David Citron 🇮🇱

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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We’re thrilled to share that Usul (YC S24) has raised $3.3M in Seed funding led by Scout Ventures with participation from BVVC, Teamworthy Ventures, True Ventures, Y Combinator and more. Usul is the modern platform for defense contract capture and federal growth. Our customers have won hundreds of millions in defense contracts for capabilities across Air, Land, Maritime, AI/ML and more. When Oliver Gomez, Joonghyun Lee and I joined forces during Stanford’s Hacking 4 Defense class, we interviewed 300+ defense companies to intimately understand how difficult it is for national security solutions to get deployed quickly at scale. In normal capital markets this is called dead weight loss. In warfighting, this costs lives. We're building an elite team of hackers and defense enthusiasts in San Francisco. If you’re interested in powering the next 1000 defense primes, email us at founders@usul.com or dm me. Read more about our journey in Erin O'Brien's Tectonic article below in the comments. Lastly, thank you to our amazing cap table for joining the ship. Bradley C. Harrison, Cody H., Nate George, Zach Beecher, Michael Keane, Joe Musselman, Gene Ebersole, Nick Nowlin, Thomas Lehrman, Stephen Schmalhofer, Michael Montano, Gustaf Alströmer 🇺🇦, Jared Friedman, Steve Blank, Jacqueline Tame, Jack Shanahan, Peter Newell, Steve Weinstein, Jeff Decker, Ivan Kirigin, Jeff Heitzman, Keith W. Gibson, CFCM, SCPM, John Tincoff, Michael Malis, Austen Allred, Tom Hsieh, Donald Donckers

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𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝘄𝗲 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 "𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗦𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺" 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗜 𝗖𝗹𝗼𝘂𝗱. When we first met the team at hosted·ai, one stat blew us away: AI workloads often consume only 40% of the GPU capacity they are paying for. In the Gold Rush of 2026, everyone is selling shovels. But hosted.ai is building the automated machinery that makes those shovels work 24/7. They announced their Series A to scale their mission of making GPU infrastructure simple, affordable, and—most importantly—profitable for providers outside the "Big Three" hyperscalers. It’s rare to find a team with this much "scar tissue" in infrastructure (25+ years of experience) tackling the most pressing bottleneck in tech today. Onward and upward! 📈 #Startups #Founders #AI #GPUaaS #InvestmentNews z21 Ventures Raj Shekhar Singh Jyotika Gupta Sudarshan Ravi Udit Batish Carl Fritjofsson

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Check out the latest funding news from across the Techstars portfolio. → Zipline (Techstars 2011), a drone delivery and logistics startup, raises more than $600M in new funding, boosting its valuation to $7.6B, as it expands commercial deployments. → Language learning startup Preply (Techstars 2015) raises $150M and becomes the 23rd known unicorn from Techstars accelerators. → Hydrosat (Techstars 2019) raises $60M in Series B funding → Tive (Techstars 2017) receives a $20M investment, valuing the shipment-tracking systems developer at slightly more than $500M. → Parambil (Techstars 2023) raises an additional $6M in seed funding ($8M to date). → Seasats (Techstars 2021) receives $24M in Department of War APFIT funding to accelerate the fielding of its autonomous surface vessels. → Hawaiian Airlines’ newly announced $600M Kahuʻewai Hawai‘i Investment Plan features a strategic investment in Ampaire (Techstars 2018) to support hybrid-electric aviation in the islands. → Fintalo (Techstars 2025) secures $500K+ in oversubscribed Pre-Seed funding. → PraxisPro (Techstars 2024) closes an oversubscribed $6M seed round. → Samara Aerospace (Techstars 2024) closes $10M seed round to help bring more stability to sats in orbit. → MyARC (Techstars 2022), a platform that enables fitness creators to train their communities at scale, secures £1.5M investment. Massive congratulations to these incredible portfolio companies!   🔗  Read more at https://lnkd.in/dxtCTvrg 

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🚀 Meet PACT, simplifying SBA-backed acquisitions with investors. Think YC’s SAFE, but built for Main Street M&A. 📘 What is PACT and why we built it PACT (Partnership Acquisition Commonsense Terms) is a free, balanced starting point for the agreements used in SBA-backed acquisitions with outside investors. For too long, SBA-backed acquisitions with outside investors have been the wild west: every deal is different, inefficient, and confusing, especially for first-time searchers raising capital. PACT gives everyone a common baseline so reviews are faster, expectations are clear, and operators can focus on acquiring the business. 🧩 SAFE for ETA Y Combinator’s SAFE gave startups a shared template that made early investing easier to execute. PACT brings that same idea to ETA. It teaches the key concepts in plain English, aligns searchers and investors on the economics, and sets a fair place to start. Our goal is for PACT to become the default baseline for investor-backed small business acquisitions using SBA loans. 🤝 Who contributed 🏛️ Legal input from top SMB M&A attorneys: Joseph Spina (Cullen and Dykman LLP), Mark Dittrich (Groundswell Advisors, LLP), and Eric Hsu (Clear Focus Law, PLLC) provided feedback on drafts. 💼 Early investor adopters: Jordan F. (Shareholder Ventures), Grant Hensel (Entrepreneurial Capital), Jason Ehrlich (Fruition Capital), Sean Smith (Search Fund Ventures), Adam Kaplan (ETA Funding Partners), Jacob Hall (Kando Capital), Tony Cappaert (Workbench Capital) and Adam Markley (PROX Search Capital) have adopted PACT on new deals. 🎓 Community support: Chelsea Wood and Walker Deibel at the Acquisition Lab and Buy Then Build have committed to start educating the community on how investor deals work using PACT. 👉 What to do next 🔍 Searchers: download the docs and ask your lawyer to start from PACT. ⚖️ SMB M&A Law firms: review the templates and send feedback so the next version is better. 💸 SMB investors: adopt PACT as your starting point and share redlines from real deals. This is a community-led standard, and we will keep versioning PACT as feedback comes in from all sides. 📝 Thanks: Special thanks to Joseph Spina for leading the legal drafting with me and helping shape a true middle ground. 🔗 Download PACT and see the key terms: ETAPACT.com (link in the comments) Let’s make investor-backed acquisitions clearer, faster, and fairer for everyone. 🚨 DISCLAIMER: PACT is not legal advice. Searchers must engage experienced SMB M&A counsel to review and tailor these documents to their deal.

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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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While there has never been a more exciting time to be a founder building dev tooling or next-gen infra, it has also never been less investable at seed/pre-seed. I'm either really missing something or a lot of my peers are lost. As someone who has not just written, but also SHIPPED, about 75k lines of code in the past 6 months I can tell you that the evolution of how to build products has changed as much in the past year as it did in the entirety of 2007-2017. The complete rise and fail of frameworks, platforms, methodologies, etc... paved over and forgotten... that is of course except for the 1 company that gets a 1000x return from a wildly overvalued hyper-scaler or drunken growth stage investor obsessed with compounding at scale. Imagine a world where any seed investor in trends like Openstack, Hadoop, PaaS, etc all took a full loss on their investment. That's what we're looking at right now. I personally know of over a dozen well-funded seed-stage companies building in these spaces, with years of runway, scrambling to get acquired for a return of capital + several million personally while they're still relevant. If you're not seeing this unfold in front of you, you either aren't paying attention or you're satisfied playing the lottery instead of investing.

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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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We've quietly raised $20M+ across two new Venture Studio funds to build the next generation of AI Native software companies. We started Forum Ventures 11 years ago to invest in and support founders at the earliest stages. From Zero to Sustainable. A few years ago, Jonah Midanik, Olivia O'Sullivan, James Murphy and I were looking at the future of Venture Capital and we felt like there was an opportunity to continue to invest in and support founders at an even earlier stage (-1 to Zero) and then leverage the infrastructure, processes and network we have built for 11 years to help them from Zero to Sustainable once they go live. The Venture Studio model fits really well within our platform, has incredible math for the funds and our investors, the process is amazing for founders if done correctly, and the company outcomes have proven to be really strong. Our Venture Studio is a place where seasoned founders and operators bring lived experience, while we bring an entire build team including product, engineering, design, GTM, recruiting, & fundraising to build a company with them, shoulder to shoulder from the ground up. It's already working with great companies in market. We've built 17 companies over the last few years alongside our Head of Studio Alice Bator Krenitski, and our amazing studio team. Karthik S., Teija Bean, Dallas Price, Ammar A., Joe Cardamone, Matt Cote, Carmen Tsang, Ksenia Onosov, Alejandro Pereda, Lauren Roberts, Catherine Gao, Draper Sturdivant. More info in the article by BetaKit in the comments. Thanks to Josh Scott for the coverage!

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We've quietly raised $20M+ across two new Venture Studio funds to build the next generation of AI-native software companies. We started Forum Ventures 11 years ago with a simple mission: invest in and support founders at the earliest stages. A few years back, Michael Cardamone, Jonah Midanik, Olivia O'Sullivan, and I were thinking about where venture was headed and realized there was an opportunity to go even earlier. We wanted to help founders from –1 to Zero, and then use the platform, infrastructure, and network we’ve spent a decade building to carry them from Zero to Sustainable once they launch. The Venture Studio model fits naturally into our platform. The economics work incredibly well for the fund and our LPs, the experience for founders (when executed properly) is transformative, and the company outcomes we've seen are consistently strong. Our Venture Studio is a place where experienced founders and operators bring their lived experience, and we bring a full build team of product, engineering, design, GTM, recruiting, and fundraising to to build alongside them from day one. And the momentum has been wild: → 17 companies launched → 63%+ raised follow-on capital within 12 months → Founders like Tooba Durraze, Ph.D., Kevin Wu, Steven Kuyan, Tim Barnes, Jordan Esbin and many more leading the charge None of this would be possible without our Head of Studio, Alice Bator Krenitski, and our exceptional studio team: Karthik S., Teija Bean, Dallas Price, Ammar A., Joe Cardamone, Matt Cote, Carmen Tsang, Ksenia Onosov, Alejandro Pereda, Lauren Roberts, Catherine Gao, and Draper Sturdivant. More details in the BetaKit article linked in the comments — thanks to Josh Scott for the thoughtful coverage!

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Founders often scramble to prep materials *after* a VC shows interest. That’s backward. You should be ready for diligence before your first meeting with a VC. Smart founders: 🗂 Have their data room ready 📊 Can share a clear KPI dashboard if asked 💸 Keep clean, up-to-date financials 📣 Track and communicate metrics Flailing around getting your files in order can erode investor trust. Put in the work ahead of time and it will build confidence in you and your company. #FundraisingAdvice #StartupTips #RSCMFounderFriday

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