May Roen

Introducing the Alinia AI Alignment Platform. From their announcement: "Alinia AI enables companies to evaluate the performance of their GenAI applications and obtain evidence on how aligned these are to their values, policies, and business preferences. Following the performance assessment, Alinia AI recommends the best next actions to further guide and control LLM output and improve alignment."

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What do bio and health applications mean for the next wave of AI -- specifically about compute? (I'm talking to you NVDA longs!) LifeX Ventures is hosting a super roundtable with some serious techbio leaders tomorrow along with Analog Century Management's Val Zlatev -- come hear Thomas Clozel Sean McClain Chetan Patel at 11am ET For the survey results based on asking 100 techbio CTOs and CEOs, join the call. Here, my own speculations after wrapping up the report: -- Amazon needs to have a GPU program on warp drive right now -- Nvidia needs to have a data center / cloud business in the works -- Edge AI chips are about to be everywhere -- in your watch, car, sneakers, thermostats, gene sequencers, spectroscopes -- All this compute needs way more data: expect a boom in sensors of all types -- Remember human genome moonshot that sequenced one person once? Now you can sequence your every cell one by one. Expect that for protein folding (AlphaFold was that moonshot) and other simulation uses, a full "twin" model of you, cell by cell -- Google has no angle here -- worse chips, worse cloud, worse models, worse phones / edge devices -- Specialty silicon for unique use-cases, lower-power, lower-memory are surely coming fast - like back in the day for mobile phones when Qualcomm, Broadcomm, Infineon, Mediatek, etc duked it out.

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🔥 Thrilled to see Hydrolix crushing it with a $35M Series B! 🔥 Data is the new oil, but too much gets discarded due to prohibitive storage costs. Hydrolix cracks this with its streaming #datalake platform that leverages object storage, decoupled compute, indexing, & compression. As Marty Kagan puts it: 'We’re cheaper than cold storage and faster than hot storage' Hydrolix’s streaming data lake platform is a game-changer for #AI, #observability, & #security workloads. 💥 Real-time query performance at terabyte scale 💰75%+ savings on log mgmt & 4x more data retained  ☁️ Stateless & containerized for seamless scaling with Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3, Google Cloud GCS, Microsoft Azure Blob 💡 Had the early conviction (first investor) that data is key to unlocking AI & enterprise workloads. It's proving right. Huge thanks to Marty Kagan Hasan Alayli for letting me early on their journey to build an impessive company 🙏 Super pumped to have awesome Aaron Perman at S3 Ventures leading this round along with other strong existing investors - Nava Ventures (Manish Patel) Wing Venture Capital (Peter Wagner) Oregon Venture Fund (Matt Compton Scott Grout) and others 💪 Onwards! 🚀🚀🚀 #cloud #data #ai #ml #llm #largelanguagemodels #analytics #security #loganalytics #datalake #datawarehouse https://lnkd.in/g5i6afP5

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At Two Bear Capital our definition of value-add, lead, early-stage investing is to form a true partnership with the founders we back. We believe that only a small fraction of our return potential comes from us “picking right” when we make our first investment into a company – the vast majority comes from how effectively we can actively help our brilliant founders over the ensuing 3-7 years in achieving the passionate, ambitious, and positive-impact goals that drive them.

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Scientists and venture operators, another ecosystem problem we can fix globally! 💪 There are ventures looking for some flexible lab space and also ventures that are looking to scale back their lab footprint. For the last few years we have been connecting the dots across the ecosystem and we are now trying to make the system more efficient for everyone: a quick form to tell us if you have an ask or an offer. https://lnkd.in/d92W36Wk Power of the science community, do your thing ✊ #scientistsfirst

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Gen AI models are a generational innovation. But beyond a handful, they haven't translated into generational applications. Why? Let's start with a short story: Last year - my cofounder Sidhartha D. and I, euphoric about the sudden uptick in open source LLMs after Mistral AI's launch, started hacking together some AI products in finance and crypto. The underlying infra of our providers, however, was so unreliable that Sid, being the 100x dev that he is, kept digging lower in the stack to solve for making our apps better. For example: 1. Unsustainable compute $$ - We initially ran our own small GPU cluster to save our pockets from the daylight robbery known as cloud compute costs. We have since moved compute to T-4 datacenter partners we work closely with as we scaled, but still pay a fraction of what we would have paid to hyperscalers. 2. Too many SOTA models, too fast - Every time we fine-tuned a new SOTA model to use on our infra, a new model would pop up - we went through Mistral, Command-R & Llama-3 in 6 months 3. Data vectorisation is not easy - Building reliable ingestion and indexing infra for Vector Databases was a tricky problem, especially given the multiple data types we were dealing with - we had to build reliable pipelines from scratch We spent 80% of our energy building infra to reliably support our app instead of something cool for our customers. And as we talked with other builders, we realised that everyone was in the same boat. Mira is our attempt at solving this problem, by creating the scaffolding infra around AI models, to empower all developers to get the best out of AI, the most powerful digital primitive of our generation. We do this using Flows - a building block primitive for AI, packaging models, data and other orchestration components to offer high-performance APIs for a wide variety of use-cases like RAG, data vectorisation, RLHF, content creation etc. Our Flow market already has 25+ Flows that serve over a dozen teams across social, gaming, SaaS, web3 etc. building exceptional AI products, saving them valuable resources that are better spent on their customers. In order to become a platform of choice for developers using AI, we know we can't build all the Flows alone. Our current priority is to build robust infra to open up flow building to other AI developers, so that they can build, distribute and monetise Flows to solve for an ever expanding collection of AI opportunities. We're going after an ambitious problem of making AI universally available to every developer and we're very grateful for the support of our investors and friends who have stood by us: BITKRAFT Ventures Justin Swart Framework Ventures Roy Learner Accel in India Pratik Agarwal Meltem Demirors Mechanism Capital Symbolic Capital Sam Lehman Folius Ventures Jason Kam Alexander Klokus Tekin Salimi Sameer Pitalwalla and many others! Day 1.

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After $400M of capital invested and 30 portfolio companies in health and pharma tech, we are excited to publish our SignalFire health and pharma tech sector thesis, 2024 edition and beyond! 👊 Here are 5 major trends that we're focused on 📈 If you are a founder building in any of these categories below, we'd love to hear from you! 1) Explosion of healthcare data creates both opportunities & risks in the GPT-4 era 2) PharmaTech is accelerating R&D, manufacturing & distribution to tackle inefficiencies 3) The labor shortage crisis and the need for AI to improve productivity 4) Aging population and the shift to hybrid, value-based care models in patients’ homes  5) Scaling access to lifesaving therapeutic breakthroughs: GLP-1s & CGTs Grateful to work closely with an incredible team focused on this sector including our legendary Eric Larsen, and partners in crime Sooah Cho, Tony Pezzullo, Sahir Raoof, Adele English 🙏 What gets me up every morning is our incredible portfolio, each of which making their own dent in our healthcare system for the better — Grow Therapy, Color, Ro, CodaMetrix, Health Gorilla, Verse, Wellth, PayZen, Recora, all.health, Bicycle Health, Form Health, Health Note, Osso VR, Praia Health, Freshpaint, Auxilius, Ovation, OrthoFX, Moxie and many others coming out of stealth soon 🚀 #healthtech #pharmatech #sectorthesis #innovation https://lnkd.in/gDE3nQqK

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Last week Factory announced a new record on the AI coding benchmark SWE-bench. This week, founders Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes talk about their vision for autonomous Droids, Archimedes' compound lever, and their latest SWE-bench results on our new Sequoia Capital AI podcast, Training Data with me and Pat Grady. New episodes weekly. Listen or watch, and subscribe! Available on these platforms and wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube: https://seq.vc/TDE2y Spotify: https://seq.vc/TDE2s Apple: https://seq.vc/TDE2a Amazon: https://seq.vc/TDE2am (01:36) Personal backgrounds (10:54) The compound lever (12:41) What is Factory? (16:29) Cognitive architectures (21:13) 800 engineers at OpenAI are working on my margins (24:00) Jeff Dean doesn't understand your code base (25:40) Individual dev productivity vs system-wide optimization (30:04) Results: Factory in action (32:54) Learnings along the way (35:36) Fully autonomous Jeff Deans (37:56) Beacons of the upcoming age (40:04) How far are we? (43:02) Competition (45:32) Lightning round (49:34) Bonus round: Factory's SWE-bench results

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🌟Innovative VC Firm Overcomes Exits Drought with Secondary Sales🌟 ⛵Navigating a challenging landscape where exits are scarce, Santa Barbara Venture Partners (SBVP) has pioneered a novel approach to sustain its growth and attract investors for its second fund: secondary sales. Instead of waiting for traditional exits like IPOs or acquisitions, SBVP opted to sell shares of its portfolio companies, demonstrating its ability to generate returns for investors and stand out in a competitive market. 🎤According to Dan Engel, founder and managing partner of SBVP, these secondary transactions have been a game-changer, sparking investor interest and bolstering the firm's credibility. By leveraging its recent successes, including a lucrative stake in sports-betting company DraftKings Inc.' acquisition of digital lottery app Jackpocket, SBVP seized the opportunity to return profits to its limited partners (LPs) and pave the way for its second fund. 💡Engel highlighted the challenges faced by young VC firms in raising subsequent funds, particularly amid a downturn in exit activity and heightened investor scrutiny. With traditional exit routes becoming increasingly elusive, the pressure is on for firms to demonstrate tangible returns and establish a track record of success. ✨"For us, secondary sales have been a game-changer. They've helped us return profits to our LPs and attract investors for our second fund," said Dan Engel. 💰For SBVP, the decision to pursue secondary sales was driven by the need to provide liquidity to LPs and validate its investment thesis in the eyes of prospective investors. By strategically offloading portions of its holdings in high-performing portfolio companies like Bark Technologies and Rad AI, SBVP not only generated substantial returns but also bolstered investor confidence in its ability to deliver results. ⚠Despite the complexities and potential stigma associated with early share sales, Engel emphasized the importance of prioritizing investor returns and seizing opportunities to unlock value for stakeholders. With a focus on profitability and transparency, SBVP remains committed to its mission of delivering sustainable growth and maximizing returns for its LPs. 🔍 "Returning profits to our investors is our top priority. By strategically selling shares, we're proving our commitment to delivering results and driving value for our stakeholders," added Engel. As SBVP continues to explore secondary transactions and expand its investor base, the firm stands as a testament to innovation and resilience in the face of market challenges. 🚀 ✅ Looking to raise capital for your #fund and increase the international pool of your LP #investors?   🤝 Need warm #LP introductions?   📝 Selling #secondaries to increase liquidity?   🧐 Looking for co-investments?   ▶ G+QUANT's link for inquiries and fund decks: https://lnkd.in/gjC_EuTE #VCInnovation #SecondarySalesSuccess #InvestorReturns #ValueCreation 

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Need I say more! If jou identify as a #sustainable #tech pre-seed startup. Apply today! The founders who joined the accelerator and became part of our Innovestor family gave 5/5 when asking if they would recommend the set-up to a startup in the same stage (pre-seed) 🚀🤩

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The last few days I've been attending SynBioBeta conference in San Jose, CA. Really cool innovations that are tackling big problems in health, industrial production, and climate. It was also AgFunder's AGM... some non-standard observations: 1- Venture markets are not back: it will not be a bounce, but a slow recovery 2- Smart startups are partnering with engineering/EPC firms earlier in their life. This is key to de-risk scale production from day 1. My first employer out of college Black & Veatch was a key partner in the growth of Tesla, and now they're active in the bio space 3- If you say you're AI, you better prove it. Nothing wrong with saying you're doing ML

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5️⃣ 🌟🇪🇺 Early stage rounds to pay attention to this week 👇 1️⃣ FlexAI 🇫🇷 (AI Compute Solutions) - Simplifying AI compute infrastructure to make AI application development accessible. 💰 Secures $30 million in seed funding from Alpha Intelligence Capital Elaia Frst Motier Ventures Partech. 2️⃣ YonedaLabs 🇺🇸/🇨🇿 (AI for Chemistry) - Transforming chemical synthesis with AI to optimize drug and material manufacturing. 💰 Raises $4 million led by Khosla Ventures 500 Emerging Europe 468 Capital Fellows Fund and Y Combinator. 3️⃣ roclub 🇩🇪 (HealthTech) - Pioneering teleoperation solutions for medical imaging diagnostics. 💰 Secures €4 million in seed financing from Speedinvest FJ Labs Better Ventures and strategic angel investors. 4️⃣ Deltia AI 🇩🇪 (AI Automation) - Streamlining manufacturing operations with AI and Computer Vision-based insights. 💰 Raises $4.5 million led by Cavalry Ventures. 5️⃣ TrueClaim (YC W24) 🇺🇸 (Healthcare Cost Optimization) - Automating healthcare cost savings for self-insured companies. 💰 Raises $2.1 million in pre-seed funding from KAYA VC Y Combinator Rebel Fund SurgePoint Capital Orange Collective and otheres.

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Exciting news! Mestrelab Mnova and ZONTAL by SciY have joined forces to help you integrate your data better. Don't miss the upcoming webinar on data integration, where you can learn from the experts. Stay ahead of the curve by registering now! Just click on the link: https://lnkd.in/eWyiqWKY  #dataintegration #webinar #SciY #mestrelabmnova #zontal #techupdates #stayaheadofthecurve

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RethinkX's recent publication on The Rise of Human Robots and The Future of Work is quite interesting. Tony Seba and his team including Adam Dorr and Bradd Libby, do an excellent job dissecting the emerging humanoid robot technology market. Here's a brief summary, with a more in-depth summary from Cern Basher, CFA, an expert on the future financial impacts of humanoid robots, linked in the comments below: The rise of humanoid robots is poised to disrupt human labor across industries, much like how automobiles disrupted horses. This convergence of technologies creating a "labor engine" will enable robots to eventually perform virtually any task better and cheaper than humans. Initially, robots will complement human workers by taking on simpler tasks. However, their capabilities will rapidly improve until they can do almost anything humans can by the 2040s. This disruption represents both a massive opportunity and challenge for society. As the marginal cost of robotic labor approaches zero, we can expect sweeping deflationary pressures and quality improvements across the economy. Labor supply will explode, uncoupled from population growth, giving nations with robust robotics industries a strategic advantage. While creating prosperity, this transition will destabilize conventional economics and the social contract around work. Thoughtful policymaking will be critical to avoid catastrophic unemployment or stifling innovation through misguided protectionism. Ultimately, humanoid robotics could lead to superabundance and liberation from labor. But achieving this will require rethinking economics, embracing the disruption responsibly, and prioritizing policies that protect people over obsolete jobs and industries. https://lnkd.in/gjNDVQe4 #humanoids #robotics #futurefrontier

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Welcome ecoLocked to the Climentum Capital portfolio! We are proud to have led the €4M funding round together with Matterwave Ventures, and delighted to have existing investors Counteract, Startup Family Office, Sabancı Building Solutions, and VOYAGERS.io joining the round. The investment will support ecoLocked’s mission to revolutionize the construction industry with carbon-negative building materials. Concrete production accounts for 8% of global CO2 emissions, making innovations in this field crucial for achieving net-zero goals. ecoLocked is leading the change by converting carbon captured from biomass into functional, carbon-negative building materials. This funding will accelerate ecolocked's efforts to turn buildings into carbon sinks, scaling their innovative biochar-based solutions and enabling 1Gt carbon removal by 2040. Doerte Hirschberg Morten Halborg Stefan Maard

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Exploring a company formation idea at the intersection between generative AI (text and image generation), scientific publishing, and new incentives structures to promote ground-breaking, world positive science over incrementalism. Would love to talk to product leaders with experience in scientific publishing and/or product led-growth in the life sciences software vertical. Any leads much appreciated! #generativeAI #scientificpublishing #reproducibilitycrisis #H-index

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118 VCs (one hundred eighteen!) are gathering in San Diego next week - to meet with 30 SD startups. But it's so MUCH bigger than just those 30 co's. It brings VCs back - when they see quality companies. It helps those who are next-in-line and adjacent. It enables us to send deal flow all year 'round. It attracts talent and other companies. It inspires entrepreneurship. Connect is working for SD. Together, we're building the best damn innovation ecosystem on the planet. Year over year. Five.Ten.Thirty.

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