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Early stage investor in transformational technology companies.
Articles by Dan
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From Corporate to Independent
From Corporate to Independent
When I first left my corporate job, I went to talk to my mentors. The best advice I received was from someone who like…
18 Comments -
Money Changes Everything?
Money Changes Everything?
Money changes everything, or so the old song goes. As many of you know, we are now seeing funding records set daily…
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Tough To Maintain Investing Focus in 2018
Tough To Maintain Investing Focus in 2018
I am an angel investor, who looks for mature founders in the enterprise and infrastructure space. 2018 has been an eye…
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A Big Day For Treasure Data
A Big Day For Treasure Data
This is a big day for the team at Treasure Data. I can fondly remember sitting in a conference room with Bill Tai and…
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Quick Book Review: Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
Quick Book Review: Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
I like a lot of folks did not know much about Theranos until two events: the Forbes article that pronounced her as a…
4 Comments -
What Have I Been Up To?
What Have I Been Up To?
One of the most fund things in this industry is to get to talk to Harry Stebbings on The Twenty Minute VC. Dream…
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Seeds Are Getting Bigger, Now What?
Seeds Are Getting Bigger, Now What?
This week, the very smart and capable folks at Wing VC published an interesting article about seed investing. If I do…
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The Tension Inherent In Being A High Performance Leader
The Tension Inherent In Being A High Performance Leader
The two most common traits in the great leaders are an intense competitive nature combined with a very high degree of…
5 Comments -
"Success Theater"
"Success Theater"
There has been a lot of discussion after the Wall Street Journal article on what went wrong at GE, highlighted by a…
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High Potential Is Often a Misleading Label
High Potential Is Often a Misleading Label
Carl Icahn is fond of telling the story about who becomes CEO at many companies. He describes the CEO frequently as…
3 Comments
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11K followers
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Dan Scheinman posted thisI was at a dinner with the great Allison Barr Allen (which is a tell that I am about to steal an idea from her!), and she used the metaphor of a capital river to describe the state of the venture market. She said to me that the boats that get on board the river are now bigger and fewer. And perhaps to stretch the analogy, fewer rafts get the chance to build to a bigger boat. I keep thinking about this as I am seeing pitch after pitch that might have worked in 2021, but has near zero chance of working in 2026. (Again to be clear, markets change and this market will change again). The companies who are unable to attract the large pools of capital will try and raise small amounts to embark on their dream. The challenge is that unless you get to insane traction, there is generally no inlet to the capital river. Most of the business plans I see for small seed raises, still project a next round raise in 18 months with less than 1M (and sometimes $0) of revenue. This is just not the market we are in right now. What to do? I am not sure. But if you are not able to access the capital river, you are going to need to have insane traction (or a guarantee of a next round) to have any hope. I would encourage all founders to think this issue through and deal with it in the presentation. Too many are still trying hype AI persos which miss the mark. As always, keep grinding.
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Dan Scheinman shared thisCongratulations to Tomer Weingarten and the entire SentinelOne team on crossing 1B in revenue. Great quarter and more to come!Dan Scheinman shared thisA historic moment for SentinelOne: $1 Billion Crossed in Annual Revenue. 📈 This milestone reflects a defining shift in AI Security. The era of AI-powered, autonomous security is here, and organizations are embracing SentinelOne at scale. Today, nearly one-fifth of the Fortune 500 and hundreds of the Global 2000 trust us to deliver the decisive AI advantage. In Q4 FY26 we reached: Scale: $1.119B ARR (+22% YoY). Momentum: $1.001B Revenue (+22% YoY) — a historic milestone. Profitability: 3.5% Operating Margin (+600 bps YoY improvement). Built for the AI Era: 50%+ of annual bookings from Emerging Platform solutions. Record ARR per Customer and Accelerated Platform Adoption The Gold Standard of Trust: 96% GRR and 109% NRR ($100K+ ARR customers). Thank you to our customers, partners, and the incredible Sentinels around the world. Read the press release: https://s1.ai/Q4-26-PR Listen to the call: https://s1.ai/Q4-26-Ern
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Dan Scheinman reposted thisDan Scheinman reposted thisAfter analyzing 139,949 conversations with Breakout’s AI agent in 2025, I was surprised by how blunt people are with AI. And that honesty is incredibly valuable for your sales team. Here’s what we learned: First, 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘺 𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘥 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘈𝘐. There is no social contract to be polite to AI. But when it’s a live rep, rules of polite conversation can leave vital information off the table. 3 real examples of valuable honesty from visitor chats: 1. "Give me the absolute minimum price. Consider that it's for 300 conversations a month, HubSpot CRM, and no routing." 2. "I would just like to get a general range for budget planning purposes then will book once budget is approved." 3. "If I decide to stop using you in the future, will you give me a complete download of my data including my notes?" Pricing, timeline, necessary integrations usually surface much later, if your sales team even gets that far. With an AI SDR, your team can tailor messaging to where buyers actually are. Second, 𝘣𝘶𝘺𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘺 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘈𝘐. They’ll ask hard questions on where your product is headed. And a strong product team can turn those questions into roadmap features. A real example of a buyer giving insight into what they're going to want in the future: "Answer briefly: do your plans include guided onboarding? done-for-you setup? self service? does it require coding?" An AI SDR on your company’s website is a win-win-win. It’s a win for your buyers, your sales team, and your company as a whole. Otherwise, you’ll see traffic bouncing with no idea why they silently objected. If you’re interested in seeing how Breakout helps SDRs find their leverage, DM me. We use it ourselves, so I’m happy to share how we’ve battle tested it with our sales team.
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Dan Scheinman reposted thisWe've always been able to simulate the black swan nevver-happened-before outages, since the product wouldn't be much use without it. Knowledge however lets us guarantee outages will never happen again by just reading a post-mortem. It's ridiculously goodDan Scheinman reposted thisToday we announced Knowledge! A persistent way of customizing Overmind's reasoning to take into account your company's architecture, standards and past outages to make it more context-aware than ever. Learn more about it in our Changelog. https://lnkd.in/dK95gmfF
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Dan Scheinman reposted thisDan Scheinman reposted thisUnpopular opinion: Some friction deserves to survive the AI revolution.
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Dan Scheinman reposted thisDan Scheinman reposted thisBrian (co-founder of HubSpot) is right. Website clicks are becoming fewer and farther between. The recipe for tofu has changed. So how do you build for it? People do not "google" the same way they used to, and they probably never will again. We already have a new verb for it - "I ChatGPT'ed it". Buyers are showing up already educated. They’ve asked AI the basic questions, they've run deep analyses comparing vendors, they've read Reddit reviews. By the time they hit your site, they don’t want to scroll. They want confirmation and relevant answers to the problem they're trying to solve. No one has the patience or attention span to hunt for answers anymore. If your website still assumes buyers are in discovery mode, you will lose them in 10 seconds. We have the stats to prove it. Which is why our team at Breakout is building for the post search world, where the first real interaction is a conversation.
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Dan Scheinman shared thisGood job alertDan Scheinman shared thisYou've heard that old saying about a salesperson who can sell ketchup to someone in white gloves? Spekit 🐙 is hiring a VP of Sales and, well, we're not looking for that. What we want is someone who'd walk away from that deal on principle - and sell them a recurring cleaning service instead. Real value, real problems, clients who stick around. That's the kind of sales leader we need right now. Spekit is at a genuinely exciting inflection point. The product is winning. The category we're building - Rep Acceleration - is resonating. And we're targeting serious growth this year. To get there, we need to be deliberate about the people we bring in. Ian Lowe, our CMO, is a great recent example - sharp, experienced, and the kind of leader who makes everyone around him better. The next piece of that puzzle is a VP of Sales, and it's one of the most important hires we'll make this year. So what does this person actually look like? Someone who rides deals, develops reps, and owns outbound - while using AI and modern tooling to make the team faster without sacrificing quality. Someone who is as disciplined about the deals they walk away from as the ones they close. If you've built or operated within a process that holds a firm line on ICP - and you understand why that's a feature, not a constraint - you'll find a lot to love here. More specifically, we're looking for someone who: 🤺 Brings genuine Challenger Sales DNA - comfortable creating healthy tension and leading prospects to the cost of inaction 🚰Can build and own outbound pipeline, with clear rep accountability and 30-40% outbound creation as a real goal, not an aspiration 👷 Is hands-on with AI - not just "embracing it" in theory, but actually building agents, testing prompts, and architecting workflows 🤝Sees Marketing and CS as true partners, not a lead vendor or a handoff point ☂️Knows the math behind a clean forecast and holds their team to it This role reports to me and is ideally based in Denver (hybrid), though we're open to strong candidates elsewhere in the US. If that's you - or you know who it is - the full job description is linked in the comments. The best hire for a role like this usually comes through someone who knows what it takes to thrive here, so please send this along if someone comes to mind!
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Dan Scheinman shared thisAn excellent report from Operator Collective 🔆 The joy of having LPs who are in the trenches!Dan Scheinman shared thisJust because you led through the last tech transitions doesn't mean you know how to lead in the age of AI. That was one of many messages that came through loud and clear when we gathered 75 senior tech executives in one room last week for what's been missing from the AI conversation: unfiltered operator truths about what enterprise AI transformation actually looks like inside their companies and for themselves. As Erica Ruliffson Schultz put it: "What will define success going forward is our ability to learn. Each of us has to be willing to go back to being a beginner." Our inaugural AI Transformation Exchange, co-hosted by legendary operators Erica and Claire Hughes Johnson (both founding OpCo LPs and board members), brought together leaders from Anthropic, Stripe, Vercel, Databricks, Toast, Box, Confluent, Microsoft, Amplitude, and more. We anchored it with our first-ever OpCo Intelligence State of AI Transformation research report (announced today in Axios by Madison Mills), surveying 123 senior operators with a median 22 years of experience. Here's a snapshot of what we heard and what the data showed: ✔️ 77% are actively executing on AI initiatives. Our operators shared how they are making it happen. ✔️ 69% say AI is reshaping talent profiles and job roles. AI is changing what people do long before it changes how many people do it. ✔️ 67% say productivity is AI's biggest benefit. Hear how those gains are being measured (or not). They also share what's holding AI back from true enterprise adoption and what solutions they are looking for. This is the space Operator Collective 🔆 was built to fill. Our 250+ Operator LPs are the leaders who scaled their companies through SaaS and cloud and are now relearning what it takes in an AI-native world. Our portfolio companies are building the tools these operators use and evaluate every day. The full blog post digs into the themes with perspectives from Elena Gomez, Kieran Snyder, Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Maia Josebachvili, Kate Jensen, Spenser Skates, Yanbing Li, Nancy Wang, Olivia Nottebohm, Bijal Shah, Christina Liu, Colleen McCreary (Wheeler), and Anu Bharadwaj. The hype is everywhere. Operational reality is harder to find. Much more from us soon!How Top Tech Operators Are Using AI To Transform Their Companies (And Themselves)How Top Tech Operators Are Using AI To Transform Their Companies (And Themselves)
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Dan Scheinman shared thisVery topical post from Tomer WeingartenDan Scheinman shared thisThere’s been a lot of confusion following Anthropic’s launch of Claude Code Security. Let’s separate the reality from the noise and look at what is actually being disrupted. What did Anthropic actually release? Claude Code Security is a capable AI tool designed to read a developer's codebase, find vulnerabilities, and suggest fixes. It is incredibly impressive. The "Code to Cloud or Application Security" Illusion: Over the last few years, we watched a massive industry trend where major cybersecurity vendors were rushing to acquire tools to do exactly this. This category is known as Application Security. It is roughly a $20B market, which represents only about 5% of the total cybersecurity landscape. Major players spent billions acquiring their way into this space — CrowdStrike buying Bionic; Palo Alto Networks acquiring Bridgecrew and Cider, Dig and more; Wiz pushing to Code; alongside pure-play names like Checkmarx and Snyk. The reality is that many of these legacy, rule-based code-scanning tools are about to be commoditized. AI models like Claude are simply better, faster, and cheaper at reading and reasoning through static code. At SentinelOne, we intentionally chose not to acquire our way into this specific market. I have been vocal for the past few years that this exact segment was incredibly risky and ripe for AI disruption given AI’s code generation trajectory. More generally — the hope is code will be generated more securely from the get-go, with coding tools like OpenAI Codex, and Claude Code. So, what does this mean for the future of cybersecurity? AI will subsume certain cybersecurity features of disjointed platforms (built by acquiring legacy narrow feature acquisitions) — specifically those based on manual review, audits, and pattern matching. I suspect that cloud misconfiguration posture management (aka CSPM) could be ripe for disruption - even though it is more nuanced and less structured than code security, so might not be as straightforward. However, active, real-time, and autonomous defense against sophisticated threat actors remains a highly defensible core of cybersecurity. There is a massive difference between finding a bug in a static environment and stopping a live, adversarial cyberattack in real-time. Singularity was built on a fundamentally different premise: autonomous, AI-native security. We don't rely on manual audits or legacy pattern matching. Active, real-time defense against threat actors is only getting more critical. The vendors built on autonomous, AI-native architectures will leverage this moment to get even stronger. The platforms relying on legacy patchworks have a difficult road ahead. Speaking of that.. another super concerning LLM based cyberattack was uncovered: https://lnkd.in/gVYe_UGu
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Dan Scheinman liked thisDan Scheinman liked thisFrontier AI isn’t being built in isolation. Neither is the frontier of cyber defense. That’s why #SentinelOne is proud to be a partner in OpenAI’s Trusted Access for Cyber (TAC) Program. For our customers and partners, this represents a significant leap forward in how we scale protection and deliver operational excellence across the digital estate. As our Chief AI Officer, Gregor Stewart, shared: “At SentinelOne, the real value of AI is how quickly it helps us turn signals into an actionable advantage for defenders. GPT-5.5 helps analysts connect telemetry, focus on what matters, and strengthen how organizations investigate, detect, and respond to emerging threats.” Innovation is a journey we take together. We are proud to partner with #OpenAI to redefine the capabilities of the modern SOC and keep our customers ahead of what's next. Read more about the announcement: https://s1.ai/GPT5-5Cyb
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Dan Scheinman liked thisDan Scheinman liked thisTwenty-one months ago, Sequoia made its first Brazilian seed investment in over a decade. What seemed to be an esoteric legal solution quickly revealed itself as something much bigger: a massive, pervasive pain point for the entire region. Since that first check, we’ve continued to double, and now triple, down on this partnership. I recently visited the Enter team in Brazil for a board meeting and witnessed their level of customer obsession firsthand. Check out this video from their office. Every time they sign a new customer, they place a physical plaque on the wall. A constant reminder of the mission they serve. Today, Enter becomes the first AI unicorn in Latin America. We are thrilled to invest in their $1.2B Series B, led by our friends at Founders Fund. Huge congratulations to Mateus Costa-Ribeiro, Henrique Vaz, Michael Mac-Vicar, and the entire team. This is just the beginning.
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Dan Scheinman liked thisDan Scheinman liked thisEvery Monday my team submits a mandatory recap of their weekend. Some people say “I don’t care what my employees do on the weekends," but I do. They don’t need to work all weekend, but what they do outside of work impacts how they show up during the week. If they’re spending every weekend doing things like: - Going outside - Raising young children - Walking their dog They’re not sharpening valuable skills. They’re wasting time. In 50 years: - We won’t have clean air (outside skills will be useless) - Their young kids will be adults (child raising skills will be useless) - Even with AI, pets will not develop the dexterity to pick up the phone and dial They should be prompting, mopping, or rebranding HBO to HBO Max. By 2076 those will be the only three jobs left. I'm just trying to prepare them for it.
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Dan Scheinman liked thisDan Scheinman liked thisKhimaya Bagla ’26 will deliver the undergraduate student address at this year's Commencement, reflecting on a Brandeis journey shaped by curiosity, exploration and a cross-disciplinary approach to learning. Brandeis Stories: https://bit.ly/3P0jd7p * * * * * Image description: Headshot of Khimaya Bagla ’26.
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Dan Scheinman liked thisDan Scheinman liked thisArista Networks put up another strong beat with its Q1 2026 earnings report, and the message it's sending is that the network is no longer the bottleneck; it’s the backbone of the AI revolution. With a significant beat and raise, Arista has officially overtaken incumbent vendors to command the #1 market share in high-speed switching ($>10G$). 💡 Key Takeaways for the Industry: Ethernet is Winning: The transition from InfiniBand to Ethernet at production scale is accelerating. As AI workloads shift from "science experiments" to global infrastructure, Ethernet’s flexibility is the preferred choice for scale-out and scale-across fabrics. Infiniband isn't going away but the growth is with Ethernet. AI Target Lifted: Management raised their 2026 AI revenue target from $3.25B to $3.5B, more than doubling AI sales annually. The "3-Fabric" Strategy: Arista is winning by addressing Scale-Up (ESUN/Rack-level), Scale-Out (Horizontal/Leaf-Spine), and Scale-Across (Distributed/Multi-tenant) architectures. 🎙️ Direct from Leadership: "Arista's demand is actually the best I've ever seen in my tenure. Our Ethernet portfolio addresses both the synchronous flows for massive training and the low latency for concurrent swarms of real-time inference in this era of trillions of tokens, terabits of performance, and terawatts of power." — Jayshree Ullal, CEO "Arista’s modern operating model played a key role... hitless production upgrades, latency analyzer for microburst visibility, and true packet drop forensics." — Todd Nightingale, President & COO However, despite the beat and raise, stock is down with some investor concerns. Rudolph Araujo, Head of Investor Advocacy The Concern: Investors highlighted the growing gap between record-breaking demand and a tightening supply chain, particularly regarding wafers, memory, and high-end silicon. The Management Response: CEO Jayshree Ullal was candid: "Demand is outstripping our supply this year." To combat this, Arista is leaning into multi-year purchase commitments (now at $8.9B) and strengthening vendor agreements. While they anticipate some gross margin pressure due to elevated procurement costs, they are prioritizing "supply continuity" to ensure customer GPUs don't sit idle. They raised the full-year revenue guidance to $11.5B, signaling confidence that they can navigate these constraints. Sell side firms agree as Sebastien Naji from William Blair writes: "While management’s more cautious 2026 guidance will be a disappointment, we would take advantage of the weakness. Arista remains a leading AI infrastructure provider. The Bottom Line: Arista is no longer just a "cloud titan" play. Between the surge in Neo-clouds, the integration of VeloCloud into the branch, and the move toward 1.6T networking in 2027, the "Arista 2.0" era is in full swing. #AI #Networking #AristaNetworks #CloudComputing #Ethernet #DataCenter #TechTrends Amanda Jaramillo
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Dan Scheinman liked thisDan Scheinman liked thisIf you’re a marketing leader heading to the AirOps Next Conference in NYC, Breakout and Navattic are co-hosting a dinner and would love to have you join. Our teams are bringing together a small group of operators for a no-agenda, no-decks dinner in Manhattan on May 13. We’ve been working closely with the Navattic team. Their click-through demos are one of the assets Breakout’s agent can present to buyers, so this felt like a natural pairing. More than anything, this is just a room of people thinking deeply about how GTM is changing. No presentations, no selling, just good food, great drinks, and better conversation. If that sounds interesting, come break bread with us! Link to request an invite in the comments below.
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Dan Scheinman liked thisDan Scheinman liked thisAnyone else hit wild peer review bottlenecks once their team passes ~70% AI usage? If you have I'd love to talk to you about it. We've been shifting our peer review left which has helped a hell of a lot but I want to hear what others are doing too. DM me if you're willing to chat about how you've solved it, or tried to.
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Dan Scheinman liked thisDan Scheinman liked this"A century ago, both church folk and gangsters advocated for alcohol restrictions. The former backed Prohibition out of sincere moral conviction, the latter out of a desire to seize a market for themselves. To describe such unlikely alignments, economist Bruce Yandle coined the term "bootleggers and Baptists." The Baptists act as high-minded advocates who provide public legitimacy for a rule; the bootleggers serve as commercial interests who stand to benefit and provide political muscle. " "The same sort of high-low coalition is present in the push for self-driving car laws. Though both bills are framed by their proponents as safety measures, each has its own mix of Baptists and bootleggers in support. Yet despite their safety-focused arguments, neither side is engaging with the actual safety data that would settle the debate. " Brilliant analogizing by the author that cuts directly into the heart of the debate over self-driving cars. https://lnkd.in/eqn344nsThe self-driving car fight in Congress isn't really about safety at allThe self-driving car fight in Congress isn't really about safety at all
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Dan Scheinman liked thisDan Scheinman liked thisHere I am at Quebec airport and I was on a flight home via Toronto, and I got to the airport and through security 40 minutes before the earlier flight which is a direct flight. The United Airlines check in desk was empty downstairs, so I went through security and headed toward the gate for the earlier flight. I asked if I could be moved and the gate agent said it wasn’t possible for her to do, but I could call United to see what could be done. I opened the united app and opened the Chat function powered by Netomi and asked if I could move flights. In 4 minutes the AI agent and the human in the loop had moved my flight and told me I could check in. Although the flight is delayed slightly because of bad weather in EWR, it’s the best experience I have had with an airline in this kind of situation ever, and anyone who knows me, knows how often I travel. Many congrats to United Airlines and Netomi for such an amazing customer experience. It’s great to be a happy customer.
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The Dan Scheinman Daily!
paper.li
See publicationA daily paper which is focused a lot on sf giants baseball and technology!
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English Encouragement Prize
Radio Beijing
Was part of a singing competition on Radio Beijing to determine the best English language talent in Beijing. A sort of Chinese Idol with foreigners. Was the closing act on New Year's eve 1985. Did not win place or show, but managed to come in tied for 4th and got the coveted English Encouragement Prize.
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Amit Mehra, CFA
We're excited to lead the Series-A round of Cloudburst Technologies along with prior investors including Strategic Cyber Ventures (SCV), CoinFund, Coinbase (Coinbase Ventures), Bloccelerate VC, and IQT (In‑Q‑Tel). Operating at the intersection of #AI and crypto-related social media data, Cloudburst Technologies is redefining how the industry approaches risk and intelligence. While most blockchain analytics are limited to on-chain activity, Cloudburst focuses on the crucial off-chain ecosystem. By tracking social sentiment, fraud networks, illicit actors, scams, and emerging narratives, they deliver real-time intelligence and predictive market insights. This comprehensive approach gives regulators, law enforcement, exchanges, investors, and enterprises a proactive edge in spotting new trends and combating crypto-enabled financial crime. The Cloudburst platform is powered by proprietary AI and data science models. It leverages millions of off-chain data points, spanning everything from Telegram and Discord groups to regulatory filings and breaking news. This capability enables clients to detect emerging fraud, enhance KYC/KYT workflows with social media intelligence, quantify reputational and financial risk, and improve investment strategies with behavioral data. Cloudburst is already trusted by major crypto exchanges, compliance teams, and government agencies. With this latest funding, Cloudburst will expand its AI and data science teams, accelerate product development, and scale globally to serve financial institutions, regulators, and exchanges. More here: Coindesk: https://lnkd.in/dDxQBKMh Newswire: https://lnkd.in/dCRughTc Ventureburn: https://lnkd.in/dmP4NzJz
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Kit Yu
Differentiated hybrid multi-cloud capabilities position NTAP to participate in enterprise AI infrastructure spend. The enterprise storage market has not seen the same AI-fueled exponential growth that servers and networking markets have experienced since 2023, likely because the vast majority of investments to date have gone towards training foundational models at hyperscalers rather than enterprise on-premise AI deployment (where storage OEMs like NetApp participate). That said, momentum in enterprise AI infrastructure and data lake modernization is building, with management highlighting expectations for a sequential ramp throughout F2026. In F2Q26, NTAP closed approximately 200 AI deals across geographies, industries, and use cases. The company has characterized these deals in three major buckets: (1) Data preparation (~45% of deals); (2) inference use cases like RAG or reinforcement learning (~30%); and (3) training & fine tuning (~25%).
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Brittany Walker
Voice is a super interesting modality right now - maybe the first modality we're seeing move to open source models across a number of scale ups / enterprises. Reliability concerns, high costs, and open source model performance are pushing engineers to do their own fine tuning vs. relying on third-party vendors of proprietary models. Many of these orgs have already been collecting their own first-party data and now with third-party vendors like Extrian, David AI, etc they can train really high quality models. RL has been insanely hyped, but it's been unclear how long it will take scale ups and enterprises to actually lean in. Voice AI might be hitting that inflection point faster than expected.
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Paul Perrett
Big milestone for Firmable. We’ve raised $14m Series A led by Airtree. Sales has moved through a few big waves: intuition-led, CRM-led, data-led. We’re now entering the next one – intelligence-led sales. The opportunity isn’t just better data. It’s turning that data into clear direction and action, without adding more work for sales teams. That’s what we’re building at Firmable: a foundation of trusted external data, layered with intelligence that helps sellers know who to focus on and when. Led by Airtree, this round supports our expansion across Asia and into the US – and accelerates the build-out of AI agents that take the admin work off sales teams so they can focus on what they do best. Proud of the team, grateful to our customers and investors. We’re just getting started. Read the exclusive in the AFR. https://lnkd.in/gr66uknb Leigh Jasper | Tara Salmon | Karthik Venkatasubramanian| Chester Thompson| Chath Widanapathirana
20 Comments -
Salil Deshpande
As AI workloads eat up global computing supply, DRAM prices are surging like never before—creating major challenges for teams trying to plan out their data center spend. One of my portfolio companies, Mext, is addressing the largest cost component in the datacenter: server memory (DRAM). From being on the board of Redis for the last twelve years, I’ve learned a lot about the various aspects of this problem and approaches to solving them. Mext found a breakthrough, using new AI techniques, for dramatically reducing the amount of server-DRAM required to run applications, all while maintaining performance. It intelligently manages the server’s memory, keeping hot pages (i.e., those in use by applications) in fast DRAM and offloading cold pages (i.e., those less used) to a much less expensive memory tier (e.g., NVMe Flash). Key to the approach is ensuring cold memory pages that are about to be accessed by an application are back in DRAM before the application needs them or notices that they were gone. This is done without modifications to the application or the OS – so it can run in the cloud or on-premise. Mext thus allows applications to either run using less DRAM or keep their DRAM footprint but do more with it. They're hosting a webinar along with Fred Weber (former CTO of AMD) on Jan 22nd at 10am pacific time. You can register here: https://lnkd.in/gXe9GCeE
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James Green
At CRV, we’ve been fortunate to partner with some of the most visionary founders reshaping the future of cybersecurity over the past five decades. From cloud-native data protection to developer-first security and AI-driven detection, our portfolio reflects the breadth and depth of innovation happening in the industry today. Companies like Cyera, Cribl, Astrix Security, Tailscale, and Vega (among many others) are tackling the hardest problems facing CISOs and developers — from securing non-human identities, to modernizing log pipelines, to making zero-trust networking effortless. What’s exciting is not just the individual companies, but the ecosystem effect: each is building in complementary areas, and together they’re advancing how enterprises secure data, infrastructure, and applications in an AI-powered world. Cybersecurity has never been more mission-critical, and the next decade will see even greater disruption as AI, automation, and new architectures redefine what’s possible. We’re proud to support founders leading that charge.🚀 If you’re building in cyber, we’d love to connect!
6 Comments -
Rishaad Currimjee
We're excited to introduce our latest investment, Oryo.io - the security layer for agentic AI. Prashanth R. and Swaroop S., veterans of Okta and Wiz, are building agentic visibility and a trust layer on the MCP protocol for enterprise autonomous agents. Like Waymo’s cars today, agentic AI across enterprises will soon ingest data, make decisions, and take action. As adoption rises, the problem shifts from capability to control. CISOs manage identity and access for humans today. Okta anchors that trust layer for non-humans tomorrow. After our Agentic AI conference in Feb 2025 led by Anand Rao, we came with prepared minds to our first call with Oryo. Michael Marmor led diligence and is working closely with the founders as they build their MVP. We wrote the first check into Oryo. Village Global (Reid Hoffman) and Seven Hill Ventures (Michael Coates) followed soon after. Perhaps Nikesh Arora should take notice :) Venkat Raju, JB Michel, Rahul Harikumar, Quentin Staes-Polet Josh Cunningham
9 Comments -
Carlotta "Lotti" Siniscalco
The best AI apps today are being built like infrastructure companies. Great breakdown from the awesome 💡 Yazan "Yaz" El-Baba on why technical depth, rapid iteration, and margin-aware architectures are becoming table stakes for AI startups. Definitely worth a read: https://lnkd.in/gMVFFXgH
2 Comments -
Jeff Johnson
The hardest companies to build are often the ones the world needs most. Resilience Tech—spanning hardware, software, deep tech, and infrastructure—demands more than just great ideas. The real test isn’t proving the technology works—it’s building it into a company that can scale and last. At B Capital, Karly Wentz and I distilled what we’ve learned into a 10-factor framework for growth investing in this space. It’s how we separate promising pilots from companies that can scale into lasting platforms. Our conviction: the companies that matter most over the next decade will be those that fuse breakthrough science with business fundamentals—and deliver measurable resilience at scale. Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/gv8jaMPK
11 Comments
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