Lightspeed
@lightspeedvp • 133,036 subscribers
Serving bold builders of the future. Not an offer to buy/sell securities or investment advisory services. Disclosures: https://t.co/NqUCVhdnhA
Videos
How do you know which robots are ready for the job? Robotics companies test their models on different tasks and datasets. Lightspeed Partner Amber Yang sees a need for better ways to compare them, especially when customers are making decisions about safety. She maps the robotics market by how general or specialized companies’ models and hardware are. As models become more adaptable, Amber sees an opportunity for companies that specialize in deployment. She calls them “DeployCos”: businesses that could pair existing models with different kinds of embodiments to handle work in places like factories or restaurants. 0:00 Why Older Robotics Companies Struggled 0:40 Mapping The Robotics Landscape Across Two Axes 1:16 Model Layer Breakthroughs From VLAs To World Action Models 4:20 One Brain Many Bodies And The Value Of Specific Models 5:27 In-Context Learning And How Robotics Companies Collect Training Data 7:40 Hardware Developments And Dependence On China 9:24 Specific Model Specific Embodiment Quadrant 13:05 The Deploy Co Angle And Open Router For Robotics 13:55 General Model Multiple Bodies Quadrant 15:50 General Model Specific Embodiment Quadrant 17:24 Where Things May Be Commoditized And Infrastructure Opportunities 20:45 Robotics Observability And Evaluation 22:33 Learning From Autonomous Vehicles Claire Zau
Lightspeed50,644 просмотров • 7 дней назад
Real-time world models represent a fundamental shift in AI. reactor is building the platform for real-time generative video infrastructure, supporting developers who need the tech for use across entertainment, physical AI, and robotics. Co-founders Alberto and Bryce Schmidtchen joined us last week on The Investment Memo, hosted by Partners Bucky Moore and Amber Yang, to talk about the era of world models. The conversation centered around the infrastructure Reactor is building, why real-time models are the edge right now, and current use cases for the product. Alberto and Bryce agreed that world models are shaping the way simulations are created, and that developers need a streamlined platform that can support their ideas. We believe Reactor is positioned to be at the frontier of research into real-time generative models. We look forward to seeing how these models apply across industries. Chapters 00:00 Introduction & Overview of Reactor 01:08 Meet the Hosts & Founders 02:18 The Origin Story: From 3D Assets to World Models 05:07 Real-Time Video Applications Across Industries 06:55 The Open Source World Model Explosion 07:23 Why Infrastructure Is the Opportunity 08:42 Parallels to Past Technology Waves 09:51 Bridging the Research-to-Production Gap 13:13 What Developers Are Building with World Models 16:41 Lessons from Luma AI 18:23 What Apple Vision Pro Taught Bryce About Real-Time Systems 20:48 Company Values & Team Culture 22:40 Series A: What the Capital Unlocks 24:13 Reactor's Five-Year Vision 26:09 Closing Remarks
Lightspeed144,942 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
AI could radically change how people access government resources. The US is starting with a chatbot. This week on Lightwork: → is now live. Designed as a front door to the federal government, the chatbot aims to make information easier to find across 29,000+ government websites. → Leaders across technology and government gathered for lunch at the White House to discuss the state of AI and what “Superintelligence” could mean for the US public. → OpenAI launched over twenty features at DevDay, including a system of “always-on” agents called Dots. Is consumer tech headed toward personal background workers? → SpaceX’s Starship reached orbit on Flight 14 and deployed its first operational payload, twenty-six Starlink V3 satellites. Full video below. Claire Zau Josh Machiz
Lightspeed10,443 просмотров • 11 дней назад
Streaming services democratized entertainment consumption, the creator economy democratized distribution, and AI could do the same for high-quality production. Rohan Nayak, Co-Founder and CEO of Pocket FM, gave us the scoop on the company’s thesis behind their AI-driven audio drama platform. Pocket FM doesn’t rely on general-purpose LLMs alone. Rohan explains that Sherpa, its multi-agent fiction-writing system built on custom post-trained models, focuses on long-horizon narrative memory, emotionally convincing prose, and long-form planning. Rohan also gets into the harder problem that comes with cheaper creation. More content means Pocket has to get better at identifying the stories people actually want to keep listening to. Pocket’s fiction models are trained on billions of minutes of engagement data, while listener behavior helps determine which stories reach larger audiences. The team is now driving their newest product, Pocket Saga, an app that converts the best audio dramas into AI-animated vertical video series. Rohan sees AI as a tool that creators can use to execute on their ideas. He believes: “For the first time, literally anyone in the world can create studio-quality entertainment at their home.” Watch the full episode with Rohan on Lightwork at the link in the comments.
Lightspeed14,177 просмотров • 25 дней назад
AI models are upgrading at a new speed. OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra model, released last week, follows a self-controlled “chain-of-thought” reasoning pattern that can evade certain kinds of monitoring. The next value differentiator for improved models may be less about performance and more about auditability. More on Lightwork this week: → ByteDance is working towards releasing a new real-time world model, pressuring Western frontier labs to keep pace. → Personal agents like Meta’s Muse and Instinct are gaining popularity, raising a conversation over personal autonomy with agents. → Some applications are throttling agent traffic. What does this mean for the companies building them? Claire Zau Josh Machiz Bucky Moore 0:00 Welcome, Bucky Moore! 1:12 OpenAI's Astra 3:50 The New AI Model’s Architecture 4:40 AI Safety and Guardrails 8:01 Trusting AI Agents 11:09 The Future of AI Models 12:06 The AI Agent Land Grab 17:09 AI, Trust, and Personal Data 20:12 Improving AI Agent Capabilities 22:11 Enterprise AI Assistants and Personal Context 24:05 AI Agents and the Future of the Web 25:50 ByteDance and World Models 28:19 World Models and Consumer Content 30:56 Reactor and World Model Infrastructure 34:13 Real-Time Video Models and Scaling
Lightspeed15,012 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
A historic IPO, a massive makeover for Siri, and Anthropic's most powerful model released to the public. What do these have in common? They were all covered on the inaugural episode of Lightwork, Lightspeed’s newest podcast with hosts Claire Zau and Josh Machiz breaking down some of the latest news in AI. This week centered on a number of topics, most notably SpaceX’s massive $1.7T IPO, the largest in history. Claire and Josh analyzed one of the most powerful AI model ever released (now with brakes built in), Apple rebuilding Siri with help from Google's Gemini, and a quiet milestone with loud implications, as AI agents now generate more web traffic than actual people. Lightspeed Co-Founder & Managing Director Ravi Mhatre joined them to talk founders, AI cycles, and what he looks for that typically won’t show up in a pitch deck. Claire and Josh also highlighted some notable deals from this past week, spotlighting Beacon Software, Sandstone, and A Security. Watch the full episode below. Episode two coming June 22nd. 0:00 Welcome to Lightwork 3:30 This Week in AI & Tech Headlines 4:15 Claude Fable 5 Release 13:33 SpaceX: The Largest IPO in History 23:14 Apple's AI Reset at WWDC 30:39 Agent Traffic Passes Humans Online 40:45 Guest Interview: Lightspeed Co-Founder Ravi Mhatre 41:50 What Success Looks Like In A Founder? 44:29 Picking Winners On An Exponential Curve 48:44 Enterprise Trust Is The Moat 52:10 What Still Excites Him After 30 Years 53:43 Ravi on Lightspeed Entering New Media 56:37 Deal Breakdowns 58:47 Final Thoughts and What's Coming Next
Lightspeed36,667 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад
Depth is our center of gravity. Complete immersion is the heart of our philosophy on investing - dedicating ourselves to our Founders’ businesses and growing with them means we can build something truly impactful. Because possibility grows the deeper you go.
Lightspeed170,493 просмотров • 3 лет назад
An essential component of audit is trust. We evaluated many companies going after this problem. On technical architecture, breadth of vision, and institutional credibility, we believed Andera was a clear outlier. On this episode of The Investment Memo, Andera co-founders tinah and Aryo Patel join Partners Kat Zhang and Bucky Moore to discuss why they built Andera this way, how customer trust became a product decision, and why they believe AI is uniquely positioned to fundamentally transform audit. Tune into the full conversation below. 0:00 Welcome, Aryo Patel and Tinah Hong! 1:04 Why Start Andera, and Why SOX Control Testing? 2:13 How AI Is Transforming Enterprise Audit 4:34 Why Is AI Finally Transforming the Audit Market? 5:37 How SOX Data Can Map a Company’s Financial Ecosystem 7:10 Andera’s Vision for AI-Powered CFO Decisions 8:22 How Andera Builds Trust With Audit Teams 9:20 The Technology Behind Andera’s Platform 11:05 Why Andera Focuses on Complex Audit Problems 15:00 How the Big Four Are Adapting to AI and Where Andera Fits 16:47 Why Andera Accelerated Its Fundraising 18:06 Andera’s Long-Term Vision 18:50 Building Trust Around Financial Data 19:21 Closing Thoughts
Lightspeed12,008 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
What happens when AI agents make mistakes? On this week’s episode of The Investment Memo, Lightspeed Partner James Alcorn sits down with Judgment Labs co-founder Alex Shan to discuss the agent workflow (and more). Alex started researching AI performance at Stanford when he was just 16. Today, alongside co-founders Andrew Li and Joseph Camyre, the team is building the quality layer for the agent era. The episode goes deep into many critical questions, like why agent evaluation is becoming critical infrastructure, how to measure trust and reliability, and what breaks when agents move from demos to production. We’re excited to have led the Seed and co-led the Series A, totaling $32M in funding. Tune into the full conversation about the future of AI evaluation, in the era where judgment is everything. Chapters 0:00 Putting Agent Improvement On Autopilot 2:20 What Judgment Labs Actually Does 3:09 Being A Full Lifecycle Agent Behavior Monitoring Platform 4:59 How The Co-Founders Met 7:57 The Fundraising Journey With Lightspeed 11:57 Two Core Technological Bets That Shaped The Product 14:49 The Philosophy Behind Partnering With Customers 17:28 How They Choose Their Early Customers 19:40 The 5-Year Vision For Judgment Labs 22:10 Where The Business Goes From Here 24:39 How To Get In Touch With Alex And The Team
Lightspeed18,674 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
Introducing Lightwork. New episodes every Monday morning.
Lightspeed16,725 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад
Stablecoins are looking to be the future of money; the infrastructure just needs to catch up. In this episode of The Investment Memo, Aaron Frank sits down with farooq 🌧 and Charles Yoo-Naut (🌧️,🌧️), Co-Founders of Rain, to discuss building the payments infrastructure that connects stablecoins to the real world. The Highlights: • Why central banks and users already treat stablecoins as money, even when the rails don't support it yet. • How Rain went from a side project solving ACH pain to becoming the card issuance platform powering Stablecoin payments globally. • Building in a greenfield space with no playbook, where regulations are evolving and every feature requires first principles thinking. • Maintaining velocity through acquisitions, staying lean until product-market fit, and hiring for agency over credentials. Huge congratulations to the entire Rain team on raising $250M! 0:00 Welcome, Farooq Malik and Charles Yoo-Naut! 1:40 How the Rain Founders Met 3:41 Early "Aha" Moments 6:19 From Sign & Wire to Building Rain 9:07 Connecting Stablecoins to Card Networks 13:07 Navigating Regulation and the First Card Issuance 15:08 What Rain Looks Like Today 16:34 Adoption Beyond Crypto-Native Companies 17:14 Unexpected Customer Use Cases 18:44 Building Fintech Without a Playbook 20:44 The Long-Term Vision 22:28 Co-Founder Dynamics 25:03 Hiring for High Agency and Low Ego 26:43 Executing Successful Acquisitions Early 29:40 What Makes a Great Partnership for Rain 31:48 Choosing the Right Investment Partners 33:26 Staying Aligned as Co-Founders 36:40 Lessons Learned Looking Back to 2022 39:20 Advice for First-Time Founders 41:59 Finding Advisors Who Give Honest Feedback
Lightspeed28,089 просмотров • 8 месяцев назад
We co-led Inferact's $150M seed round to support them in their mission to build the inference engine for all current and future AI. In this episode of The Investment Memo, Lightspeed's Bucky Moore and James Alcorn sit down with Simon Mo (Co-Founder & CEO Inferact) to cover: - How vLLM grew to 60K+ GitHub stars - Why inference is shifting to the majority of compute - How vLLM evolved from a research project into the industry standard - Why building a company was the next step to push open-source inference forward 00:00 Introduction 02:03 The investment memo 04:47 Latency vs throughput vs cost 06:19 Paged attention explained 08:04 The evolution of attention 09:42 Growing the vLLM open source community 11:41 Working with hardware vendors 14:45 Deploying vLLM at large scale 16:03 Inferact's culture of openness 18:45 Building an open ecosystem and horizontal stack 19:45 Inferact's approach to fundraising 22:14 What is the future of inference? Simon Mo Bucky Moore James Alcorn
Lightspeed27,040 просмотров • 8 месяцев назад
.Garry Tan on the future of YC: “YC is like Airbnb. It’s a two-sided marketplace.” “I need to grow YC so that we can have more startup founders and more success in the world.” “Venture can and should be 10 times bigger than it is now.” From the latest episode of Out of Office. Michael Mignano Y Combinator
Lightspeed21,870 просмотров • 8 месяцев назад
The accounting services industry has historically been 1) underserved by technology and 2) constrained by capacity, not demand. Founders Arush Jain, Pranav Pillai, and Vinay Kasat saw this as an opportunity. They brought together their backgrounds in private equity M&A, forward-deployed software engineering, and growth operations. In doing so, they created Modus to partner with auditors ready for the next generation of firms that have the right to grow. Through co-creating and tightly iterating on powerful, scalable workflows with frontline auditors, Modus freed up tens of thousands of hours in their first platform partner that they have already sold into. The co-founders joined Justin M. Overdorff and Amish Desai this week on The Investment Memo, where they go into more detail about our partnership, their vision for innovating in the industry, and how their past career experiences prepared them for this journey. 0:00 Welcome, Arush Jain, Vinay Kasat, & Pranav Pillai! 2:40 Why Audit Is a Massive Opportunity 3:17 The Core Problem Auditors Face Today 4:10 The “Audit in 2 Weeks” Vision 5:04 Proving the Model Works Without an Audit Background 5:53 Why Audit Software Has Failed Before 6:25 Reinventing Audits from the Ground Up 7:25 Inside 7 AI Workflows & 40% Time Savings 9:03 Palantir’s Influence on Their Strategy 10:00 Embedding Engineers Inside Audit Firms 11:12 Turning Time Savings into Growth 12:25 Improving Audit Quality with AI 14:01 Where Audit Errors Actually Happen 16:24 The First Acquisition Journey 17:50 Early Results: Growth & Efficiency Gains 19:05 The “This Works” Moment 20:18 From Friends to Co-Founders 22:34 Hiring in the Age of AI 24:08 Advisors Behind Modus 25:41 Choosing the Right Investors 26:55 The Future of AI in Audit 28:03 What Excites the Founders Most 28:48 Advice for Founders
Lightspeed12,617 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад
Lightspeed's Ravi Mhatre on why trust is the unlock for AI adoption: "When AI moves from being a tool to truly being a digital co-worker, people will not do it unless they have confidence that the systems are auditable, observable, and aligned." Anthropic launched Claude Code and in six months, revenues grew from zero to a billion dollars. Ravi says: "That's a testament to the fact that if you trust AI will do the work properly, you will see rapid adoption because the productivity benefits are so great." Ravi Mhatre via CNBC
Lightspeed11,834 просмотров • 7 месяцев назад
Visualize technology as an escalator; a steady constant, always carrying us upward into the future. And then, every now and again, something avant-garde emerges, a massive step-function change that thrusts us into the next cycle of technology. A moment that will be remembered for many years to come. To all of us at Lightspeed, Anthropic represents that structural reset. Cc: Ravi Mhatre, Guru Chahal🇺🇸, and Sebastian Duesterhoff
Lightspeed11,106 просмотров • 8 месяцев назад
Check it out—The 2025 Game Changers in Times Square! Thank you to Nasdaq for congratulating the winners on the big screen: Bitmagic, Brilliant Labs, Cartwheel, Cosmic Lounge, Eggscape, ego, emptyvessel, Giant Skull, k-ID, Layer, @LudeoGG, Look North World, mudstack, Noodle Cat Games | Cloudheim OUT NOW! 🪽, Pok Pok, @PraktikaEnglish, @PlayOnRay, Regression Games, Sloyd, Stoke Games, Superbloom, @PlayRunLegends, Womp, Everbloom, and yellow3d. Cc Moritz Baier-Lentz, Dean Takahashi, GamesBeat
Lightspeed12,342 просмотров • 1 год назад
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