Matthew Berman

Berman is a self-taught engineer. While on the Distribution team at 500 Startups, he saw the texting struggles of Mayvenn, a company in the accelerator’s portfolio, and built a platform for it in six weeks, which became the starting point of the business texting platform Sonar. “I built everything myself and the design was not pretty,” he recalled.⁠[1][2]

In August 2015 Sonar, of which Berman was founder and CEO, disclosed a $960,000 seed round led by QuestVP with participation from 500 Startups and angel investors including Semil Shah. Sonar let businesses text with customers and customers text back; its clients included Mayvenn, Handy, Sidecar and StyleSeat, and its dashboard had added analytics, standard responses for customer service staff and Facebook Messenger support. Startups from the 500 Startups portfolio made up most early clients and about 30 percent at the time.⁠[2]

He said much of the company’s work was teaching businesses to use SMS without overdoing it: “A lot of our job is showing companies how to do SMS successfully and not overdo it where the channel becomes saturated.”⁠[2]

In April 2016 Twilio said Sonar had received a $200,000 investment from the TwilioFund and that its platform was built on Twilio SMS; Sonar was also named an official Facebook Messenger platform partner at Facebook’s F8 conference. “We built Sonar for the conversational aspect of communication,” Berman said.⁠[3]

On December 17, 2019, Marchex announced it was acquiring Sonar Technologies for $12.5 million in cash and stock: $8.5 million in cash at closing and $4 million in stock paid in three annual installments, plus up to $1.5 million more in stock if Sonar met certain 2020 sales targets; Marchex would also issue up to $1 million in restricted stock units to certain Sonar employees, vesting over four years.⁠[4]

The release described Sonar as an enterprise text and messaging sales engagement and analytics company processing millions of messages for clients in industries including real estate, consumer lending, travel and automotive. Berman, then Sonar’s CEO, said in the release: “We are excited to unite with Marchex to build a leading conversational analytics and solutions company.”⁠[4]

In June 2023 Berman appeared as “Matt Berman” on the podcast The Long Game w/ Elijah Murray, which introduced him as a venture-backed founder who had exited Sonar and a “rising star on YouTube”; the episode covered startup models, AI ethics and mental health in startup life.⁠[1]

Forward Future’s interviews section includes Berman’s conversations with technology executives, among them Satya NadellaSatya NadellaSatya Nadella is a business executive who serves as chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft; his leadership career spans cloud computing, developer platforms, corporate acquisitions, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry and Sundar Pichai in May 2025, Aaron Levie and Logan KilpatrickLogan KilpatrickLogan Kilpatrick is the product lead for Google AI Studio and the Gemini API at Google DeepMind, focused on helping developers worldwide build with Gemini and other models; he previously led developer relations at OpenAI.Open the full entry in July 2025, Matt Garman in August 2025, Greg BrockmanGreg BrockmanGreg Brockman is a software engineer and entrepreneur, co-founder and president of OpenAI, and a former chief technology officer of Stripe. His work spans payment infrastructure, engineering organizations and large AI systems, alongside public discussion of AI development and governance.Open the full entry in October 2025, and Sam AltmanSam AltmanSam Altman is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator and founded the location-based social service Loopt. He also helped found Tools for Humanity and Merge Labs, has invested in energy and life sciences ventures, and has driven public discussion of AI governance, employment, and wealth distribution.Open the full entry in October 2026, the last covering recursive self-improvement, AI consciousness, OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry’s new hardware and compute.⁠[5][6]

Berman gave the talk “State of the Union: Why Local, Why Now” at the AI Engineer World’s Fair 2026; it runs 44 minutes 29 seconds.⁠[7]

Forward Future is an AI media company founded by Berman and Nick Wentz, with Berman as founder and Wentz as co-founder. It runs the daily newsletter The Future Today, a YouTube channel and the weekly live show Forward Future Live. In November 2026 its about page listed more than 95,000 daily newsletter readers, more than 600,000 YouTube subscribers and more than 25,000 weekly live-show viewers.⁠[8]

His AI coverage combines hands-on model testing, explanations of research and interviews with industry figures. His YouTube channel, @matthew_berman, says its mission is to make AI and emerging technology accessible to everyone.⁠[7][9]

Forward Future: Official website: https://forwardfuture.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[7]

X: Public account: https://x.com/matthewberman (opens in a new window).⁠[7]

YouTube: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCawZsQWqfGSbCI5yjkdVkTA (opens in a new window).⁠[8]