Brandon Arbini

Brandon Arbini is a software engineer, founder, and angel investor with more than 20 years in software development, team building, and systems architecture. He began his entrepreneurial career founding Sevenwire, a software development consultancy, around 2007. In 2010 he co-founded Zencoder — a cloud-based API for high-performance video and audio encoding — alongside Jon Dahl and Steve Heffernan. Zencoder was accepted into Y Combinator, raised a Series A in 2011, and was acquired by online-video platform Brightcove for roughly $30 million in July 2012. Zencoder's team was also behind Video.js, a widely used open-source HTML5 video player. Following the acquisition, Arbini worked as a software architect at Brightcove.

Since Zencoder, Arbini has built and operated a portfolio of ventures, several based in Orange County, California. He co-founded Hello Agent in 2013, a Costa Mesa startup that helped homebuyers connect and communicate with real estate agents (it raised about $142K and later wound down), and has been associated with Wayfare. Outside of pure software, he co-founded and manages Buenas Coffee (a responsibly-sourced coffee roaster and café), FLDWRK (a collaborative coworking and events space), and the Common Good Network, and owns/operates the FASTSIGNS of Irvine franchise.

Today Arbini serves as an engineering leader at Webconnex (a payments/event-registration software company), while continuing to advise, build, and invest. His public writing and recent activity increasingly center on AI, agentic systems, and applied engineering leadership. He frames his work around a "common good" philosophy — sustainability, community, and supporting marginalized groups — a theme that recurs across his companies.

In 2021 Arbini was diagnosed with stage IV colorectal cancer and, after major surgery and a six-month course of chemotherapy at City of Hope Orange County, reached remission — an experience he has written and spoken about publicly.

• Invests as an angel at the seed stage, deploying personal capital into early-stage software companies.
• Gravitates toward areas where he has operating depth: developer tools and APIs, video/media infrastructure, and consumer marketplaces, with newer interest in AI agents and agentic systems.
• Brings a hands-on, technical founder's lens — having built, scaled, and exited a developer-infrastructure company (Zencoder) — so he can evaluate engineering-heavy products and teams first-hand.
• Has been listed among angels connected to the 500 Global ecosystem, suggesting alignment with early, high-velocity startup networks.
• Values ventures that place "the common good at the forefront" — a stated personal priority around sustainability and community impact.