Hobbes × Lyra: From MVP to a $6M Seed and GTM-Ready
How Lyra helped Hobbes turn an early MVP into a GTM-ready product, through embedded design and engineering work and some of the hardest agent infrastructure in the category.
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About Hobbes
Hobbes is a conversational AI agent for GTM teams. It runs product demos around the clock across the funnel, adapting in real time to walk each buyer through the parts of the product that matter most to them. Every conversation makes it sharper, and it captures buyer intelligence along the way. Its promise is simple: your product sells itself, with a demo for every interested buyer and no added headcount.
Founded by Chirag Kulkarni and Arjun Athreya, based in San Francisco, Hobbes came to Lyra in July 2025 looking for full-stack support on its core platform.
Design and engineering, together
Hobbes came to Lyra for engineering and design work, and the value was immediate. The engineering delivered from the start, and the design shipped right alongside it, so the product was being built and shaped at the same time. That is what turned a first engagement into a partnership Hobbes has kept building on.
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Scaling with the company
As Hobbes grew, so did the engagement, and Lyra scaled its engineering work in step with the company. On April 21, 2026, Hobbes raised a $6M seed round led by Steve Vassallo at Foundation Capital, with 1984 Ventures, Afore Capital, Emergence Capital, Story Ventures, and Predictive VC joining.
By mid-2026, Lyra was going deep on the hardest part of the product, adapting to Hobbes's engineering needs as they evolved. The team was, in the client's words, crushing it.
At a founders' dinner in June 2026, Chirag and Arjun called the Lyra team "game changers" and said the partnership was like working with family.
The result
- Hobbes went from an early MVP to GTM-ready, in the founders' own words.
- During the partnership, customers doubled revenue within eight weeks of deployment and closed deals within an hour of deployment.
- A $6M seed round and a founding GTM hire to scale sales, with existing customers running on systems Lyra helped build.
"The Lyra team has really captured the essence of engineering and design. Working with them has been absolutely amazing; they were able to take our MVP and turn it into something that's GTM-ready." - Chirag Kulkarni, CEO, Hobbes
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What we build
- Core platform engineering. Full-stack development across the product's core systems.
- AI agent infrastructure. The backend that powers the product's autonomous, self-improving agents.
- Internal tooling. Dashboards and tooling that give the team clear visibility into how the system runs.
- Performance and reliability. Latency, caching, and evaluation work to keep the product fast and accurate.
- Design. Product and brand design delivered alongside the engineering work.
The takeaway
For an early-stage company, the distance between an MVP and a GTM-ready product is mostly execution: building the right things quickly, and making them look and feel ready to sell. Hobbes did not split that across vendors. One partner owned design and engineering together and adapted as the product's needs changed.
That is the model: one team shipping product and polish at the same time, staying close enough to adapt the moment your needs change. It is how an early MVP became a $6M seed and a product that is GTM-ready.
Ready to build with us?
Whether you're filling an engineering gap or scaling alongside your senior team, Lyra embeds with you from day one.
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