permitting. Series D · SF, US-remote · 8/10. Trigger: Director of Product Design. Lead: Red Cross's consolidation, six intake systems into one, for installers currently reconciling permitting rules across jurisdictions.
45. Higharc. Generative homebuilding and construction docs. Series B · Durham, US-remote · 9/11. Trigger: Head of Design. Lead: the constraint section of the Trust essay. Generative output inside code compliance is bounded autonomy.
46. Flock Safety. License plate recognition and evidence. Series E · Atlanta, US-remote · 9/11. Trigger: design leadership posting. Lead: Carrier IQ's sign-off pattern, with an officer as reviewer and the artifact entering a chain of custody. Weigh the civil-liberties exposure before you engage.
47. Vannevar Labs. AI for defense intelligence analysis. Series C · Palo Alto/DC · 10/11. No design postings on the board. Expect clearance language when one appears. Trigger: any design leadership posting. Read the clearance requirement before you spend a week on it. Lead: Brand Pulse on analyst-facing synthesis and source-confidence display.
48. Waabi. Generative simulation for autonomous trucking. Series C · Toronto/SF/Dallas · 10/11. Trigger: Bay Area product design posting. Lead: the autonomy ladder, in its most literal form.
49. Saronic. Autonomous surface vessels. Series C · Austin · 9/10. One below-threshold designer. Trigger: Staff+ or Director posting. Lead: Retail Velocity's operator-interrupt design under time pressure.
50. Flexport. Freight forwarding with an operating platform. Series G · SF/Chicago/NYC · 8/9 (stage/equity 2). The cluster's decline case, kept deliberately. Trigger: design leadership posting plus trajectory recovery evidence. Lead: Alibaba's cross-border transaction flow. Stage caps it. Don't chase it for equity.

6. Consolidation-Exposed

Tier: Enterprise platform, except the health-data four — Commure, Cedar, Komodo, Truveta (Healthcare/Regulated) · Confidence: timing moderate, equity warning high

Fintech infrastructure and health data are consolidating, and these companies sit at the infrastructure layer of stacks being assembled around them. Acquisitions throw off design leadership requisitions roughly four to six months after close. Salesforce posted a VP Product Design for Informatica 178 days after the November 18, 2025 close. ServiceNow posted a Principal Product Designer for Moveworks 126 days after December 15, 2025. Two cases is not a study. Timing aside, the harder fact is that both roles sit inside the acquirer's compensation structure no matter whose product name is in the title. The equity thesis does not survive the close. Re-score before you engage.

51. Commure. Clinical operations and ambient AI roll-up. Series D · Mountain View/SF · 9/10. Trigger: platform-level Head of Design consolidating the roll-up. Lead: Red Cross's six-systems-to-one work, which is literally the job description.
52. Cedar. Patient billing and financial engagement. Series D · NYC · 8/10. Trigger: acquisition announcement or Director+ posting. Lead: the $847K Red Cross disbursement flow, built for people under financial stress.
53. Komodo Health. Healthcare claims data and analytics. Series D · SF/NYC · 9/10. Trigger: leadership posting or transaction. Lead: Brand Pulse's evidence-to-confidence display, for analysts who have to defend a number in a room.
54. Truveta. Health-system-owned clinical data platform. Growth · Bellevue · 9/10. Consortium governance slows hiring. Trigger: first design leadership posting. Lead: Thermo Fisher's multi-partner model. Six organizations, one workflow, no shared authority.
55. Alloy. Identity and fraud decisioning for banks. Series C · NYC · 9/11. Trigger: Director of Design or acquisition. Lead: Carrier IQ's audit record. Who reversed the automated decline, when, and on what basis.
56. Unit. Embedded banking infrastructure. Series C · NYC/Tel Aviv · 8/9 (design influence 2). Trigger: application-layer design posting. Lead: Allē's dual-surface design. Platform operator and end customer inside one system.
57. Lithic. Card issuing and program management APIs. Series C · NYC, US-remote · 8/9 (design influence 2). Trigger: product design leadership posting. Lead: Thermo Fisher's controls made visible without becoming friction.
58. Modern Treasury. Payment operations and ledgering. Series C · SF · 8/10. Trigger: Staff+ or Director posting. Lead: the reversibility section, applied to money movement that cannot be undone.
59. Highnote. Card issuing and acquiring. Series B · SF · 8/10. Trigger: first design leadership posting. Lead: Equinox+, zero to MVP in three months, told as function-building speed.
60. Treasury Prime. Bank-fintech connectivity and compliance. Series C · SF · 8/9 (trajectory 2). No dated milestone found. Trajectory unverified. Trigger: design posting plus renewed growth evidence. Lead: Thermo Fisher's partner attestation model. Every bank in the chain able to see what it signed for.

7. IC Cluster, No Ceiling

Tier: Growth-stage platform, except Sierra and Luma (AI-native) · Confidence: high

Two or more designers posted or recently filled, nobody above them. Those IC postings aren't signal under the title-scope rule, and there's a second reason they can't anchor a Watch: Greenhouse and Ashby public feeds expose an update timestamp, not a first-published date, so I cannot place a single one inside or outside the 43-day IC-cluster window. A signal whose age I can't establish doesn't get to move a verdict. What makes this the most reliable trip-wire on the bench is that the ceiling always appears eventually. Either the company posts a leader, or the IC roles sit unfilled and get re-scoped upward. Watch for the re-scope specifically. A posting that vanishes and returns with different language is a failed search plus a committee that just learned what it actually needs, which makes the revised text the most honest document that company will ever publish about itself.

61. Sierra. Conversational AI agents for enterprises. Series C · SF · 11/12. Multiple IC agent-experience roles, no leader. Trigger: Head of Design or Staff+ posting. Lead: the Trust essay plus TinyFish's production agent context. You already live inside the problem they're hiring against.
62. Luma AI. Multimodal 3D and video generation. Series B · Palo Alto · 9/10. Trigger: design leadership posting. Lead: Brand Pulse's creative-output review interface.
63. Supabase. Open-source Postgres backend. Series C · remote-first, SF · 8/10. Trigger: Head of Design. Lead: Equinox+'s speed proof, which reads correctly to a team shipping weekly.
64. Mercury. Banking stack for startups. Series C · SF/Portland/NYC · 8/11. Several senior ICs, no leadership posting. Trigger: Director or Head of Design. Lead: Allē's 3.2x redemption lift. Behavior change through interface, not incentive.
65. Candid Health. Autonomous medical billing. Series C · SF/Denver/NYC · 9/11. Trigger: Staff+ or Director posting. Lead: Carrier IQ's sign-off design, at the moment a biller accepts an AI-assigned claim code and owns the denial risk.
66. Cohere Health. AI prior authorization. Series C · Boston, US-remote · 10/12. Lead IC posted, leadership absent. Trigger: Director of Design. Lead: Carrier IQ's attestation flow, where the attester is the nurse reviewer whose name sits on the denial.
67. Garner Health. Provider quality data and benefits steering. Series D · NYC, US-remote · 9/10. Trigger: Staff+ or Director posting. Lead: Red Cross's non-expert calibration, for patients picking a doctor off a ranked list.
68. Melio. SMB accounts payable. Series E · NYC/Denver/Tel Aviv · 8/10. Trigger: US design leadership posting. Lead: Alibaba's transaction flow work. +20% completed transactions.
69. Constructor. AI search and discovery for retailers. Series C · remote-first · 9/11. Trigger: Head of Design. Lead: Alibaba's search relevance and PDP redesign. Same problem, different scale.
70. Gamma. AI presentation and document generation. Series B · SF · 9/11. One senior IC, founder-led taste. Trigger: second IC hire or a leadership posting. Lead: Equinox+'s multi-brand template system.

8. Design Reports Into Engineering

Tier: Enterprise platform, except Airbyte, Prefect, PostHog (Growth-stage platform) · Confidence: high · False-positive risk: also high

Upstream and midstream developer infrastructure. Value concentrates in engineering adoption, which is precisely why the design ceiling here is structural, not a headcount problem. Several of these triggers will fire into roles you should decline. A Director of Design reporting to a VP Engineering at a company past two hundred people is a delivery function with a budget line. Ask who the role reports to inside the first ten minutes of the recruiter call. If the answer is engineering, thank them and move on.

71. Temporal. Durable execution for distributed workflows. Series D · Seattle/SF, US-remote · 8/9 (design influence 2). Trigger: leadership posting reporting to product or CEO. Lead: the reversibility framing. Retries and compensating transactions are trust design.
72. Honeycomb. High-cardinality production debugging. Series D · US-remote · 8/10. Trigger: Head of Design with a product reporting line. Lead: Retail Velocity's alert-to-diagnosis path.
73. Cribl. Telemetry pipeline routing. Series E · SF, US-remote · 8/10. Trigger: Director of Design. Lead: Thermo Fisher's data-governance surfacing across partner boundaries.
74. Monte Carlo. Data observability and incident detection. Series D · SF, US-remote · 9/11. Trigger: design leadership posting. Lead: Retail Velocity's false-positive tuning, the central credibility problem in data alerting.
75. Sentry. Application error and performance monitoring. Series E · SF · 8/10. Trigger: Head of Design. Lead: Brand Pulse's triage-by-confidence display.
76. PostHog. Open-source product analytics. Series C · remote-first · 8/10. Flat org, engineer-designers. Trigger: first design leadership posting. Lead: Equinox+'s MVP speed. Expect a low management ceiling by design, not by accident.
77. Tailscale. Identity-based mesh networking. Series C · Toronto, NA-remote · 8/10. Trigger: US-eligible leadership posting. Lead: the Trust essay on access decisions and what a user sees when permission is denied.
78. Airbyte. Open-source data integration. Series B · SF, remote mix · 8/9 (design influence 2). Trigger: first product design leadership posting. Lead: Red Cross's consolidation work, applied to connector configuration state scattered across four teams with no single owner.
79. Prefect. Python-native workflow orchestration. Series B · DC, US-remote · 8/9 (design influence 2). Trigger: first design hire above IC. Lead: the failure-state section of the Trust essay.
80. Domino Data Lab. Enterprise MLOps and model governance. Series F · SF · 9/10. Trigger: design leadership posting. Lead: Thermo Fisher's audit-trail-as-interface, applied to model approval.

9. Clinical Decision Surfaces Nobody Owns

Tier: Healthcare/Regulated · Confidence: high · Highest match density on the bench

The furthest downstream group on this page. Every one of these puts machine output in front of a clinician who must accept, edit, or reject it before something happens to a patient. That is the shortest available distance between design and consequence, and it is the decision-rights problem the accountability-gap issue named as the sorting variable. All ten have no design posting at all. You've designed the regulated sign-off artifact and you've designed the consumer trust surface. Almost nobody applying here has done both, and this is where the combination is worth the most.

81. OpenEvidence. Clinical evidence search for physicians. Series B · Cambridge MA · 11/13. Explosive growth, no visible design function. Trigger: any product design posting. Lead: Alibaba's citation and attribution work, reframed for a physician checking a source mid-consult.
82. Suki. Voice-first clinical documentation. Series D · Redwood City · 10/12. Trigger: Head of Design or Staff+ posting. Lead: Carrier IQ's sign-off flow, at the precise moment a note becomes the legal record.
83. Regard. AI diagnostic surfacing inside the EHR. Series B · LA/SF · 11/13. Trigger: first design leadership posting. Lead: the Trust essay's suggestion-versus-diagnosis distinction, which is their entire liability surface.
84. Qventus. AI hospital capacity management. Series D · Mountain View, remote mix · 10/11. Trigger: Director of Design. Lead: Retail Velocity's time-critical alerting, translated to OR scheduling and discharge.
85. Tennr. Document AI for referrals and intake. Series C · NYC · 10/12. Trigger: design leadership posting. Lead: Thermo Fisher's multi-party document workflow. 100% adoption across six partners.
86. Rula. Behavioral health network and matching. Series D · LA, US-remote · 9/11. Trigger: Staff+ or Director posting. Lead: Red Cross's decision support for non-experts in acute distress.
87. Equip. Virtual eating disorder treatment. Series C · San Diego, US-remote · 9/11. Trigger: first design leadership posting. Lead: Allē's dual-surface pattern. Patient view and care-team view of one treatment plan.
88. Pomelo Care. Virtual maternity and newborn care. Series B · NYC, US-remote · 9/11. Trigger: design leadership posting. Lead: Red Cross's national rollout under regulatory constraint. Six intake systems reduced to one.
89. Oshi Health. Virtual GI care with multidisciplinary teams. Series C · NYC, US-remote · 9/10. Trigger: first product design posting above IC. Lead: Equinox+'s zero-to-MVP speed inside a compressed clinical launch window.
90. Virta Health. Metabolic disease reversal through remote care. Series E · US-remote · 9/11. Trigger: Director+ posting. Lead: Allē's 3.2x redemption lift. Adherence and redemption are the same behavioral design problem.

10. Security Operations Without a Design Owner

Tier: Enterprise platform · Confidence: high · False-positive risk: moderate

Midstream detection platforms selling into the SOC. Value concentrates in detection engineering, which explains both the under-designed analyst surface and the risk that any mandate you're offered is hollow. Structurally this is the closest match on the page to Retail Velocity and Carrier IQ, and the worst-staffed. The caution is specific: security companies hire a design leader and keep the roadmap inside detection engineering routinely. Ask who owns the alert taxonomy. If the answer isn't product, the mandate is cosmetic.

91. Abnormal Security. Behavioral AI for email compromise. Series D · SF/NYC · 10/12. Trigger: Director+ design posting. Lead: Carrier IQ's sign-off design, for the analyst who releases a quarantined message and owns what happens next.
92. Orca Security. Agentless cloud security posture. Series C · Portland/Tel Aviv · 9/11. Trigger: US leadership posting. Lead: Brand Pulse's prioritization display. Forty thousand findings compressed to a ranked ten somebody will act on.
93. Drata. Continuous compliance automation. Series C · San Diego, US-remote · 9/11. Trigger: Head of Design. Lead: Thermo Fisher's governance-visible workflow, which is Drata's product thesis expressed as design.
94. Huntress. Managed detection for SMB and IT providers. Series C · Maryland, US-remote · 9/11. Trigger: design leadership posting. Lead: Red Cross's non-expert operator design, for IT generalists doing security work nobody trained them for.
95. Tines. No-code security automation. Series C · Dublin/Boston · 9/11. Trigger: Boston or US-remote leadership posting. Lead: the delegation ladder, mapped onto which playbooks run unattended.
96. Torq. Agentic workflows for the SOC. Series C · NYC/Portland/Tel Aviv · 10/12. Trigger: US leadership posting. Lead: TinyFish's agent-trace context plus Carrier IQ's audit design. Their roadmap is your daily working problem.
97. Coalition. Cyber insurance with active risk monitoring. Series E · SF, US-remote · 9/11. Trigger: Director of Design. Lead: Allē's dual-surface work. Policyholder and underwriter reading one risk score differently.
98. Corelight. Network detection built on Zeek. Series E · SF, US-remote · 8/10. Trigger: design leadership posting. Lead: Retail Velocity's signal-to-noise tuning, for analysts who dismiss by reflex.
99. 1Password. Credential and extended access management. Series C · Toronto, US remote-first · 8/10 (AI centrality 2). IC designer posted, no leadership posting. Trigger: Director+ posting. Lead: Red Cross's consolidation work, for the pivot from consumer password manager to enterprise access platform.
100. Cato Networks. Converged network and security service edge. Late private · Tel Aviv/Boston · 8/10. Trigger: US design leadership posting. Lead: Alibaba's consolidation across fragmented enterprise buyer workflows.

How to Use This Page

Don't read it again. Learn the ten cluster names, then treat the page as a lookup table for the day something moves. A dormant bench pays for itself in one narrow way: you never research a company on the morning its trigger fires. You're writing the message instead.

Two clusters earn standing attention instead of reactive lookup.

• Clinical decision surfaces. Highest match density, lowest hiring activity on the page. I can't tell you how long the first posting there stays quiet, and application volume peaks in week one everywhere, so assume you're moving fast when it lands. The candidate pool holding both regulated sign-off work and consumer trust work is thin enough that your edge survives the rush.
• The CPO-shaped hole. The only cluster where the timing rule is strong enough to justify outreach before a design posting exists. Twenty boards. One check a week.

The other eighty wait for the trip-wire. And when a design-ops posting turns up in cluster three, treat it as corroboration and nothing more. I went looking for the evidence and it isn't there.