Over the past year, the product development world has been reshaped by AI-driven code generation. Building has become faster than ever. Barriers that once slowed teams down are rapidly disappearing, and the velocity at which small teams can ship meaningful software has increased exponentially. Yet despite this acceleration, one part of the product loop hasn’t kept up: deciding what to build next.
Signal is fragmented. Qualitative feedback comes from everywhere. And the burden of making sense of what matters still falls on humans stitching disparate information streams together.
The problem: product teams are structurally too far from signal
Most product organizations default to sub-optimal loops. Engineers – the ones actually building the product – are often too far removed from customer reality. They end up working through filtered layers of interpretation, rather than touching the raw signal directly. Meanwhile, product feedback today surfaces everywhere: Slack, Discord, GitHub issues, Sentry traces, app store reviews, community threads, performance logs, etc., and the volume continues to compound as products scale. Signal is abundant, but fragmented and noisy. And when teams try to bring all of this together, focus becomes harder, prioritization slows, and the gap between what gets built and what actually matters widens.
The best teams find ways to keep engineers close to the problem. The rest struggle with bottlenecks, slow roadmapping, and reduced product velocity.
Introducing Modem – The first AI-native product teammate closing the loop between signal and action
That’s why today, we are excited to share that we’ve invested in Modem, the first AI-native product teammate built to bring product context directly to engineering teams and help them ship the right things faster. The company’s US$4.4M pre-seed round was led by Accel, with participation from Inovia.
Modem listens across all the channels where product signal organically exists – and turns that into structured, coherent, prioritized context. When multiple customers report the same bug across different surfaces, Modem automatically connects the dots: who flagged it, why it matters, when it started, and how big the blast radius is. Modem keeps backlogs current, notifies teams when isolated feedback becomes a pattern, and closes the loop by updating tickets and notifying stakeholders when improvements ship.
By removing the product’s busy-work and auto-triaging at scale, Modem ensures engineering stays close to the problem, without creating bottlenecks or dependency on a single individual. Teams stay lean. They ship faster. Product direction stays grounded in real usage.
From Sentry to Modem: A Founder Who’s Lived the Problem
Behind Modem is Ben Vinegar – a veteran builder who has spent a decade shaping some of the most respected developer tools and observability products in the industry. Most notably, Ben was among the early team at Sentry, where he helped scale the company from an early open source analytics project into one of the most respected developer platforms in the world. Over his tenure, he held both engineering and product leadership roles.
Ben has repeatedly lived the problem Modem is solving. He has seen first-hand how the best teams empower engineers to be close to the problem – not downstream from it – and how breakthrough products emerge when builders have direct access to user signal, not filtered layers.
Why this aligns with how we believe software will be built
At Inovia, we believe functional boundaries in product development will collapse, and product excellence will be driven by hybrid PM-engineers operating with direct connection to user reality. The rise of agentic development demands that prioritization becomes agentic, too. Modem sits directly at this inflection point – and we believe it has the potential to become category-defining infrastructure in the next era of product building.
We’re proud to partner with Ben and the Modem team as they build the first AI-native product teammate – and help define what comes next in product development. This is a space undergoing fundamental change, and Modem is positioned to be one of the companies steering that change from the front.
P.S. – Modem is beginning to onboard early teams – for those building in this new frontier of agentic software development, their waitlist is now open.