

COHORT
006
Modern Industrials
The AI Workforce for Building Materials Distribution. Built by lifelong friends from xAI, Google, and McKinsey.
Modern Industrials is building the AI workforce for distribution, starting with the $450B+ building materials industry. Co-founders Austin, Vatsal, and Ankit have known each other for decades. Vatsal and Ankit are brothers and Austin is their childhood best friend. The team combines deep technical and operational experience from McKinsey, Google (MLE), and xAI (MTS). Their first product (AI Sales Engine) transforms the back office from a manual cost center into a high-margin engine by automating quoting, order entry, and analytics. At scale, Modern Industrials seeks to become the end-to-end OS for distribution across the physical world.
Meet the Team
Co-Foudner & CEO at Modern Industrials
Austin Mao
Former Head of Growth & Operations at Roon (Sequoia-backed Series A). Previously led F500 AI engagements at McKinsey and consistently ranked in the top 5% of the company. Selected for Northwestern’s BS/MD program (<0.1% acceptance) and awarded the Frederick Shipp Diebler Award as the top economics undergraduate.
Co founder at Modern Industrials
Vatsal Bhargava
Led ML initiatives for Google Ads Bidding, driving $XXXM in incremental revenue. Previously built a real-time NBA injury intelligence platform to $10k MRR with 500+ users, and was an early engineer at Bloomfilter (Sequoia-backed).
CTO @ Modern Industrials at Modern Industrials
Ankit Bhargava
Former Member of Technical Staff at xAI building agentic AI systems. Previously architecting ML models at Uber on the Surge pricing team to optimize marketplace dynamics driving $XXM in revenue. Developed algorithmic trading systems for Kalshi and Polymarket generating $200k+ in profit (16% ROI).