AI is brilliant, but it forgets. SaaS Unicorn founder Rob Imbeault thinks that’s the biggest problem in the stack.
Backboard.io, an AI infrastructure company building a memory-native layer for Large Language Models (LLMs), announced a substantial pre-seed funding round led by Mistral Venture Partners (Cohere, Klipfolio) . The round includes key participation from N49P (Spellbook, EvenUP), Garage Capital (Groq, Substack) and Dev Cap (Unified, Glowtify).
Founded by Rob Imbeault, co-founder of a SaaS unicorn Assent, Backboard.io marks his return to the operator’s seat to address one of the most pressing bottlenecks in generative AI: the lack of stateful, persistent, and portable memory.
Backboard isn’t another AI wrapper. It’s foundational infrastructure. Rob has the vision and operational discipline to make Backboard the standard for how AI systems remember and retrieve information.”
— Raif Barbaros, Partner at Mistral Venture Partners
Imbeault previously helped scale Assent from a basement startup into a global supply chain compliance platform valued at more than $1.4 billion. He is now applying the same enterprise-grade rigor around scalability, security, and data reliability to the fragmented AI infrastructure stack.
The Mission: Memory-Native AI Infrastructure
Despite rapid advances in model performance, today’s AI systems suffer from a fundamental limitation: amnesia. Once a session ends, context is lost, forcing developers to rely on complex and brittle workarounds to preserve state across interactions.
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Backboard.io addresses this challenge by providing a unified, portable memory layer for AI, enabling persistent context and stateful orchestration across more than 2,000 models. Backboard’s memory system has already demonstrated industry-leading performance, achieving 90.1% accuracy on the LoCoMo (Long Conversational Memory) benchmark.
“Building Assent taught me that unsexy infrastructure is where real enterprise value is created. AI today is powerful, but fundamentally stateless. We’re building permanent memory infrastructure that allows AI systems to learn and evolve with users over time. To do that, we partnered with investors who understand deep technology and long-term bets.” – Rob Imbeault, Founder and CEO of Backboard.io
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