General Catalyst

The AI-powered legal assistant platform is here, thanks to Wordsmith AI. Ross, Volodymyr, and Robbie combined their collective experiences as exited founders, lawyers, and technologists to build Wordsmith, the secure AI platform for legal and compliance operations. Wordsmith handles the overload of routine tasks — from reviewing contracts to processing questionnaires — empowering legal teams to prioritize the high-value work that inspired them to enter the profession in the first place. We’re proud to invest in their $5M seed round and welcome Ross, Volodymry, Robbie, and the entire team to the GC family.  More from TechCrunch (full piece linked in comments) ↓

Ready to go live? We believe Gen-Z is creating the future of livestreaming. In their latest piece that’s part of our ‘The Consumer Internet is Dated’ series, Niko and Jonny detail the shifts in this ecosystem including… 1. Evolving the livestreaming business model “As livestreaming continues to advance, we believe that platforms will find new ways to evolve their business model to focus on niche verticals, expand the formats they offer, and create opportunities for offline monetization.” 2. Changing how viewers and streamers engage “We see additional opportunity in interactivity, and we believe future livestreaming platforms will lean into this area to expand their reach.” 3. The role of AI in viewer engagement “We believe that AI has the potential to fundamentally improve livestreaming across the engagement stack…AI may also be able to improve personalization in livestreaming. For example, as AI inputs become increasingly multimodal, they may be able to better understand streams, and enhance the viewer experience by providing additional context based on what streamers do.” And much more. Explore the future of livestreaming (full post in comments) ↓

Today, we’re pleased to announce that Teresa Carlson and Maryam Mujica are joining GC full-time to lead our efforts to strengthen governments’ resilience through radical collaboration. In the wake of burgeoning power competition, our global resilience thesis underscores the need for dynamic, resilient systems across critical industries, like energy, industrials, defense & intelligence. Public policy is instrumental in facilitating innovation and ensuring this work is executed effectively with societal good at the core. As a firm, we know that going beyond the traditional remit of venture capital and working across these different ecosystems is the only way to create transformational change. That goal is at the center of this mission.  Teresa has been at GC for over a year as a Catalyst Advisor and will spearhead this work. She previously led Amazon Web Services public sector business to innovate the government with cloud computing, and her impressive work there demonstrated that leveraging government partnerships can yield transformation at scale. Maryam is joining GC as Global Head of Public Policy, and her wide-ranging experience at institutions and enterprises, including the White House National Security Council, Google, Twitter, and Booking Holdings, will help drive the kind of transformation we are striving to create. We’re homing in on the opportunities to bridge and bolster the interests of the US, Europe, India, and their allies. Together, Teresa and Maryam will help shape the policies for a more globally resilient world. Stay tuned, as there’s much more to come this Fall. Learn more (full post in comments) ↓

Behind the scenes, much of the secure internet is a coordinated dance of point-to-point user-driven sharing. For example, we’ve all experienced attempting to open a Google Doc and being told permission is needed to access it. This is Google’s authorization as a centralized service in action — a concept elucidated in its landmark Zanzibar paper. When AuthZed co-founders, Jacob, Joseph S., and Jimmy dove into this paper, they immediately recognized managing authorization with scale and flexibility is an idea worth exploring and expanding. SpiceDB is their open-source, fine-grained permissions database that underlies AuthZed, which empowers customers like Canva (also part of the GC family) and many more. "Authorization stands as the bedrock of any application, and its complexity continues to grow alongside the evolution of software. Jake, Joey, and Jimmy have created what we believe is a powerful solution for permissions management that is evident in AuthZed's growing enterprise customer base." -GC’s Mark Crane We’re proud to lead AuthZed’s $12M Series A and welcome Jake, Joey, Jimmy, and the entire team to the portfolio. More from SiliconANGLE & theCUBE (full piece linked in comments) ↓

📣 AI Founders! Here are 6️⃣ concrete ways you can win over Enterprise buyers... The Stack General Catalyst #ai #enterprisetechnology

“How do you build a business designed for the future without knowing what the future holds?” In the latest feature of McKinsey & Company’s The Exchange with Asutosh Padhi, GC’s CEO, Hemant Taneja engages in an expansive conversation covering… 1. An ‘exit to endurance’ mindset “Over the last 20 years, the role of technology in business has profoundly changed. We've gone from building software companies that bring efficiency into the world to redefining critical industries, whether it's healthcare, finance, education, defense, you name it. In turn, the level of responsibility for these technology companies has increased a lot. Similarly, so has the scope of what these companies get to do because now, you're not just a technology vendor going after the technology budget of a company, you’re going after the health care spend or the finance spend in a country or the markets that you care about. So, much, much bigger TAMs. For that reason, leadership in those situations is about going from a mindset of exit to endurance.” 2. Transformation time horizons “If the role [of AI] is around transformation, then, again, the time scales you have to think about when you go in and say, "We're going to transform these businesses in these large industries," has to be much, much longer. So, it's forcing us and others in the industry to think about, "What is the capital solutions format, and how do we help these founders really go from inception to endurance in these long journeys around the transformation of these major industries?” 3. Embracing ambiguity “In this dynamic world where so much is changing (technology shifts, geopolitical shifts, short-term perturbations, long-term perturbations), it's important to understand and embrace ambiguity. What happens to most leaders is they lean towards, "The world is black or white," and they become dogmatic about that being their raison d'être.” And much more. Full interview (video link in comments) ↓

“What’s for dinner?” is a question as old as time. And catering to everyone’s tastes is still harder than it should be. With Local Kitchens, you can order a variety of cuisines in a single order. Their unique approach offers recipes from cherished local restaurants, all in one kitchen. "Local Kitchens is accomplishing what other food delivery models have not been capable of — meeting customer experience preferences, driving unparalleled efficiency, and creating a solution that delights consumers, chefs and local communities alike.” -GC’s Kyle Doherty We’re proud to lead their $40M round and deepen our partnership with Jon, Andrew, and the entire team. More from TechCrunch (full piece linked in comments) ↓

Experimentation is key to building a product-led growth motion across all stages of company building journey. In the second post in the PLG blog series, I spoke with PLG leaders in our network (Jeanne DeWitt Grosser at Stripe, Lauryn Motamedi (Isford) and Bryan Ng at Notion, Hila Qu 曲卉 ex GitLab, Caroline Huskey Mack at Spline ex Canva) and captured some of the highest impact experiments they've run (hint: small changes sometimes can have large impact!) that hopefully will inspire your experimentation efforts. What are some of the most impactful growth experiments you have run? Feel free to chime in below. General Catalyst

Yesterday, I wrote about the 20th IPO anniversary of Salesforce and how SaaS created a technology shift and a new business model to enable two decades of software innovation. As a result, it’s been said software is eating the world but we’d argue software has only eaten the digital world…the physical world of critical industries (industrial, healthcare, defense, energy) has yet to be digitally transformed.   For software to eat the physical world, we need a new category of Software-Defined Hardware companies that bridge digital and physical with new business models. We must make hardware a core competency, reimagine manufacturing from first principles, meld software and hardware into hybrid solutions - 10x better, 10x cheaper and 10x faster, build new software tools for hardware developers to iterate as fast as their software peers, and infuse responsible AI into the physical world. Just as Salesforce created a new business model that was mis-understood and took years for investors to value properly, Software-Defined Hardware has a new business model where investors must take a similar leap. Low (but expanding) gross margins should be celebrated, excellence in R&D / CapEx should be rewarded not penalized, iterating 100x better solutions to unlock hard markets creates a premium, supply chain resilience is a moat (not a cost), and “long” sales cycles must be offset against higher CAC/LTV than SaaS. Software-Defined Hardware will be more transformational than pure SaaS. A decade ago, we founded Livongo to transform chronic care and they had to make their own glucose meters to deliver a compete solution. Gross margins went down to ~40% but it was the right decision to scale the business. 6 years after its founding, Livongo was acquired for $18.5Bn and a forward revenue multiple of 48X, the highest multiple ever paid in public tech M&A. In 2017, we invested in Samsara when they were a $1MM ARR, they were bundling cameras and sensors for industrial customers and gross margins were ~50%. Today, Samsara is one of only two public software companies with $1Bn+ revenue, 30%+ growth and FCF positive, trading at 13X forward revenues, one of the highest in software. To deliver transformational ROI for their customers, Livongo and Samsara had to bridge the physical and digital worlds. At General Catalyst, we invest in Global Resilience to modernize our most critical, physical industries for us and our allies. We are at the cusp of an industrial renaissance but must move urgently in light of the changing world order. SaaS ate the digital world for 20 years, Software-Driven Hardware will now eat the physical world and transform healthcare, defense, energy and industrial, over the next two decades. #GeneralCatalyst #GlobalResilience #ReIndustrialize #SoftwareDefinedHardware

🌟 Europe! It’s time to boldly build together to create a better and brighter system of care. 🌟 It was energizing for Alexandre Momeni and myself to meet with so many talented entrepreneurs and leaders across pharma, payers, providers and policy at HLTH Europe, all committed to making a difference in European healthcare. Here are a few of takeaways: ✅ An ambitious new generation of European digital health innovators is emerging. Following in the footsteps of Sword Health, Alan and Doctolib, companies like Doccla, Nabla, Corti and Causaly are pioneering world-class solutions to bridge the critical gaps in Europe’s healthcare infrastructure. They are creating a future instead of optimizing the present and their success will raise the bar, attracting more talent and investment in the space. ✅ Our academic health systems are undergoing a ‘renAIssance’. Lighthouse health systems like Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust and Greater Paris University Hospitals - AP-HP are re-imagining their business models to shift care out of the hospital, making strategic investments and embracing innovative solutions to leapfrog their most pressing challenges, including with (Gen)AI. AI is not just a tool for efficiency; it’s a catalyst for more effective healthcare. ✅ Radical collaboration is the path to success. HLTH, with over 3,500 attendees from over 60 countries convening in Amsterdam, is proof that when we are bold and join together as a community, bringing the best minds and hearts together to engage and share ideas, we make progress. This is critical in Europe where the geographic and regulatory complexities of the market means greater coordination and intentionality is needed to achieve real system-level change instead of diffuse pockets of innovation. As an investor in European digital health for over a decade, I’m excited by how vibrant the ecosystem is becoming. At General Catalyst, we are committed to creating, investing, partnering and operating to enhance the resilience of European healthcare — all in the pursuit of Health Assurance. Let’s seize this moment!