JJ Jiang

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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**Bridging Fashion and Technology: Alta's $11M Vision** Jenny Wang's innovative approach at Alta aims to redefine personal styling by merging technology with user-centric solutions. This $11M investment from prominent figures reaffirms the demand for tools that simplify style choices in our fast-paced digital era. At ElevenX Capital, we believe that the intersection of technology and personal experiences is where significant value lies. How can investors further support startups transforming traditional industries through tech? #investing #innovation #venturecapital #entrepreneurship

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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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"Build the event you wish existed" That's what we at Monadical did last week at #NYTW. We wanted an AI Engineers discussion for Engineers. There's always a lot of events out there for VCs to network, or for startups to learn about G2M, but very little on lessons learned from actual engineers in the field. So that's the event we hosted. Big thank yous to our awesome panel, Roy Pereira, Ben Cohen and Corey J. Gallon. Here's the key takeaways and the AI tools we're using. 🚀 All three panelists independently called AI Agents the most transformative LLM application they’ve used. They specifically called out Claude 3.5 Sonnet for its accuracy and reliability. 🪨 We dug into how LLMs are “jagged”, not general. They can be shockingly good at some tasks and completely fail at others. Everyone agreed: good evaluations are critical (and hard.) 🧪 Corey noted how public benchmarks and reality are two different things. Most public evals are saturated or gamed. ♊ Ben emphasized that AI projects are actually two projects: building the tool and building the evaluation process. 🧱 We explored how falling dev costs may impact startup defensibility and labor demand. Roy shared that founders are already shifting strategies in response. ⚒️ In a world of daily AI launches, the panel discussed how they decide what’s worth attention, and what’s just noise. They called out tools like Goose, Aider, Claude Code, and Monadical’s own Cubbi, which helps run agentic workflows safely in dev environments. (links in the comments). CTA: What would you want to hear in an AI Applied Engineering talk you attended?

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What do creative technologists build? At Baukunst, we’ve spent the last few years answering that question in real time. We are a collective of builders — operators, designers, engineers, and investors — committed to advancing the art of building at the frontiers of technology and design. We lead pre-seed rounds with conviction, often as the first institutional capital a founder takes, and we invest deeply in the messy, magical early days of company creation. This deck is the portfolio behind that philosophy, or rather that portfolio that has grown up out of it. We have chosen to champion these companies, and they chosen to co-create with us. These are companies built by creative technologists, founders who think in systems, design for real people, and push beyond the familiar. 

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Today Isembard announced a $50m Series A fundraise led by Union Square Ventures, less than a year after Notion Capital led their Seed round. 💥This is a company right at the intersection of AI & supply chain sovereignty & they’re exceeding even our most optimistic expectations. By the end of the year they will have 25 factories across the UK, US, Germany, France & Ukraine. 💥Isembard is rapidly scaling its network of AI-first factories for precision manufacturing at the same time as market demand is accelerating. Macro forces (reshoring, rising defence spend, concentration risk in Asia, and the growth of neo-primes) are structurally increasing demand for fast, local, flexible manufacturing that the current industry is unable to deliver on. 💥The innovation is in the way the company builds and franchises factories as a product with tightly integrated units of machines, software, robotics, & process intelligence that turn design files into certified components with speed & reliability. 💥Their AI software platform, MasonOS, connects all sites into a single operating system, replacing fragmented shops with standardised, high-performance industrial nodes & enabling real-time quoting, predictable delivery, & low defect rates. By owning the full production stack, Isembard delivers premium manufacturing performance with the scalability & flexibility of a software platform. 💥We are at the top of the AI hype cycle and there are understandable concerns about the ROI on the vast sums of money being invested into this new super-cycle. But, the ROI for Isembard is both clear and compelling. They will deliver components 10x faster and at 50% of the cost of current suppliers. They will also build a de-centralised, global network of factories to meet the growing demand for national or regional sovereignty. 💥This is a company with a clear vision to disrupt a massive, fragmented $1.8tn component manufacturing market. Today marks another huge stride towards that vision. And they are only just getting started. We’re thrilled to be on this journey with Alexander Fitzgerald & the team & we’re also excited to welcome Rebecca Kaden & USV into the investor base. Notion Capital Union Square Ventures Alexander Fitzgerald Rebecca Kaden Maximilian Eichler Stephen Millard Britt Mulder

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Talking to users and thoughtfully integrating their needs and wants was woven through everything we did at IDEO—threaded through every prototype and product decision. Reading my colleagues Joanne and Leo's latest work brought that to mind. They describe a future where research runs continuously, with AI agents recruiting participants and instantly surfacing insights. Synthetic personas, carefully trained on consumer signals, mirror human behavior closely enough to extend live studies and compress timelines from weeks to hours. Today user research mostly runs in fits and starts, prohibitively expensive and locked away in dedicated project cycles when it could be a constant companion, seamlessly integrated into the product development process. Joanne and Leo lay out the full vision here: https://lnkd.in/gEUBSG_J

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I’m lucky to work alongside colleagues like Richard Fruehauf, who constantly push my thinking. His latest piece unpacks why U.S. robotics and drone manufacturing faces uphill economics, and how public policy can help turn the tide. One key takeaway: 232 tariffs on robotics imports could help reset the economics that are holding back U.S. investment and production. It’s a sharp perspective on how policy can shape the future of advanced tech here at home. Well worth a read: https://lnkd.in/edMPTQPQ Richard Fruehauf, Robert J. Szczerba, Michael Lutzky, Edward Ovando, Karl Sanchack, Herman Herman, Jeff Legault, Phil English, Richard Fruehauf, Ryan Aument, Michael Guido, Sheila Fitzgerald Sterrett, David McCormick

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Loved hearing the news that Seraphim Space hit their target of $100mm in funding. As a purely space focused fund, it’s great to see that the fund has an outsized amount of LP support. That means that not only is commercial space a hot sector right now but it means that LPs can expect real return from a sector that is exponentially growing. Big congrats to the industry and the whole team at Seraphim. #space #newspace #spacetech #vc

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My DCVC partner Milo Werner at the announcement of MIT's New Manufacturing Initiative: the highly automated factories of the future will re-industrialize the United States, tightly couple R&D and manufacturing to accelerate innovation, and decarbonize industry.

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