Kevin Wang (FOSSA)

📈 Curious about the startup scene in Massachusetts? Explore our detailed funding list featuring startup names, HQ locations, and investor info. Perfect for investors and entrepreneurs alike! Check it out: https://lnkd.in/dAp3xj-Q #startup #startups #venturecapital #funding #vc #managementconsulting

4

We're launching the inaugural edition of Beyond Benchmarks, a deep dive into the metrics and trends observed across the early-stage enterprise cloud market. This is the first look at some of the business data around GenAI in SaaS. Some initial observations: 1) 60% of SaaS companies have already integrated GenAI into their offerings (60% of these as part of their current product and 40% as a new product), and an additional 20% are planning to do so this year. Almost half aren't monetizing these features. Those that are are primarily experimenting with both usage-based and flat fee pricing models. 2) Most companies are utilizing OpenAI as their primary LLM, but many are experimenting with multiple models - and we are noticing an early trend towards intelligently routing GenAI inference requests to different models based on cost, performance, and security. 3) Though we are in the initial innings of GenAI, we are seeing some positive signals - companies that implemented GenAI had 7% higher NDR than those that did not. Still early days, but we'll be doing this benchmarking report regularly to track and share how things progress in this new era. Link to report in comments.

104

6 Comments

Anthropic introduces Autonomous AI Agents that use a computer mouse and screen to perform complex tasks independently. Currently available for developers only through the Claude 3.5 Sonnet API.

7

At most networking events… Business owners shake hands, exchange business cards, and go home. HumanX has a different approach. You’ll be paired together in 1:1 conversations with investors & AI startups. You’re not just adding people to your rolodex. Deals will be made.

42

4 Comments

👋 What better way to get to the AWS Summit NYC than on a boat 🚤 Looking forward to meeting developers, startup founders, and builders at the Summit TODAY! Catch me at the Dev Community Lounge, Startup Lounge, or on the floor of the Expo filming folks to learn what they're building! DM me in you want to meet up, be in one of my videos, or just grab a cup of coffee ☕ In the meantime, let me know where you are coming in from and what you are most excited for the AWS Summit 😁 #AWSSummit #AWS #startups

27

2 Comments

What a week this has been for innovative companies in Seattle (first Smartsheet and now OctoAI). Today NVIDIA made public the news that they have acquired Madrona portfolio company OctoAI. Partnering with the founders since Day 1 (ok Day -1) has been one of the greatest experiences of my life. Luis Ceze, Jared Roesch, Tianqi Chen, Jason Knight, Thierry Moreau and Carlos Guestrin were all involved in the research and insights that helped create the TVM open source technology at the University of Washington computer science school and then the creation of OctoAI back in 2019 to drive commercial impact with this technology. From sorting out the terms of the original "pre-seed" round over a bottle of Caymus Vineyards wine to helping Amazon Web Services (AWS) understand the dynamics around the open source movement in Applied AI to learning our way in to product-market fit with the BEST inference optimization service available (OctoAI can help customers find their optimal fit of performance, customization, and cost), OctoAI has been the best! The company has helped set the table for AI-driven innovation for the years ahead and they will be a perfect compliment to the many capabilities at Nvidia. Luis, his leadership team, the board (including Carlos Guestrin Lip-Bu Tan and Mike Dauber) and so many "friends of OctoAI" know what a motivated, talented and authentic group of people are associated with this company. It is inspiring to see an acquisition at a total deal value of over $250 million in this highly dynamic and fast-moving phase of AI disruption. It is even more exciting to anticipate what will be possible with innovations powered by AI models and related technologies in the years ahead. Madrona has been investing in Applied AI for over a decade and we truly believe that we are just getting started! One of the hardest judgement calls as an investor and board member is to assess the benefits and risks of selling a company at a key inflection point in the journey. Nvidia made a compelling case that the impact for the OctoAI team and technology would be maximized within the market leader for AI infrastructure. I will be rooting every day that they all maximize this impact in the months and years ahead!

748

54 Comments

Perfecting your product and GTM strategy are surely important. But Box CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie argues there's one factor that outweighs all others in startup success: recognizing and capitalizing on tech and macro tailwinds. Fighting against them? You're setting yourself up for failure. Our full conversation here: https://lnkd.in/gEAPFR-A

12

Excited about what Anthropic and Menlo Ventures is doing for early stage companies. I am a non-stop #claude Anthropic user and it's amazing how great the product is and how much can be built on it to solve big problems. I have been very excited about this investment into Anthropic but now I am even more excited about the impact they are going to have in the startup community. More and more companies are doing this , I am hoping this leads to a world where lot's of VC courting startups with favorable term sheets. #founders #ai #startups #fund #vs #investing #familyoffice

20

On this episode of Building Jam w/ Retool + ex-Stripe eng leader Tamar Ben-Shachar: 1. How to get out of fire-fighting mode and back to proactive engineering 2. Slowing down short term to add observability to move faster long term 3. The importance of aligning on what does "Done" mean on your team 4. Why the best dev teams are good at saying no 5. What are the best engineering interview questions to ask Hope you enjoy the episode! YT link below

32

2 Comments

Thanks Joanne Chen and Jaya Gupta from Foundation Capital for the nod! Great to be in the cohort of top notch AI companies. Observability data is untapped goldmine of information, but when the time comes (in the middle of incident), it still requires "expert" skills to find the needle in the haystack. We at Deductive AI are democratizing the expertise to everyone in the organization.

35

4 Comments

The story of Eon starts years before our investment. We identified Ofir Ehrlich as a special operator, and he helped us across multiple deal processes; in the meantime becoming a great and loyal friend to Vine and to me personally. Fast forward to the end of 2023, Israel has just been caught blindsided by a devastating Hamas attack on October 7th, the country was in disarray, but that didn’t stop Ofir from bringing the gang back together to ideate on their next big idea. And, surprise, it wasn't in AI. On November 29th, as we sensed this would become one of the most competitive deal processes in Israel, we were fortunate to have the opportunity to introduce Shaun Maguire to Ofir over lunch in our office via Dean Meyer. Shaun was in Israel on a righteous mission to show Elon Musk the atrocities of October 7th and resilience of the Jewish nation. We as a firm know when we can go alone, and when we need / want to partner with the multi-stage firms, in this case Sequoia. Ofir would easily raise a large seed, and it would be an obvious seed investment for most firms out there, given the incredible founder-market fit of Ofir plus his stud co-founders, Ron Kimchi and Gonen Stein. Once the market caught wind of the fact that this prospective founder was quickly moving from “ideating” to potentially being pre-empted, the conversation in a week shifted from “get to know you” to Sequoia Capital / Vine Ventures, L.P. need to earn the right to partner with these founders, together. We quickly went into diligence mode, speaking with experts in the backup space, incumbents, and potential customers. Within a week, the insights that Ofir had described to us were validated, and it became clear that this was an n of 1 team to go and build a solution in this category, which could become among the largest in enterprise software. We are extraordinarily grateful that Ofir chose to work with us and that Sequoia remained loyal to Vine as we navigated the deal process together. Since then, Ofir, Gonen, and Ron have built one of the highest caliber teams we have ever seen, and have worked with some of the largest corporations in the world, allowing them to have a holistic view of their cloud assets and ensuring that they are available, even in the case of a ransomware attack or human error. Following this progress, in just 8 months the company has rapidly completed both their Series A (Tal Morgenstern, Lightspeed + Omri Casspi) and Series B financing led by the wonderful folks at Greenoaks. With that, we are grateful and excited to be a part of the Eon journey, and look forward to working closely with the team as they build the next great enterprise software company out of this small but mighty country. Am Yisrael Chai. Let's go Eon! Daniel Povitsky Demren Sinik Barak Kaufman Alex Moskowitz Racheli Adler John McIlree https://lnkd.in/e8fvVCji

238

9 Comments

How to pitch: The company has zero traction —> “We’re early” You only have 2 customers —> “We’re working with design partners” You currently have no revenue but hoping some pipeline finally closes —> “we’re on track to exit this year at $3M ARR” You’re in the natural kill zone of a FAANG —> “We view them as partners rather than competitors” There’s no way the tech can actually work —>“We’re manifesting the future” And of course: One of your developers uses Co-Pilot to write some front end code —> “We’re an AI company”

1,131

64 Comments

“The secret to building better business software is building a system where you can build multiple parallel business software applications that are all natively built into the same system,” Conrad said. “Now every single software vertical has like a dozen competitors, and it’s extremely crowded,” Conrad said, adding that customers prefer an approach where a software company will “build the system that sort of recombines all of this and gives people one system that combines a lot of these capabilities and wins.” Another great TechCrunch article. This horizontal approach is exactly what we're doing BuyerMatch.ai for Real Estate Brokerages. One system to do everything and one AI that understands it all. https://lnkd.in/e2JeU5ia

4

1 Comment

We are thrilled to announce that TurboDocx has successfully closed its Angel funding round, raising $75,000. This significant milestone marks a leap forward in our journey to revolutionize smart and modular document and slide deck creation, accelerated by AI. A heartfelt thank you goes out to our friends, family, early supporters and everyone that believes in our vision. Your support is not just appreciated-- but a strong vote of confidence in our mission to innovate and transform how business document creation is created. What does this mean for TurboDocx? We're reinvesting it into the business: - Focusing on Partner/Client Needs - Understanding and addressing the evolving needs of our users remains our top priority. We're here to build not just a product but a solution that truly makes a difference. - Enhanced Solutioning - We're more committed than ever to developing solutions that set new benchmarks for efficiency, re-usability, and innovation has never been stronger. - Innovation, Partner, and Channel Growth - Our investment team and advisors primarily consists of go-to-market (GTM) and implementation professionals that have already provided invaluable guidance on scaling our overall growth. Looking ahead: As we celebrate this achievement, we're mindful that fundraising is not the end goal but a milestone --a means to an end-- to build out a well oiled machine. We're excited to leverage this opportunity to further our mission, drive innovation, and exceed the expectations of our users and partners. With this said - If you'd like to be part of this exciting journey, please reach out! Stay tuned for updates, join our growing community, and let's reshape the future of document and slide deck creation together. -Nicolas https://lnkd.in/e4CGrUVB

179

40 Comments

I always get a bit peeved hearing other VC's categorize AI-enabled companies as 'ChatGPT wrappers'. Your Defensibility? Your Moat? That's your business model and unique insights into your industry. It's Network Effects, and scrappy GTM's, and sticky features you build on top. In my opinion, LLM's are a core part of most tech stacks, the same way cloud compute or other infrastructure is. OpenAI and others have created one of the most profound advances in computing, and has made it publicly accessible for everyone to use. There's massive opportunity to build applications on top of it.

47

5 Comments

💯 agree with this viewpoint Today there are hundreds of products in every vertical that should really be features not products 🤯 Who actually enjoys having 20+ software applications to run a business? I’ve yet to meet a degenerate who does 😂 Building a compound startup or true system of record is not for the faint hearted. Everything is harder. Navigating through the complexity and the breadth vs depth conundrum is agonising 🛣️ 🧟‍♂️ But if you can stick the course and execute on this strategy successfully to build the ‘one stop shop for X’ both the customer and the software provider get incredible rewards 🏆🏆 #compound #startup

58

8 Comments

New Methods for Efficient Finetuning of LLMs!

10

This is an interesting article from SaaStr sharing data from ICONIQ Capital about revenue per employee. “These are useful yardsticks for folks scaling: At less than $25m ARR, actually SaaS start-ups aren’t any more efficient than in 2017-2019, at $130,000 per employee / FTE. Although that’s still more efficient than the Boom Times. At $25m-$100m ARR, SaaS scale-ups are about 25% more efficient than they used to be, at $172,000 in revenue per employee / FTE. Time to get real at $25m ARR, apparently 😉 And at $100m+ ARR, they are 20% more efficient then they used to be, at $249,000 in revenue per employee. On the path to the $300k+ we see in public SaaS leaders.” At Worksmith in October, our annualized revenue per employee was $238K. https://lnkd.in/gqkkpjEW

6