Red Swan Ventures

Last September, I left Stripe after 8+ years to build something new with my friend Rob Cheung. Today, we're launching Substrate, the first inference API optimized for multi-step AI workloads. https://substrate.run With Substrate, you connect nodes from a curated library that includes optimized ML models, built-in file and vector storage, a code interpreter, and logical control flow. By simply connecting nodes, you describe a graph workflow, which Substrate then analyzes and runs as fast as possible. Entire graphs of many nodes will often run on a single machine, with microsecond communication between tasks. With this launch, we're announcing our $8M Series Seed led by Lightspeed with participation from South Park Commons, Craft Ventures, Red Swan Ventures, and Lorimer Ventures, joined by industry luminaries like Guillermo Rauch, Immad Akhund, William Gaybrick, Chris Best, Gokul Rajaram, Shreyas Doshi, Jana Messerschmidt, Michael Manapat, and Matthew Hartman. We’ve been working on Substrate privately for nearly a year. We’ve battle-tested the product with great customers like Substack, and we’re finally ready to open access to everyone. Substrate was built by an exceptional team: Liam Griffiths, Rishabh Parikh, 💭 Kyle Pitzen, and Chris S., who bring years of experience building world-class software at Stripe, Pulumi, Robust Intelligence, Confluent, Zendesk, and Grailed. Truly, I have never enjoyed working with a group of people more in my entire career. Thank you to all our friends and early supporters for helping us in the first chapter of this adventure: Aditya Agarwal, Ruchi Sanghvi, Shreyans Bhansali, Namrata Patel, Andrew Kortina, iqram and the immigrant groove, Sam Lessin, Julian Connor, Mike Cohen, Jairaj Sethi, Chris Mueller, Stanislas Polu, Sabrina Hahn, Anne Lee Skates, Audrey Kim, Quinn Garner, Jason Cui.

New 🇲🇽🚢🇺🇸🚚🇨🇦: American companies that manufacture overseas are increasingly dodging import duties by embracing a controversial trade "loophole" that's been key to the rise of Shein and Temu. In order to use the loophole, known as de minimis, companies ship orders out of warehouses located just across the border in Mexico and Canada, allowing them to dodge tariffs as high as 25% on some items. That's fueled a boom in warehouse openings just across the border from companies like A.P. Moller - Maersk, ShipMonk, ShipBob, ShipHero and XB Fulfillment. It's also led to a bizarre process where goods can arrive in US ports, get trucked to Mexico, then immediately get shipped back duty-free. “It lands in the U.S., goes through the U.S., is exported for a day or two, and is kicked back around into the U.S.," said Graham Anderson of Importal. "It's a pretty wild loophole." Companies can also take advantage of de minimis by flying customer orders directly from China. Izzy Rosenzweig of Portless, which focuses on de minimis air frieght, said: "The perception of Chinese brands as the only ones using [de minimis] is absolutely incorrect." De minimis shipments are on track to hit around 1.5 billion this year, or about 4.5 packages for every American. But politicians from both parties have been discussing ways to tighten or close the loophole. Read the full story story with Ann Gehan in The Information: https://lnkd.in/ee_FZ3jr