The secret is out. Backboard.io has closed a pre-seed funding round backed by Mistral Venture Partners, N49P, Garage Capital, and Developer Capital.

This is an announcement, but more importantly, it is a thank you.

To Pablo Srugo, Raif Barbaros, Omar Dhalla, Alex Norman, Jordan Steiner, Mike McCauley Michael Litt Devon Galloway, and Mike Weider, thank you for believing in the problem, the approach, and in me. You backed this company early, thoughtfully, and for the right reasons.

Why I Came Back to Build Backboard

I have had the privilege of helping build Assent from a basement startup into a global platform valued north of $1.4B. That experience shaped how I think about infrastructure, reliability, and what it really takes to support enterprise-grade systems at scale.

It also taught me something less glamorous but more important.

The biggest value is created in infrastructure that works quietly, consistently, and over time.

Today’s AI systems are powerful, but they are fundamentally stateless. They forget. Context disappears between sessions. Developers are forced to stitch together fragile workarounds just to make systems behave coherently over time.

That problem matters more than model performance curves.

Backboard exists to solve that.

What We Are Building

Backboard is a memory-native infrastructure layer for AI.

We are not building a wrapper. We are not building another chatbot. We are building persistent, portable memory for AI systems so they can retain state, reason over long timelines, and improve through continued interaction.

Our platform already supports orchestration across more than 2,000 models, and our memory system currently ranks #1 on the LoCoMo benchmark with 90.1 percent accuracy.

Those numbers matter, but what matters more is what they enable.

They allow developers to build AI systems that behave more like software and less like demos.

Choosing the Right Partners

This round was intentionally small and intentionally selective.

Mistral, N49P, Garage, and Developer Capital understand long-term infrastructure bets. They have backed companies like Cohere, Klipfolio, Spellbook, EvenUp, Groq, Substack, Unified, and Glowtify.

They know that foundational infrastructure is built patiently, not rushed.

One comment from Raif at Mistral stuck with me early on. Backboard is not another AI wrapper. It is foundational infrastructure. That framing matters, and it reflects exactly how we think about the work ahead.

What Comes Next

We are still early.

The focus now is execution. Shipping. Listening to developers. Hardening the platform. Earning trust through reliability and clarity.

Memory in AI is not a feature. It is an architectural requirement. We believe it will become a standard layer in every serious AI stack.

If we do our job right, Backboard will fade into the background and simply work.

To our investors, our early users, and the builders pushing us forward, thank you for the trust. We are just getting started.

Rob Imbeault, Founder and CEO

Read more in the press release here.