How Chaz Englander Built Model ML: A $75M Series A One Year After Launch

TL;DR: Model ML is an AI workflow platform for financial services — banks, asset managers and the large consultancies use it to automate the creation and verification of the Word, PowerPoint and Excel deliverables their teams produce over and over. It was founded by brothers Chaz and Arnie Englander, who had already sold two companies before it: Fat Llama, the peer-to-peer rental marketplace, and Fancy, the rapid-grocery startup acquired by Gopuff. In November 2025, roughly a year after launch and six months after its seed round, Model ML closed a $75 million Series A led by FT Partners, with Y Combinator, QED, Thirteen Books, Latitude and LocalGlobe participating. The product started as internal software the brothers wrote for their own family office — until the CEOs they showed it to started asking if they could buy it.

Chaz told the whole story on The Product Market Fit Show, including the number most founders want: how fast revenue actually moved once it worked.

What does Model ML do?

Model ML is an AI workflow builder for financial services. In practice, that means it takes the repetitive document work that eats junior analysts' days — pulling data together, building the deck, writing the memo, checking the numbers — and automates both the creation and the verification of the output.

Chaz is precise about the shape of the product:

"We describe ourselves as an AI workflow product for financial services. In other words, an AI workflow builder specifically for financial services." — Chaz Englander, Model ML

Under the hood, he described three AI systems that mirror how a human actually works — gather, assemble, check:

"There are three different AI systems. One that goes and gathers all the information that you would need in order to create some kind of output. When I say output, I just think an email, a Slack message, all the way through to PowerPoint, Word, Excel outputs. Think very complicated. So don't think two pager, think like a two hundred page PowerPoint presentation, graphs, tables, charts, logos, with all the Excel backup files, and then verification." — Chaz Englander, Model ML

The insight behind it is unglamorous and correct: at these firms, the long hours don't go into thinking.

"If you study where the time is going, it's not going into what we would think is strategy or critical thinking or analysis or anything like that. It's literally going into creating a PowerPoint presentation or writing an email. In other words, you already have the information. You're just putting it together, repackaging it, and sending it out." — Chaz Englander, Model ML

Key stat: Model ML doesn't pursue customers spending less than roughly a quarter of a million dollars a year, as Chaz shared on the show. Its customer base skews to banks, asset managers and large consultancies — including two of the Big Four accounting firms, according to the company's own Series A announcement.

Who founded Model ML?

Model ML was founded by Chaz Englander and his brother Arnie. It's their third company together, and the pattern in the first two matters for understanding the third.

Fat Llama (2016, London). A peer-to-peer marketplace for renting out physical items — cameras, DJ decks, gardening equipment — with insurance built in. It got into Y Combinator in 2016, which Chaz called a breakthrough for two people from England trying to build a software business. Fat Llama took about three years to find product-market fit; the hard part wasn't demand, it was unit economics.

"We knew deep down that what we were building, people wanted. What we didn't know was whether we could do that in a way where the unit economics adds up and I think that's hard, right?" — Chaz Englander, Model ML

Before the exit, the team spent six to nine months exploring a SPAC that collapsed weeks before Christmas, after more than half a million in legal fees. Then a Swedish number started calling. Fat Llama was acquired by the Swedish rental marketplace Hygglo for $41.5 million in August 2022.

Fancy (end of 2019, Newcastle). Rapid grocery delivery, launched with what Chaz freely calls a non-MVP: a native app with about thirty items, an item database wired to a Google Sheet, images hot-linked from random URLs, orders arriving as Twilio text messages, no payments, no back end. The founding team did the first 1,400 deliveries themselves — buying stock at the corner shop and walking it over.

"Obviously, if you're doing the deliveries, you're getting the most real time user feedback that you can possibly get. Because you're literally meeting every single user every time they make an order in person. So it's almost like you have customer interviews for every order." — Chaz Englander, Model ML

It went from zero to fifteen cities in about six months and was acquired by Gopuff while the team was out raising a $100 million round.

Then three years of investing. After the exits, the brothers set up a small family-office structure and ran their own money — not, Chaz admits, profitably.

"Put it like this, if you're asking whether we made money doing it, no. On balance, no but we didn't lose money." — Chaz Englander, Model ML

What they did do was write software to make their own diligence faster: intake an inbound opportunity, then automatically go enrich it — who's running this company, do we have connections in common, what does the news say, what do the reviews look like. Eventually the tool stopped being a side effect.

"We noticed that the idea we should be working on full time was literally staring us in the face. Which was the software that we were writing for ourselves to improve our own investment decision making process, was great and people wanted that, right?" — Chaz Englander, Model ML

Senior finance people — bank CEOs, well-known private equity investors — asked how they could get hold of it. By the end of 2024, Chaz says, they were "pushed out the door" by customer demand.

How much has Model ML raised?

• Series A — $75 million, announced November 2025, led by FT Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, QED, Thirteen Books, Latitude and LocalGlobe. It came roughly six months after the company's seed round and about a year after launch, making it one of the largest early-stage fintech rounds on record.
• HSBC Asset Management invested in the company in August 2026.

Model ML is headquartered in San Francisco and New York, with additional offices in London and Hong Kong.

On the show, Pablo noted the round in the intro — "the third company, which is the one we're talking about today, Model ML. Is off to a start faster than those other two, just raised $75 million" — and Chaz's own framing of what that money does to the risk profile is worth reading twice:

"There's kind of two elements of risk in any business of this stage. Do you have product market fit, and are you one of those companies that escape velocity?" — Chaz Englander, Model ML

How Model ML found product-market fit: one design partner, sat next to

The single most transferable thing in the episode is how Chaz thinks about design partners. Not as a logo or a discount, but as physical proximity.

"If you have a design partner that you're speaking to once a week. You're almost certainly going to fail, right? If you've got a design partner that you are working from their office, and ideally sat next to them, you're almost certainly going to succeed." — Chaz Englander, Model ML

Model ML's first design partner was a small investment bank — one of the firms that had told the brothers to do this full time. They worked from its office. And they took the buy-in one step further: that firm invested in the company, which Chaz frames as the real test of seriousness.

"I think that paying is nice, but it's only a way to validate one very important thing, which is how serious they are about what it is that you are doing." — Chaz Englander, Model ML

He's equally blunt about what feedback is and isn't. In a category where demos are dazzling, a demo proves nothing:

"A demo kind of counts for nothing. Real feedback is not when you are showing the user the product or what they can do. Real feedback is where they are using it and ideally by themselves, right?" — Chaz Englander, Model ML

"Usage just doesn't lie." — Chaz Englander, Model ML

If you're structuring this phase of your own company, our guides on getting design partners and landing the first enterprise customer cover the same ground across dozens of episodes.

The revenue curve — and "escape velocity"

Model ML sold ahead of the product on purpose. With six-to-twelve-month enterprise procurement cycles, selling what exists today means always shipping into yesterday's promise:

"We knew how quickly the product was going to evolve, so we almost had to sell like three, six months in advance. Because if we were selling what we had today, you know, we were never going to get ahead." — Chaz Englander, Model ML

Then the curve bent:

"We went from about $5k in monthly revenue to about $100k in three months." — Chaz Englander, Model ML

"And then we kind of did that again, in the next three months. Things moved fast." — Chaz Englander, Model ML

Key stat: roughly $5K MRR to $100K MRR in three months, then a repeat of that step in the following three months, as Chaz shared on the show.

His definition of the goal is the cleanest one we've heard on the show:

"Escape velocity is where twelve months ago it was a risk to use ModelML, I now think in some markets it's a risk to not use ModelML." — Chaz Englander, Model ML

And the moment he personally believed it, asked at the end of every episode:

"When we were having to push customers start dates back and they were getting upset." — Chaz Englander, Model ML

Key lessons from Chaz Englander's playbook

1. Never fundraise from zero. "No one should ever say they're raising money and so far they've raised zero," Chaz says. His tactical version: whatever your first check is, call the round that number plus about twenty percent. First checks come from allies, and everyone else wants to be at the tail end. See also: how to create FOMO when fundraising. 2. No competition is a bad sign, not a good one. "If you have no competition, and you've never had any competition. It's like you still have no competition. You probably don't have anything that people want." Competitors validate the concept — and out-executing is easier than finding a concept that works. 3. Sit with your design partner. Weekly calls lose. Working from their office wins. Get them invested if you can, and make sure buy-in comes from the person who actually decides. 4. Watch usage, not smiles. Especially in Europe, Chaz argues, everyone says it's great. Three months of enthusiasm with no logins is not enthusiasm. 5. Assume PMF expires. "You might have PMF today, but you don't necessarily have it when you wake up." Model ML's stated risk isn't OpenAI or Anthropic — it's shipping speed against other application companies. Which reduces to one instruction: "Ideally, you want the code and the customer to be as close together as possible." Related reading: losing product-market fit and AI startup defensibility.

Listen to the full interview: He sold his first 2 startups. His 3rd grew to $1M ARR in 3 months — Chaz Englander, Founder of Model ML

FAQ: Model ML

Q: What is Model ML? A: Model ML is an AI workflow platform for financial services. Customers build workflows that gather data, generate client-ready Word, PowerPoint and Excel outputs in existing formats, and verify those outputs before they go out. Its customers are primarily banks, asset managers and large consultancies.

Q: Who is the CEO of Model ML? A: Chaz Englander is the co-founder and CEO. He founded the company with his brother Arnie Englander. It's their third company together, after Fat Llama and Fancy.

Q: How much funding has Model ML raised? A: Model ML announced a $75 million Series A in November 2025, led by FT Partners, roughly six months after its seed round and about a year after launch. HSBC Asset Management invested in August 2026.

Q: Who are Model ML's investors? A: The Series A was led by FT Partners with participation from Y Combinator, QED, Thirteen Books, Latitude and LocalGlobe. HSBC Asset Management joined as an investor in August 2026. The company's first design partner, a small investment bank, also invested.

Q: What companies did Chaz Englander start before Model ML? A: Fat Llama, a peer-to-peer rental marketplace founded in London in 2016 and acquired by Sweden's Hygglo for $41.5 million in August 2022; and Fancy, a rapid-grocery startup launched in Newcastle at the end of 2019 and acquired by Gopuff.

Sources: Listen to the Full Founder Story

• Chaz Englander, Co-Founder & CEO, Model ML — the three-company arc from a peer-to-peer rental marketplace to an AI workflow platform for banks, and why he thinks product-market fit expires overnight in AI.

Listen to the full episode at pmf.show for the complete story.

Last updated: August 2026