Flybridge

Today in Business Insider, industry leaders, including our very own General Partner, Chip Hazard, gave their hot takes on the evolving landscape of AI investing. While the tech industry faces a challenging environment, AI continues to shine, driving forward with innovation and significant valuations. What's coming out on top? Infrastructure enhancements, leveraging unstructured data, and revolutionary approaches to software development. 🔍 Read the full article to discover more about what excites VCs in AI today and what they believe needs a fresh approach: https://lnkd.in/gAKWkhvq #AI #VentureCapital #Innovation #Flybridge

Are you a 10x Founder? We believe that hiring a great team is one part of being a great founder, but what does that look like in the age of AI? Our colleague Jeffrey Bussgang's latest post shares how a new type of founder is emerging and how new organizations will look wildly different. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/gCuGit6Y

🚀 Excited to share some incredible insights from Flybridge GP Jeffrey Bussgang's latest interview with Inc. Magazine's "From The Ground Up" podcast. 🗣️ In this conversation, Jeff dives deep into why your startup should be an experimentation machine and the importance of constant testing and learning for success. 💡 Key takeaways: • Embrace experimentation: Each hypothesis you test brings you closer to the right product-market fit. • Iterate and learn: Failure is part of the learning process. Use each failure as an opportunity to grow. • Stay resilient: The journey of a startup is filled with challenges, but resilience and a willingness to experiment can lead to breakthroughs. Jeff's perspective on building a culture of experimentation is invaluable for entrepreneurs at any stage. Check out the full interview here: https://lnkd.in/euf7i9UJ #Startups #Entrepreneurship #Innovation #Flybridge

We are excited to share our NY #TechWeek Lineup. Join us for an AI Demo Day, some deep dives on the AI wave in NYC and in the world of AI-Native Vertical SaaS, and of course - a proper party to celebrate this dynamic and incredible city. 🌟 AI Demo Day | June 3rd, 6-9pm | Hosted by Next Wave NYC, Lynx Collective, The Council with support from Rho Eight NY AI startups will pitch our panel of judges for a $50K investment from Next Wave NYC and a crowd of over 100 active Pre-Seed, Seed, and Angel investors. Apply to attend: https://lnkd.in/ekemc3Nu 🎙️ NY State of AI Breakfast | June 4th, 8:30-10am | Hosted by Flybridge Join us for a collaborative breakfast and roundtable discussion exploring the findings of the newly launched Flybridge AI Index and digging into the opportunities and challenges ahead for the NYC AI ecosystem. Gain exclusive insights from Flybridge GP Chip Hazard and Associate Daniel Porras Reyes and also contribute to the discussion. Apply to attend: https://lu.ma/n71dpyo1 🪐 AI Native Vertical SaaS Panel | June 4th, 4-6pm | Hosted by Flybridge, CRV, Headline, and Olive Commerce Join Julia Maltby from the Flybridge team alongside Taylor Brandt, Ipshita Agarwal, and David Peck for a discussion on trends and opportunities in AI-Native Vertical SaaS with support from Carta, Harmonic, and Povio. Get on the list: https://lnkd.in/gqjUHmRT 🌃 The Melting Pot at Lumos House | June 5th, 7-11pm | Hosted by Next Wave NYC, Andrew Yeung, and Blindspot with support from Goodwin The Melting Pot brings together NYC founders, creators, and innovators for a night that truly represents this city. Hosted by Next Wave NYC, Flybridge's pre-seed fund, expect 5-minute lightning talks, DJs, live performances, and incredible food - all at the stunning Lumos House in the Lower East Side. Apply to attend: https://lu.ma/lumosn4 #nytechweek2024 #startups #vc #venturecapital #ai #nyc #networking #innovation

Today, we're thrilled to share the Flybridge AI Index, a new public market index that tracks the performance of AI-focused companies. Developed by our brilliant colleague Daniel Porras Reyes, this index is a testament to our firm's commitment to understanding and supporting the AI revolution. In 20 years of investing, we have witnessed the transformative impact of the internet and cloud computing. AI is now poised to reshape industries at an unprecedented pace. We created this index to provide a clear, data-driven picture of how AI drives value creation in public markets and identify the key players leading this charge. By sharing these insights, we aim to empower founders, investors, and industry leaders to make informed decisions and stay at the forefront of this exhilarating era of technological advancement. Here are some key findings from the index and accompanying report: • The index has outperformed major tech benchmarks, with a 116% return from Jan 2023 to May 2024 • 75% of index companies have outperformed the S&P 500 • Key players like Microsoft, NVIDIA, Google, Meta, and TSMC make up 80% of the index's market cap Enterprise AI adoption is surging, with companies like Adobe, Salesforce, IBM, and UiPath Community integrating AI across their offerings to drive efficiency and growth. Meanwhile, AI infrastructure leaders like NVIDIA, AMD, and Marvell Technology are enabling this transformation. As an early investor, we're also excited to see MongoDB on the index. Beyond the public companies on the index, we're also paying close attention to private companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Runway, and Hugging Face who are all rising rapidly. We're eager to watch this space evolve and support the next generation of AI innovators. Check out the index in full and sign up for monthly insights here: https://lnkd.in/eDmss7c7 #AI #EnterpriseAI #FutureOfWork #VentureCapital #Investing

Last week we co-hosted "LLMs in Production" with Portkey, a Flybridge portfolio company helping companies deploy and iterate on genAI apps more efficiently. Our discussion, moderated by Flybridge GP Chip Hazard, focused on the challenges and best practices for deploying large language models in production. A few quick takeaways: - Data security is top of mind for enterprises. Solutions like on-prem deployment, not using customer data to train models, and robust security compliance are critical. - Fine-tuning smaller, task-specific models can improve performance and cost-efficiency vs using foundation models like GPT-4. But it requires more technical sophistication. - Rigorous testing and continuous monitoring with "guardrails" are essential for high-stakes use cases like law and finance to manage issues like hallucinations and concept drift. - The future will likely involve both massive foundation models and smaller, domain-specific models. The focus for startups should be on customer value, not model choice. The discussion highlighted that while the technology is rapidly evolving, the fundamentals of deeply understanding customer needs and building trust through transparency and rigorous quality assurance remain paramount. For a deeper dive check out the latest post on our blog: https://lnkd.in/eBpWcGW6 What has your experience been deploying LLMs in production? What's on the horizon as more AI heads into enterprise? Big thank you to Sonja Gould and Izzy Chung at Gunderson Dettmer for hosting and to our panelists Rohit Agarwal, Chris Brown Yoni Sebag (Jonathan), Aaron Rubin, and Sarmad Qadri for bringing such excellent insights and real-time experience to the convo.

It's been quite the week at Flybridge. As we continue yesterday's energy of celebration, we'd like to announce our investment in TrojAI - a leading enterprise AI security solutions provider. Flybridge GP Chip Hazard shares why he backed James Stewart, Ph.D., Stephen Goddard, and incoming CEO Lee Weiner in this next, exciting phase of growth here on our blog: https://lnkd.in/euB_wpK4

We're so excited to have you Celestine Maddy - welcome to the fam!

🎉 we're thrilled to have you Dorothy Chang!

Excited to announce my role as an investment partner in Next Wave NYC, a new pre-seed fund from Flybridge dedicated to supporting innovation in NYC. I'll be partnering with 14 other incredible founders and operators, including the founding teams and leaders at companies like Chief, SQUIRE, Casper, Flatiron School, Foursquare, and Snowflake. If you're a founder who is building something at the forefront of AI, please reach out. (DM me "PITCH") Meet my fellow investment partners and learn more at www.nextwave.nyc