On Tuesday,
@Lux_Capital
hosted its 2nd annual AI Summit in NYC - bringing together over 150 of the top CEOs, industry experts, researchers & builders in one room. 🗽🚀
THREAD⬇️
nyc marathon ✅
no race quite like nyc - running through all 5 boroughs w/ electric crowd energy made me very grateful to call this city home!!
huge shoutout to the crowds, music, friends & family who kept me going 🏃🏼♀️
Thrilled to announce the launch of Lux Capital 8 - our single largest $1.15B vehicle to back the most AMBITIOUS founders solving the world's most pressing problems from first $100K to last $100M 💫
Today I’m thrilled to announce
@Lux_Capital
's NYC AI Directory & NYC AI Map - 2 resources for the burgeoning AI talent ecosystem
READ MORE👇
NYC AI Directory:
NYC AI Map:
Thrilled & so grateful for this exciting milestone - especially thankful for the founders we work with & learnings from the rockstar
@Lux_Capital
team
Excited to partner with the next generation of technologists inventing the future in the computational sciences & beyond!💡🚀
8/
@graceisford
promoted to Partner. Grace first graced our presence earlier this year and got off to a fast start adding a jolt of positive tenacious energy and an immediate investment impact
A very exciting day for
@runwayml
- announcing a $141M funding round bringing a ton of firepower onboard
@google
@nvidia
@salesforce
& continuing to build the future of the *multimodal* AI creative economy
1/ APIs are nothing new..but it seems like they may be having their heyday in 2020.
I wrote about my framework for evaluating standout API-first companies and why the very best companies give their users “superpowers”
read it here 👇
I’ve been diving deep into the Web3 rabbit hole - and thanks to friends, readings & investing myself I’ve learned quickly 🙏
Hoping to pass along SOME of my learnings below to help others understand 1) what Web3 is ✨ & 2) how to think about segments of the landscape
THREAD 👇
Excited to announce that
@Lux_Capital
is leading the $30M founding round of
@SakanaAILabs
🇯🇵
@hardmaru
@YesThisIsLion
& Ren Ito are building nature inspired AI foundation models, launching a state of the art research lab in Tokyo, Japan
Read more 👇
friendly reminder that
@Lux_Capital
portfolio companies are hiring for all roles in NYC, SF, Boston, LA, Paris, London, Tokyo + more!!
dm me if you are looking for your next thing and happy to put you in touch 🤝🤗
1/ Excited to launch the API-First Directory today, a growing record of API-first companies across enterprise & consumer industries & announce my API-first pricing framework!
READ IT & SEE THE API-FIRST DIRECTORY HERE 👇
Thrilled to announce
@SakanaAILabs
’s first launch (< 2 months after seed funding!) of 3 SOTA evolutionary AI foundation models for the Japanese market
@SakanaAILabs
challenges the current paradigm of costly model development w/ resource-efficient, evolved models
THREAD👇🇯🇵
Introducing Evolutionary Model Merge: A new approach bringing us closer to automating foundation model development. We use evolution to find great ways of combining open-source models, building new powerful foundation models with user-specified abilities!
theme I'm excited about in 2024 --> VERTICAL AI
hint - it involves large datasets
💸 LLMs x fintech (e.g.
@CorisInc
)
🧪 LLMs x sciences - biology, chemistry, physics
🏭 LLMs x manufacturing, supply chain, defense
📢We're organizing an AI bagel gathering this Thursday morning at Madison Sq. Park in NYC. Bagels sponsored by
@Lux_Capital
DM me or
@graceisford
if interested.
(and yes, we're calling it bagels & lux 🥯+🤖=❤️)
Today I’m thrilled to announce
@Lux_Capital
's NYC AI Directory & NYC AI Map - 2 resources for the burgeoning AI talent ecosystem
READ MORE👇
NYC AI Directory:
NYC AI Map:
Today was a very special day - lucky to have brought together
@Lux_Capital
portfolio cos, researcher luminaries and enterprise company leaders in 1 room discussing CUTTING EDGE technology in AI 👇
Early growth leaders dinner in NYC 🗽
@Lux_Capital
@ExponentCap
many fun discussions:
1) what is growth 📈
2) why overrelying on metrics is dangerous
3) self serve vs top down
4) working w/ founders
dm me or
@CharleyMa
to join next! Early GTM, growth, eng, product up next :)
Thrilled to announce $LUXDEX - the first ever investment index tracking publicly traded NYSE companies + publicly traded crypto assets
Read more on Axios & below👇
We’re excited to announce our $20M seed round of funding to empower innovation and creativity by providing leading open-source generative AI models and an innovative cloud platform that makes AI accessible to anyone, anywhere.
1 spot left for first business hire/early GTM leader dinner I'm co-hosting next week in NYC. Have a great group established of AI x devtool x fintech cos
cc
@CharleyMa
@MahdiRazaMR
who should we invite?
✅Must be NYC based
✅First or second person shaping the GTM team 🚀
This release made me and
@graceisford
start talking about new products tinkering at the intersection of AI x finance. To our surprise, there aren't a ton.
We're hosting a small Inspired Cap x Lux dinner next month for those who are. DMs open if this is interesting to you.
Future dinners will include 1st growth, marketing, engineering hires, chief of staff + more
Capping groups at 12 to maximize discussion, debate & insights sharing
only prerequisite? NYC based 🗽
5+ of my girlfriends have bought crypto for the first time in the last week & I’m very proud and excited!
if you want to invest for the first time & need help hit me or
@hello_we3
up ✨💸
Huge congrats to Lux family co
@MosaicML
on its acquisition to
@databricks
and to my teammate
@Farshchi
for partnering with Naveen (twice!) from the earliest stages👇🏼🚀
1/ Two amazing companies:
@databricks
and
@MosaicML
plan to join forces to empower everyone to train their own AI models, imbued with their own data.
Here is a story of the journey thus far, and what's ahead of this great partnership🧵:
A really exciting milestone for
@SakanaAILabs
today:
💸$100M in funding
🤝Deep partnership with
@nvidia
🗼Continuing to solidify its standing as the leading AI research lab in Tokyo, Japan
just getting started 🚀
Very special to host the
@stanfordwib
crew
@Lux_Capital
NYC today!!
Visited my first VC firm & scored my first internship with the program, excited to see what this brilliant group accomplishes! 🚀✨
NEW:
@BusinessInsider
's annual list of the rising stars of
#VentureCapital
is here! These 71 investors are the up-and-coming dealmakers landing hot term sheets with big name startups that you should keep on your radar in 2023:
THE MACHINE THAT BUILDS THE MACHINE
Today we are excited to announce the latest updates from Factory and the next steps in our mission to Bring Autonomy to Software Engineering.
Droids are autonomous systems that solve problems for engineers. Not just in demos. Not just in
Thrilled to unveil
@Lux_Capital
portfolio company EvolutionaryScale with the launch of ESM3 - a generative language model for programming biology
Emerging from stealth $142M in fresh funding & a rockstar team, inventing the future of biology 🧬🚀
We have trained ESM3 and we're excited to introduce EvolutionaryScale.
ESM3 is a generative language model for programming biology. In experiments, we found ESM3 can simulate 500M years of evolution to generate new fluorescent proteins.
Read more:
We are SO lucky to have brilliant
@davidkmyang
join the
@Lux_Capital
team to supercharge our efforts at intersection of life sciences x techbio x AI/ML x BEYOND 🚀🌱
say hello & get to know him if you don't already :)
At least 27 women in venture capital rose to partner or higher in 2022. We have the full list.
Notably, a number of women launched their own funds, and
@lightspeedvp
hired five female check-writers.
Cheers ladies 🥂
great group @ the NYC AI hackathon this weekend - thx to
@contrary
@betaworks
@Lux_Capital
for hosting & an awesome crew of builders 👩🏼💻⌨️🤗
working til 4:30 pm today..stop by!
They want to be a part of it: VCs are flocking to New York like never before.
Here's what's driving a great migration in startup capital to the city that never sleeps (on dealflow).
Incredible evening bringing fantastic group of builders & investors at the intersection of frontier tech for a
@Lux_Capital
dinner in Paris -- data & AI, space, healthcare, crypto, climate & much more!!
Big shoutout to
@RoiStartup
for helping organize 🇫🇷✨
Thrilled to share the latest Securities podcast on a few whirlwind weeks in AI, including:
1️⃣first-ever AI film festival 🎬
2️⃣why LLM “knitting” matters
3️⃣typescript vs python in AI
4️⃣AI hype vs crypto hype
5️⃣role of cloud players & AI assistive loops
give it a listen 👇🏼🎧
compelling graph mapping internet vs crypto users - still SO early in adoption cycle w/ inevitable bubbles/winters/hiccups coming Web3’s way
I’d argue crypto growth rate will slant higher but w/ greater volatility & dependency on stronger crypto infra to facilitate growth 📈
I’m excited to share that I’m joining
@KleinerPerkins
as a Partner to invest in the next generation of history-making founders, esp. those working on infrastructure & ML applications. I’ve long admired KP's investing strategy & portfolio, and am thrilled to be part of the team!
HUGE congrats to
@togethercompute
on their $102.5M (!!) Series A
@vipulved
& team are best in class
And they're hiring! Reach out if you're looking to join a rocketship or adopt the most performant AI cloud to build & develop open source & custom models ⚡️🚀
We are excited to announce our $102.5M Series A funding lead by
@kleinerperkins
with participation from
@nvidia
,
@emergencecap
, and many of our seed investors.
This funding will help us build a comprehensive AI cloud platform for developers everywhere.
lucky to be an investor + friend to so many folks
@tryramp
-- watch out for this rocket ship as it soars to new heights & as always, enjoy
@packyM
's fantastic narrative chronicling the growth 🚀💸
Today,
@tryramp
is announcing a new round at an $8.1 billion valuation. It crossed $100 million in recurring revenue faster than any SaaS or fintech company in history.
That's just the first act. It has a Google-sized opportunity ahead of it.
Went from barely ever 🏃🏃 to seeing my V02max drop 📉to getting inspired esp by Lux partner
@graceisford
and now running 10k every other day!
Biggest hack?
Told myself:" I'm a runner now!"
8/ NET - very excited about the future of the Paris tech ecosystem - think we will only continue to hear more about france esp in the software infra worlds of data/ML & crypto/fintech with cutting edge technology & design
à bientôt!
If you haven’t heard about
@ethelsclub
, check it out! Couldn’t be more excited to support Naj and her team to make her vision a reality
@najjmahal
@nickabouzeid
💫💫
6/ At
@Lux_Capital
, I’ll be writing checks from pre-seed to growth out of our seventh $1.5B fund globally!
So if you’re building or brainstorming the FUTURE in these spaces, let’s talk - dms are open :) - my new email is grace
@lux
.vc
@OpenAI
@Meta
@huggingface
@MosaicML
@Azure
6/ in summary:
✅access to GPUs matter
💾proprietary data = moat
⌨️infra margins compressing
🕵️evaluation is unsolved prob
🤗open vs. closed tension
what did I miss? re hardware, fine tuning & beyond..
READ MORE:
1/ Wrote about some of the problems brought to light by
#COVID19
and opportunities they present for VC investors to work together to solve them.
Read it here 👀:
Thx
@Techcrunch
for feature on my journey into crypto infrastructure and the inherent challenges + opportunity to grow adoption & trust in web3
read to figure out why security & critical enterprise infra platforms represent the biggest opp in crypto 🤓
NYC AI x ART demo night..
Incredible group of NYC based artists x engineers x curators x visionaries building at intersection of creativity x AI
the future is bright ✨🌈
1/ Excited to share my perspective on the CRYPTOGRAPHIC foundations of Web3 + OPPORTUNITY in web3 infra
special s/o to
@shomikghosh21
for the feature in his awesome Software Snack Bites newsletter
A THREAD 🧵
Exclusive: LangChain, the popular open source AI startup, has released its first paid product, LangSmith, today.
CEO Harrison Chase tells me
@forbes
the tool is used by 1,000 teams with a waitlist of 80,000.
He also confirms a $25M round led by Sequoia.
🚨 AGI HACKATHON in NYC this weekend 🚨
sponsored by
@Lux_Capital
w/ special appearances from portcos
@runwayml
@MosaicML
+ many others!
will be there all day Sunday + judging! stop by ✨
A best-in-class team with a best-in-class product -
@runwayml
@c_valenzuelab
and team are relentless innovators and formidable opponents reimagining the end to end creative workflow 🎬🔥
A ton of fun to chat with longtime friend
@MollySOShea
@sourceryvc
on what computational sciences mean🧠, including
-Why I'm bullish on NYC 🗽
-Sourcing & diligence taking "technical risk" 👩💻
-State of AI agent & infrastructure investing 🤖
Computer Science is 'So Hot Right Now' 🔥
Deep dive on NYC AI & the
@Lux_Capital
portfolio w/ Partner
@graceisford
- the youngest Partner in the firm's history
We get into:
- Runway’s $1.5B Valuation
- How HuggingFace Makes Money?
- NYC AI > SF
- How to Source Great Companies
-
really special to wake up to
@runwayml
in
@nytimes
this AM!!
"In the old days, to do anything remotely like this, you had to have a camera. You had to have props. You had to have a location. You had to have permission. You had to have money…you don’t have to have any of that
we brought over 100 AI leaders together in NYC across academia, enterprise & entrepreneurship to discuss themes with an 👁️ to the future:
🪄Latent Space - open source, dev tools, ML infra
🧬Inner Space - biology, healthcare, medicine
🌍 Outer Space - space, defense, security
1/ Today we share
@Nominal_io
with the world. We are on a mission to revolutionize the way mission-critical hardware systems are tested, validated, and monitored. We’ve been hard at work for the past 18 months building our core product offering, working with early customers
landed
@CryptoBahamas
- thanks to
@Lux_Capital
portfolio company
@FTX_Official
for hosting!
If you’re here and want to chat crypto infra say hello 👋🏼
also will be speaking tmrw @ 2:10 pm discussing crypto asset allocation in VC 📣
Our next Cerebral Valley will be hosted in New York City on June 27! We're teaming up with the best co-hosts at
@Volleying
to bring you a great lineup of speakers and panelists.
2/ PROPRIETARY DATA = moat
-Don't have enough "good clean" data on web to train new LLMs
-Data source tracing impt for mission critical use cases
-Specialized data sets for specialized workflows w/ data product flywheel is crucial moat for apps e.g.
@runwayml
-effect of GPT-5/6?