Amit Aharoni

Deal of the Week https://lnkd.in/dbwycUFN Augmented Intelligence Inc. — $20M at $750M valuation https://aui.io Investors: eGateway Ventures (lead), New Era Capital investor group, strategic partners AUI's Stealth Play for the Post-Transformer Era AUI continues to operate under deep stealth while charting a bold path beyond the transformer paradigm — a contrarian stance in an AI landscape dominated by compute-heavy scaling wars led by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. The company's recently closed $20M bridge SAFE at a $750M valuation cap underscores deep investor conviction that the next wave of AI breakthroughs won't come from bigger GPUs, but from smarter architectures. While the broader market remains fixated on model size and synthetic data pipelines, AUI's research focus lies in neuro-symbolic reasoning, blending the statistical power of deep learning with the logical rigor of symbolic systems. This hybrid approach promises greater reasoning reliability, interpretability, and energy efficiency — three attributes that address growing skepticism around current foundation models' opacity and cost of scaling. The raise brings AUI's total capital to nearly $60M, fueling the quiet development of its Apollo-1 reasoning engine, rumored to be a foundation-model architecture that fuses symbolic logic modules with dynamic neural representations. Insiders describe Apollo-1 as a potential step-change in "grounded AI" — one capable of multi-hop reasoning and factual traceability without massive compute budgets. Within New York's fast-emerging AI corridor, AUI is becoming one of the most closely watched under-the-radar companies, blending research sophistication with enterprise-grade product discipline. Its investor syndicate — composed largely of deep-tech and frontier-AI specialists — sees this as an early bet on the post-transformer paradigm: leaner, more explainable AI that could redefine how intelligence is modeled, trained, and deployed. Deal Significance AUI's bridge round reflects a broader inflection point in AI investing — where capital is shifting from pure scale bets to architecture differentiation and reasoning fidelity. The company represents a hedge against the saturation of transformer economics, where model improvements deliver diminishing returns on exponentially higher costs. If Apollo-1 delivers on its promise of interpretable, low-energy reasoning, it could position AUI as a strategic acquisition target for hyperscalers seeking new compute-efficient architectures, or as the foundation for a new class of hybrid AI platforms capable of combining symbolic logic with generative fluency. For investors, this deal underscores rising conviction that the next "OpenAI-moment" may emerge not from scale, but from structure — and AUI's stealth trajectory gives it the mystique and momentum to be one of the few serious contenders for that title.

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With RL techniques like GRPO, it’s become easy to fine-tune small models to outperform foundation models on vertical tasks. We’re open sourcing Osmosis-Apply-1.7B: a small model that merges code (similar to Cursor’s instant apply) better than foundation models. Links in comments! Using foundation models for high specificity, low complexity tasks like code merging can be overkill - instead, it’s better to use a specialized model instead for higher performance and latency. We fine-tuned the model on 100K real-world code commits where the model needs to merge a code edit snippet into an original code snippet. On the test dataset (subset of CommitPackFT), foundation model performance ranged between 0.77-0.93 reward score. In comparison, Osmosis-Apply-1.7B achieved a 0.98 reward score - while also being 3X-5X more affordable than the next cheaper model AND ~10X faster! Why this matters: the best AI agents use multiple models to ensure task specialization and reliability at scale - on top of cost and latency benefits as well. Links to the model and full write-up (with reward function, hyperparameters, etc.) are in the comments - reach out if you’re interested in using reinforcement learning!

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Replit just raised $400M at a $9B valuation — and IronArc Ventures doubled down with a sizable investment. We first backed Replit because we believed software creation should be accessible to everyone, not just engineers. That thesis is playing out faster than anyone expected. 50M+ users. 85% of the Fortune 500. On track for $1B in run-rate revenue by year-end. And today they launched Agent 4 — 10x faster than its predecessor. But the numbers aren't what excite me most. It's watching a CMO prototype partnership ideas on game day. My kids building their own video games. Employees spinning up internal tools in hours instead of weeks. Thanks to Amjad Masad Alexander Bibic Robert Kohse and the Replit team for pursuing the mission to bring a billion creators online. Every quarter, that vision looks less ambitious and more inevitable. Congrats to the entire Replit team. We're proud to be part of this journey. CC: IronArc Ventures #Replit #AI #VibeCoding #Venture

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85% of Fortune 500 are using Replit. Truly anyone anywhere can now build thanks to Amjad, Haya, and Team Replit. What are you waiting for?

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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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One of the stronger events, and they are all respectable and valued. The ones to remember Duality AI builds Falcon, the digital twin simulation platform. Falcon-generated synthetic data has been proven to close the sim2real gap . Real Life Robotics a Canadian automation company building PASSENGER, a hardware-agnostic platform for managing robots and loT devices in real-world environments. XELA Robotics Co., Ltd. is a Japanese startup pioneering tactile sensing with its 3-axis uSkin technology, giving robots a human-like sense of touch. INVO Station Inc Autonomous electric flying vehicles for personal transportation.

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VC friends - Having done these types of sailings with Ori Lahav for a bunch of years, and having been part of the portfolio of quite a few VC's - I can't recommend this idea enough. Doing a sail for portfolio CEO's will get VC's two huge values: 1) Your startup CEO's don't have much pure thinking time with peers. This is the perfect setting for deeply advancing strategy and tactics thinking in your portfolio. 2) I guarantee that taking your portfolio CEO's sailing like this will be a huge differentiation vs competing VC's. While others just talk about value-add, you'll be delivering.

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When it comes to startup success, Israelis don’t just build - they connect. In this episode, Lirone Glikman, CEO of The Human Factor by Lirone Glikman author of The Super Connectors Playbook, joins Yoel Israel to unpack what really makes the Israeli tech ecosystem thrive and why connection is the biggest competitive edge. From cultural clashes in Tokyo to the empathy that drives founders to help competitors, Lirone shares her insights on building authentic relationships, developing a founder-led personal brand, and creating meaningful opportunities through human connection. You’ll learn: - Why Israeli founders stand out in global networking - How to build credibility and visibility through personal branding - The biggest mistakes Israelis make when pitching abroad - Why introverts might actually be better networkers - How The Super Connectors Playbook turns human skills into business success Because behind every great Israeli startup is a network that believes in giving back. 🎙 Hosted by Yoel Israel Watch the full episode - link in the comments 👇 --- Thank you to our incredible partners Deel and The Recruitery for making this all possible!

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