Murtada Shah

Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

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This a seductive idea; that organization's context fragments, decision logic gets lost, and an organization is prone to tackle collective amnesia. BUT this comes with a lot of caveats!! - MONOCULTURE: When one system becomes the authoritative interpreter of "why things are the way they are", it will collapse pluralism. An organization actually benefits from various "contested memories". An engineer and sales guy remember different things from a discussion and that helps. Employees can stop arguing with the system not because its correct but its "coherent". - OBSERVER's EFFECT: When people know that the reasoning within systems is being captured, they will change what gets recorded. The negotiations will become "safer" and will contaminate raw signals. - CENTRALIZATION: Interpretation gets centralized upwards. It may appear leadership or executives are gaining synthesis and becoming closer to the ground. But there is no comparison to living through the frictions, not even eclectic summaries. LEADERSHIP MUSCLE NEEDS TO PRACTICE LIVING THROUGH FRICTION OTHERWISE IT WILL TURN SENILE. - BIAS AMPLIFICATION: Model's inbuilt biases can combine with company's cultural quirks resulting in misinterpretations and distortions, worse they get reinforced over time. System will learn how the company thinks and then will optimize for continuity. AMNESIA IS SOMETIME A FEATURE. - SEMANTIC TRUTHS: Unlike objective truths this system will play on subjectivity and will build "causal" relationships that are based on semantics. This over time can form mythical decision norms with no external validity. The real question isn't "CAN IT BE BUILT?". Of course it can be. But "HOW IT SHOULD BE POSITIONSED". #llms #leadership #ai

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Had a great time at DC Startup & Tech Week (Formerly DC Startup Week) moderating a panel with Scott Christensen (Chesapeake Bay Seed Capital Fund (CBSCF) , Faith Davis (Exelon) and Bill McNulty (NextEra Energy Investments), convened by the great C'pher Gresham. Here's a quick recap: 1) The panelists were phenomenal - a mixture of corporate, state and foundation-backed VC's all focusing on climate. They're actively funding companies across a range of sectors - e.g. nature-based solutions, energy + AI, water, etc. Point being, we were lucky to have experts with such broad purviews. 2) The current climate could be pushing at least some climate VC's to focus on software and move away from hardware, at least temporarily. This type of capital may indeed just be better suited for software companies at this juncture. It also reflects the fact that certain segments of the climate-tech market are just more mature than others - e.g. software performs best once the hardware and the business case around it are solid, then it becomes and optimization and efficiency game. 3) Founders need to target "must-solve" climate problems from the investor lens. In other words, yes there's a sea of climate challenges where startups can be additive. However, in this environment, few of these areas are attracting meaningful capital. There's nothing wrong with tackling problem areas that are under-invested, we need this in spades. However, for those trying to get capital in the door, realize the constraints that come with targeting problems that investors just aren't prioritizing. 4) Look to funders overseas. The EU, where so much climate finance, policy and general expertise has come from, could be playing a much more important role. I'd also argue that Gulf countries like KSA and UAE are going to be critical here too, not to mention China, of course. 5) We need mentoring and coaching to be at an all-time high. With so much uncertainty, networks/communities where both founders and investors can learn from/lean on each other have never been more important. The panel/audience was a nice microcosm of the types of support networks we need to be actively building. Big thanks again to C'pher, Faith, Scott and Bill, as well as the whole DC Startup + Tech Week team. Til next year!

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Replit just raised $400 million at a $9 billion valuation, and shipped its fourth autonomous coding agent in two years. What started as a tool for professional developers in 2016 is now pioneering how anyone — regardless of technical background — can build software. The story behind how that transition actually happened is less told. That’s a design story — and the domain of Haya Odeh, its co-founder and VP of Design. Valentina Suarez Gutierrez, Yina L. and I recently sat down with Haya to talk about the design decisions behind making software creation feel intuitive for people who’ve never written a line of code. (Some changes are as small as a single word.) She also shares her path into design, an inside look at how Replit's design team operates, and why taste — the kind that notices the difference between 1% gray and white — is something that every designer still needs, especially in the age of AI. https://lnkd.in/gu6QTCSf

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I'm incredibly excited to share the news of our investment in SiC Systems, Inc., marking our first US based portfolio company announcement. 👉 Founded by Christopher Savoie, inventor of adaptive agent-oriented software engineering platform (together with Babak Hodjat and Makoto Amamiya) that underpinned the development of Apple’s Siri, and Soheil Mansouri, Professor of Process Systems Engineering at the DTU - Technical University of Denmark. 👉 SiC Systems brings a new generation of AI agents together with quantum computing and sensing technology to empower smarter, faster decision-making in high-stakes environments such as biomanufacturing, industrial automation, and defense operations. What a pleasure to work with Christopher, Soheil, Christopher and Eric. We have led SiC Systems' initial funding round, with participation from Propagator Ventures, Plug and Play Tech Center and Wavepeak Ventures. QDNL Participations, Kris, Cheryne, Chad, Nicola, Jaap, Charles, Nadia Onwards and upwards.

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Y Combinator, the legendary San Francisco accelerator that gave us Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe, is planting more seeds in Saudi Arabia. When Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston founded Y Combinator in 2005, they revolutionized how startups are built and funded. Today, that same innovative spirit is crossing oceans to nurture promising startups in emerging markets like Saudi Arabia. Take erad (YC S22), the Riyadh-based alternative financing platform, as a prime example. Founded in 2022, this Saudi fintech has successfully secured Y Combinator’s backing and recently closed a $16M pre-Series A round with continued support from YC and leading regional investors VentureSouq Nuwa Capital Khwarizmi Ventures AlJazira Capital الجزيرة كابيتال Oraseya Capital Joa Capital What makes this development exciting is what it represents. Silicon Valley’s most influential startup institution is recognizing the potential of Saudi Arabia’s startup ecosystem. It’s a powerful validation of the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 initiatives and the quality of innovation in the region. For founders in MENA, YC's presence opens doors to global networks, expertise, and capital. For investors, it signals that Saudi startups are ready for the world stage. This isn’t just about money flowing to a new market - it’s about the world’s most influential startup accelerator acknowledging that the next generation of unicorns may emerge In Riyadh. The startup world is going borderless. Where do you think the next unicorns will come from? For more venture capital insights, subscribe to our newsletter: https://hubs.ly/Q03m9bzK0 #YCombinator #SaudiStartups #TechInvestment #EmergingMarkets #VentureCapital #GlobalInnovation #Vision2030 #FinTech

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Reading Metronome’s Monetization Operating Model, I kept coming back to one idea: pricing has become product. Software now delivers outcomes, not access. Yet most companies still charge as if they’re selling seats or licenses. That disconnect creates friction: for customers, unpredictability; for companies, stalled growth. The paper’s argument is simple but sharp—monetization isn’t a late-stage decision. It’s strategic infrastructure. Pricing needs the same ownership and iteration as any feature. Treat it like a surface that customers touch, not a spreadsheet buried in finance. If value is continuous and dynamic, pricing must be as well. That means product, GTM, finance, and engineering working from one system of truth. How many of us still treat pricing as an afterthought—when it should be a growth engine? https://lnkd.in/gnH7WzYf #Monetization #ProductStrategy #AI

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I’ve known David Meister for years and backed him at Sydecar, so I’ve seen his ability to build through complexity. Axiom Trust is taking on one of the most outdated parts of wealth infrastructure, trust administration, by pairing a regulated trust company with AI-native workflows. We're proud to invest again and congrats to the team on the launch!

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The world has never felt this uncertain. Great companies have lost half their value in a year. Entire org charts are getting rewritten by AI. We just lived through the SaaS-pocalypse, where “durable” stopped meaning what people thought it meant. Which is why this moment at Plaid feels so special. Plaid just raised additional capital at an $8B valuation to help support employee liquidity. I’ve been here for 8+ years. Long enough to see hype cycles come and go. Long enough to live through multiple “this is the end of fintech” narratives. Long enough to learn the difference between a company that looks strong in a screenshot and a company that stays strong when the weather turns. When I joined, maybe 1 in a hundred Americans had ever used Plaid. Today, well over 1 in 2 have. Back then, I had to explain to friends and family what it even meant to “link your bank account to an app.” Today, a lot of new grads joining Plaid have never managed money online without seeing Plaid in the flow. For them, paying for daycare, buying a car, and applying for a mortgage, is digital by default. And Plaid has quietly been the network making it work. Durability doesn’t always make the headlines, but I’m proud of it. Proud of the team that kept building through the hard parts, grateful for our customers who trusted us, pushed us, and held us to a higher bar, and to our investors who believed in the long term vision. This has never been a flash-in-the-pan company. Trust is earned slowly and lost quickly. And yet, year after year, Plaid got stronger. In a time when the rug is getting pulled out from so many companies who were darlings of industry just a few years ago, it’s been amazing (and honestly, still a little surprising) to be part of something that I can truly say will be around for decades to come. Next play!

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