Every once in a while, you meet someone who’s looking at the same shift you are, but from a completely different vantage point.
Jacob Bernstein has spent the last decade investing in high-growth companies, working closely with teams navigating major technology shifts, and seeing firsthand what actually makes it into production and what doesn’t.
Now, as both an investor and a customer, he’s joining Unframe’s board. We sat down to talk about what stood out, why he leaned in, and why this moment in AI feels different.
Shay: There’s a lot of noise around AI right now, but also real change happening inside companies. From your perspective, what does this moment actually feel like?
Jacob: I think there’s underlying anxiety around AI at the moment. I don’t just feel that as an investor, I feel it as a board member, and just as someone working day-to-day inside a company.
You look around and wonder whether others are moving faster than you are, or whether they’re adopting AI more effectively. And then you think about competitors, and whether you’re being left behind.
Almost anyone you speak to can describe an AI use case that would be genuinely game changing for them. They can picture how it would work, how it would fit into what they’re doing, how it would actually deliver value.
But then you hit the question of what to do with that.
Shay: So what do companies actually do with those AI use cases, and what made you feel Unframe could solve that gap?
Jacob: In most cases, an AI project goes to the internal tech team, but that team is already buried under a backlog of priorities, so it gets queued.
Or teams try to build it themselves, which isn’t realistic for anything that needs to be secure, governed, and reliable at scale.
Then companies look at SaaS AI tools, and the issue is always the same, which is that last mile. The tools don’t quite fit how teams actually work, they don’t integrate properly, and the features aren’t the ones that move the needle.
That’s the gap, and Unframe is the first thing I’ve seen that actually addresses it.
Unframe works with the customer, building a solution together. Within a week, it’s no longer an idea, it’s a working prototype. That shift from theory to something tangible, that quickly, is extremely powerful.
Shay: What ultimately convinced you to invest?
Jacob: The customer conversations.
By definition, customers come to Unframe with something urgent, difficult, and high impact. And then it gets solved. So customers are excited, but also have a sense of relief, which is quite unusual.
The other thing is that almost every use case is described as the first one. It starts as a test, and then once it works, there’s a clear moment where it clicks, and the conversation immediately shifts to the next set of use cases.
And underneath that, there’s a platform being built. A lot of these applications share common building blocks, and if you structure them correctly, you can reuse those components across departments and teams. That’s what creates scale for Unframe customers.
Shay: You’re now also an Unframe customer! What has that experience been like?
Jacob: It’s been surprisingly enjoyable. There’s something that was a real problem, something that was causing stress, and we’re watching it get solved in front of us. And because you get something tangible so quickly, you’re actively shaping it as you go. You end up, almost by default, acting as the product manager for the thing you care about most - solving your organization’s biggest operational challenges.
Shay: Looking ahead, where do you see Unframe going?
Jacob: The trajectory so far has been exceptional.
The growth has been faster than anything I’ve seen in my career. Customers don’t stop at one use case, they expand quickly.
The Unframe team hires very strong people, bringing in experienced operators and deep technologists who have built and scaled before.
When you put all of that together, I find it really hard to see anything other than astronomical growth for Unframe.
Learn more about Unframe’s rapid growth from Shay Levi, Co-Founder and CEO of Unframe.
