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Announcing that Willow has raised $4.2 million to build voice-first interfaces. We started Willow after dropping out of Stanford freshman year to build a healthcare startup. It failed. We pivoted over 10 times, spent a year in the trenches, and learned how to build the hard way. But we...

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Allan Guo

2,738 subscribers

499,059 просмотров • 1 год назад •via X (Twitter)

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Комментарии: 10

Фото профиля Allan Guo
Allan Guo1 год назад

If you’re excited about joining us on our mission, apply to our open roles at Want to 5x your productivity with the latest voice AI? Try

Фото профиля dharmesh
dharmesh1 год назад

@WillowVoiceAI Congrats! Product is great, and it's a massive opportunity. Thrilled be along for the ride as an indie investor.

Фото профиля Allan Guo
Allan Guo1 год назад

@WillowVoiceAI Thanks so much Dharmesh. Incredibly grateful to have you 🚀

Фото профиля amogh
amogh1 год назад

@WillowVoiceAI why does @_allanguo kinda look like asian marlon?

Фото профиля David Corbitt
David Corbitt1 год назад

@WillowVoiceAI I was blown away by a demo of Willow a few months back. Really excited to see where you take the product!

Фото профиля Allan Guo
Allan Guo1 год назад

@WillowVoiceAI I'm so glad to hear that. Thank you!!!

Фото профиля Ankur Nagpal
Ankur Nagpal1 год назад

@WillowVoiceAI Stoked to be involved man

Фото профиля Allan Guo
Allan Guo1 год назад

@WillowVoiceAI We're so grateful to have you!

Фото профиля ellie chang
ellie chang1 год назад

@WillowVoiceAI i already have a bf but i'd cheat on him in a heartbeat for @_allanguo

Фото профиля Y Cumbinator
Y Cumbinator1 год назад

@WillowVoiceAI Is the willow office just a bunch of people yelling over each other at their computers?

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41,464 просмотров • 11 месяцев назад

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Adam Guild

677,473 просмотров • 1 год назад

10 years ago, Parag Agrawal and I were working together to introduce ranking to Twitter’s timeline for hundreds of millions of consumers. Now he’s started Parallel Web Systems to build infrastructure for a very different kind of user: AI agents. And in a full circle moment, we’re able to work together again, as First Round invested in his seed round last year alongside Khosla Ventures and Index Ventures. Parag and I had a chance to sit down for a great conversation last week (his first interview since leaving Twitter!). It was a fascinating reflection on what he learned and what he’s doing differently. We dig into: - The transition from CTO → CEO → Founder - What he was *really* thinking when all the Twitter drama was going down - Why he chose to be a founder (vs. take another big role) - How he landed on the idea for Parallel - What fundamentally changes when you’re designing for AIs vs. humans - How he thought about fundraising and building his early team - How working with customers like Clay shaped Parallel’s earliest products - The case for building “slow” APIs, and the advice he got from Patrick Collison - His takes on the modern agent stack and how evals need to evolve And much more! Immensely proud to be able to partner with Parag and the entire Parallel team. They’ve made incredible progress in a short amount of time and I can’t wait for more folks to start playing around with the APIs they’ve built. The full conversation is below, as well as more details on what Parallel is up to.
1:17

10 years ago, Parag Agrawal and I were working together to introduce ranking to Twitter’s timeline for hundreds of millions of consumers. Now he’s started Parallel Web Systems to build infrastructure for a very different kind of user: AI agents. And in a full circle moment, we’re able to work together again, as First Round invested in his seed round last year alongside Khosla Ventures and Index Ventures. Parag and I had a chance to sit down for a great conversation last week (his first interview since leaving Twitter!). It was a fascinating reflection on what he learned and what he’s doing differently. We dig into: - The transition from CTO → CEO → Founder - What he was *really* thinking when all the Twitter drama was going down - Why he chose to be a founder (vs. take another big role) - How he landed on the idea for Parallel - What fundamentally changes when you’re designing for AIs vs. humans - How he thought about fundraising and building his early team - How working with customers like Clay shaped Parallel’s earliest products - The case for building “slow” APIs, and the advice he got from Patrick Collison - His takes on the modern agent stack and how evals need to evolve And much more! Immensely proud to be able to partner with Parag and the entire Parallel team. They’ve made incredible progress in a short amount of time and I can’t wait for more folks to start playing around with the APIs they’ve built. The full conversation is below, as well as more details on what Parallel is up to.

Todd Jackson

114,887 просмотров • 11 месяцев назад

Sam Altman on how to identify founders who can build $10 billion companies “It’s difficult to hear an idea at the very early stage and say: ‘Yeah, this idea has what it takes to be a $10 billion company.’ However, I think you can, with practice, identify founders that have a chance at creating one of those companies.’” The first four traits Sam looks for comes from gmail creator Paul Buchhiet: obsession, focus, frugality, and love. Next, Sam looks for intelligence: “You can give a founder an idea, but the problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week… We tried an experiment at Y Combinator where we funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but otherwise were really good, and they all failed. What we learned is that good founders have ideas all the time.” #6 is communication skills: “So much of your job as a founder is about communication—every time you hire someone, go to raise money, try to sell the product, and set a direction for the company. A huge amount of a founder’s job is being an evangelist for the company. If you don’t have strong communication skills or you don’t develop them quickly, you’re at a big disadvantage.” #7 is execution speed. How quickly can you generate a hypothesis, test it, and implement it? Sam observes that most slow-moving founders who went through Y Combinator didn’t go on to be successful: “A relentless cadence of execution is incredibly correlated with success.” #8 is the rate of improvement of the founder: “If you look at a founder who comes to meet you for a seed round and compare that founder to Brian Chesky, you will be disappointed 100% of the time. That’s the wrong comparison… You should look at the at the growth rate of the founder… Humans always underestimate exponential growth.” #9 is the right motivations: “There a lot of people who start a startup because they think it’s a way to get rich quickly, and unfortunately it’s just not. So startups have become the new default career trajectory for ambitious people… This does not work given the amount of pain you have to suffer for a startup… In our portfolio at YC, every time we thought a company was going to go really well and didn’t, the founder did not have a deep sense of mission.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)
5:32

Sam Altman on how to identify founders who can build $10 billion companies “It’s difficult to hear an idea at the very early stage and say: ‘Yeah, this idea has what it takes to be a $10 billion company.’ However, I think you can, with practice, identify founders that have a chance at creating one of those companies.’” The first four traits Sam looks for comes from gmail creator Paul Buchhiet: obsession, focus, frugality, and love. Next, Sam looks for intelligence: “You can give a founder an idea, but the problem is they need to come up with new ideas for the company basically every week… We tried an experiment at Y Combinator where we funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas but otherwise were really good, and they all failed. What we learned is that good founders have ideas all the time.” #6 is communication skills: “So much of your job as a founder is about communication—every time you hire someone, go to raise money, try to sell the product, and set a direction for the company. A huge amount of a founder’s job is being an evangelist for the company. If you don’t have strong communication skills or you don’t develop them quickly, you’re at a big disadvantage.” #7 is execution speed. How quickly can you generate a hypothesis, test it, and implement it? Sam observes that most slow-moving founders who went through Y Combinator didn’t go on to be successful: “A relentless cadence of execution is incredibly correlated with success.” #8 is the rate of improvement of the founder: “If you look at a founder who comes to meet you for a seed round and compare that founder to Brian Chesky, you will be disappointed 100% of the time. That’s the wrong comparison… You should look at the at the growth rate of the founder… Humans always underestimate exponential growth.” #9 is the right motivations: “There a lot of people who start a startup because they think it’s a way to get rich quickly, and unfortunately it’s just not. So startups have become the new default career trajectory for ambitious people… This does not work given the amount of pain you have to suffer for a startup… In our portfolio at YC, every time we thought a company was going to go really well and didn’t, the founder did not have a deep sense of mission.” Video source: Y Combinator (2018)

Startup Archive

167,320 просмотров • 9 месяцев назад

Excited to announce Payman has raised a $3M pre-seed to pioneer AI to Human Payments! 🤖 + 🧑🏽 We’re proud to be backed by Visa, Coinbase Ventures 🛡️, Boost VC, Deepwater Asset Management, Spartan Group, Untapped Capital, Theory Forge VC and other awesome investors! With Payman, AI can pay humans to help them complete tasks like marketing ones shown in the video. Our Vision We believe AI and Humans will always work together. Giving AI the capability to work with humans involves giving them access to capital, and access to humans. Payman’s platform makes it easy for AI to pay humans for what it needs. This includes information, tasks that need to be completed, and so much more. We believe a key reason that AI Agents have struggled is because they aren’t able to ask for help from humans and incentivize them to help out. Building out the AI-Human payments infrastructure solves this and it’s why we’re so excited about what we’re building. Today 100% of the global economy is human to human payments. AI will start to eat a big chunk of that and Payman will be the rails by which it does so. How it’s going Since announcing Payman a couple of months ago we have 15,000+ people on the waitlist ready to use the product. In the meantime we’ve hired a stellar team to build out the production version of the product and have started onboarding Developers and Human’s to the platform this week. If you’re a developer and you'd like to get access, check out our website and sign up for early access. Additional Rockstar Investors In addition to the above investors we’re also proud to be backed by Protofund, Systemic Ventures, MetropolisDAO, and our awesome angel investors, Paris 2024 Olympic Gold Medalist Viktor Axelsen, Devin Walsh, kennethng.eth, Erin Koen, and many more!
6:24

Excited to announce Payman has raised a $3M pre-seed to pioneer AI to Human Payments! 🤖 + 🧑🏽 We’re proud to be backed by Visa, Coinbase Ventures 🛡️, Boost VC, Deepwater Asset Management, Spartan Group, Untapped Capital, Theory Forge VC and other awesome investors! With Payman, AI can pay humans to help them complete tasks like marketing ones shown in the video. Our Vision We believe AI and Humans will always work together. Giving AI the capability to work with humans involves giving them access to capital, and access to humans. Payman’s platform makes it easy for AI to pay humans for what it needs. This includes information, tasks that need to be completed, and so much more. We believe a key reason that AI Agents have struggled is because they aren’t able to ask for help from humans and incentivize them to help out. Building out the AI-Human payments infrastructure solves this and it’s why we’re so excited about what we’re building. Today 100% of the global economy is human to human payments. AI will start to eat a big chunk of that and Payman will be the rails by which it does so. How it’s going Since announcing Payman a couple of months ago we have 15,000+ people on the waitlist ready to use the product. In the meantime we’ve hired a stellar team to build out the production version of the product and have started onboarding Developers and Human’s to the platform this week. If you’re a developer and you'd like to get access, check out our website and sign up for early access. Additional Rockstar Investors In addition to the above investors we’re also proud to be backed by Protofund, Systemic Ventures, MetropolisDAO, and our awesome angel investors, Paris 2024 Olympic Gold Medalist Viktor Axelsen, Devin Walsh, kennethng.eth, Erin Koen, and many more!

tyllen

143,280 просмотров • 1 год назад

Today, KOHO announced $130M in new capital at a $1.33B valuation. We’re very happy to welcome Mubadala, Savano Capital, tobi lutke, CEO, Founder of Shopify, and Michael Linford, COO of Affirm, to the KOHO story. We’re also grateful for the continued support of Drive Capital, Portage Ventures, Eldridge, BDC Capital, and HOOPP. One of my favourite things about KOHO is that the only way we win is if millions of Canadians choose us. We cannot out-spend or out-market. We have to out-build. The progress we have made reflects the progress our users have made. So, while we feel very proud of what’s behind us, we’re much more humbled by what’s in front of us. With this capital, we’ve earned the right to keep building on our promise to users. That job remains monumental, and we’re very honoured that we get to do the work. I want to thank the team for their incredible work these past few years. The world doesn’t yet know how talented, smart and kind the KOHO Collective is - but they will. I want to thank our investors for their continued trust and support. We’re lucky to have partners who recognize and support the need to take the longer view here. More than anything, I want to thank our users. We’ve come a long way with much farther to go. We’ll keep earning your trust every damn day. Back to work 🔥
0:40

Today, KOHO announced $130M in new capital at a $1.33B valuation. We’re very happy to welcome Mubadala, Savano Capital, tobi lutke, CEO, Founder of Shopify, and Michael Linford, COO of Affirm, to the KOHO story. We’re also grateful for the continued support of Drive Capital, Portage Ventures, Eldridge, BDC Capital, and HOOPP. One of my favourite things about KOHO is that the only way we win is if millions of Canadians choose us. We cannot out-spend or out-market. We have to out-build. The progress we have made reflects the progress our users have made. So, while we feel very proud of what’s behind us, we’re much more humbled by what’s in front of us. With this capital, we’ve earned the right to keep building on our promise to users. That job remains monumental, and we’re very honoured that we get to do the work. I want to thank the team for their incredible work these past few years. The world doesn’t yet know how talented, smart and kind the KOHO Collective is - but they will. I want to thank our investors for their continued trust and support. We’re lucky to have partners who recognize and support the need to take the longer view here. More than anything, I want to thank our users. We’ve come a long way with much farther to go. We’ll keep earning your trust every damn day. Back to work 🔥

Daniel Eberhard

25,766 просмотров • 1 месяц назад

Today, we are announcing Greylock 18, a new $1.5 billion early-stage venture fund. A company begins when a founder sees a future others cannot yet see. There is no team, product, or revenue. Only a deep insight and the courage to start. Being early is lonely work. For years, being right can look exactly like being wrong. Greylock has spent more than six decades partnering with founders through those earliest moments to build enduring companies. Airbnb, Facebook, and Palo Alto Networks all began as improbable ideas driven by founders determined to make them inevitable. AI has made the map blank again. Every part of the economy is now open to reinvention. We believe many of the defining AI companies do not yet exist. We invest selectively and partner deeply with the founders we back. Each Greylock partner makes only one or two new investments a year because the work demands depth. We bring the full attention, network, and resources of Greylock to every partnership. We are builders backing outliers. Founders have their choice of investor. When a founder chooses to partner with Greylock, we understand the weight of that choice and the profound responsibility that comes with it. We seek to be a founder’s first believer and long-term partner. Greylock 18 is our commitment to what does not exist yet.
0:48

Today, we are announcing Greylock 18, a new $1.5 billion early-stage venture fund. A company begins when a founder sees a future others cannot yet see. There is no team, product, or revenue. Only a deep insight and the courage to start. Being early is lonely work. For years, being right can look exactly like being wrong. Greylock has spent more than six decades partnering with founders through those earliest moments to build enduring companies. Airbnb, Facebook, and Palo Alto Networks all began as improbable ideas driven by founders determined to make them inevitable. AI has made the map blank again. Every part of the economy is now open to reinvention. We believe many of the defining AI companies do not yet exist. We invest selectively and partner deeply with the founders we back. Each Greylock partner makes only one or two new investments a year because the work demands depth. We bring the full attention, network, and resources of Greylock to every partnership. We are builders backing outliers. Founders have their choice of investor. When a founder chooses to partner with Greylock, we understand the weight of that choice and the profound responsibility that comes with it. We seek to be a founder’s first believer and long-term partner. Greylock 18 is our commitment to what does not exist yet.

Saam Motamedi

166,091 просмотров • 5 дней назад

Learn to build conversational AI voice agents in "Building AI Voice Agents for Production", created in collaboration with LiveKit and RealAvatar, and taught by dsa (Co-founder & CEO of LiveKit), Shayne (Developer Advocate, LiveKit), and Nedelina Teneva (Head of AI at RealAvatar, an AI Fund portfolio company). Voice agents combine speech and reasoning capabilities to enable real-time conversations. They're already being used to support customer service, to improve accessibility in healthcare, for entertainment applications, and for talk therapy. In this course, you’ll learn to build voice agents that listen, reason, and respond naturally. You’ll follow the architecture used to create the "AI Andrew" Avatar, a collaborative project between and RealAvatar that responds to users in what sounds like my voice. You’ll build a voice agent from scratch and deploy it to the cloud, enabling support for many simultaneous users. What you’ll learn: - Understand the fundamentals of voice agents, including key components like speech-to-text (STT), text-to-speech (TTS), and LLMs, and how latency is introduced at each layer. - Explore voice agent architectures and the trade-offs between modular pipelines and speech-to-speech APIs. - Explore how platforms like LiveKit mitigate latency issues with optimized networking infrastructure and low-latency communication protocols. - Learn how to connect client devices to voice agents using WebRTC—and why it outperforms HTTP and WebSocket for low-latency audio streaming. - Incorporate voice activity detection (VAD), end-of-turn detection, and context management to detect turns, handle interruptions, and manage conversational flow. - Understand the trade-offs between latency, quality, and cost in an example in which you build a voice agent and change its voice. - Equip your agent with metrics to measure latency at each stage of the voice pipeline and learn the key levers you can pull to make your agent faster and more responsive. The voice agents built in this course also incorporate voice technology from , a supporting contributor to the project. By the end of this course, you'll have learned the components of an AI voice agent pipeline, combined them into a system with low-latency communication, and deployed them on cloud infrastructure so it scales to many users. I’m looking forward to seeing what voice agents you build from this course! Please sign up here:
2:41

Learn to build conversational AI voice agents in "Building AI Voice Agents for Production", created in collaboration with LiveKit and RealAvatar, and taught by dsa (Co-founder & CEO of LiveKit), Shayne (Developer Advocate, LiveKit), and Nedelina Teneva (Head of AI at RealAvatar, an AI Fund portfolio company). Voice agents combine speech and reasoning capabilities to enable real-time conversations. They're already being used to support customer service, to improve accessibility in healthcare, for entertainment applications, and for talk therapy. In this course, you’ll learn to build voice agents that listen, reason, and respond naturally. You’ll follow the architecture used to create the "AI Andrew" Avatar, a collaborative project between and RealAvatar that responds to users in what sounds like my voice. You’ll build a voice agent from scratch and deploy it to the cloud, enabling support for many simultaneous users. What you’ll learn: - Understand the fundamentals of voice agents, including key components like speech-to-text (STT), text-to-speech (TTS), and LLMs, and how latency is introduced at each layer. - Explore voice agent architectures and the trade-offs between modular pipelines and speech-to-speech APIs. - Explore how platforms like LiveKit mitigate latency issues with optimized networking infrastructure and low-latency communication protocols. - Learn how to connect client devices to voice agents using WebRTC—and why it outperforms HTTP and WebSocket for low-latency audio streaming. - Incorporate voice activity detection (VAD), end-of-turn detection, and context management to detect turns, handle interruptions, and manage conversational flow. - Understand the trade-offs between latency, quality, and cost in an example in which you build a voice agent and change its voice. - Equip your agent with metrics to measure latency at each stage of the voice pipeline and learn the key levers you can pull to make your agent faster and more responsive. The voice agents built in this course also incorporate voice technology from , a supporting contributor to the project. By the end of this course, you'll have learned the components of an AI voice agent pipeline, combined them into a system with low-latency communication, and deployed them on cloud infrastructure so it scales to many users. I’m looking forward to seeing what voice agents you build from this course! Please sign up here:

Andrew Ng

87,484 просмотров • 1 год назад

The world needs 10x more scientist-founders. 5050 helps scientists and engineers become great founders and start indispensable companies. Applications open! Startups are the best way to make a real impact with research, but where do you get started? How do you know if entrepreneurship is for you? Whether you’re validating an idea or ready to build — 5050 is for you. You’ll learn what it takes to become a great founder, how to choose the right problem, technology, and market, and how to build a deep tech startup. “It’s a cheat code for starting a deep tech startup.” – Eric McShane, 5050 alum. • Eric McShane and Evan spun out of Stanford and co-founded Electroflow to tackle the lithium shortage. They’ve scaled their tech by 200x in 6 months. • Mark Budde 🦕🏆 joined 5050 as a postdoc at Caltech. Two years later, plasmidsaurus enables scientists across all 50 states and most European countries to go much faster. • Niccolo joined as a Tesla engineer. Three months later, he co-founded Clippership and is building autonomous sailboats to decarbonize maritime shipping. • Chi and Tay Shin joined as postdocs at MIT. Within weeks, they spun out and are now working to enable in vivo cell reprogramming. At Fifty Years, we’ve built deep tech companies ourselves. We’ve backed over 100 deep tech startups from the earliest stages and helped them raise over 4.6 billion dollars. We distilled everything we know about deep tech startups into 5050: a free program to help world-class scientists and engineers start indispensable companies. Phase I: Explore We’ll help you answer: How do I turn my breakthrough science into a business? What do I need to make a startup idea work? Am I ready to be a founder? You’ll learn if entrepreneurship is right for you, identify the idea to build, and pivot quickly if necessary. We’ll guide you through the early days of building in deep tech. At the end of Explore, those ready to build a startup will be invited to the next phase, Build. Phase II: Build You’ll join a cohort of fast-moving founders who will challenge you to ramp up. We’ll coach you to level up into a great founder and guide you through the early days of building in deep tech. Build will help you de-risk your technology, hit key milestones, raise a first round, and reach takeoff speed fast. Helping great scientists and engineers become great entrepreneurs is our jam. Apply / nominate! ➜
3:22

The world needs 10x more scientist-founders. 5050 helps scientists and engineers become great founders and start indispensable companies. Applications open! Startups are the best way to make a real impact with research, but where do you get started? How do you know if entrepreneurship is for you? Whether you’re validating an idea or ready to build — 5050 is for you. You’ll learn what it takes to become a great founder, how to choose the right problem, technology, and market, and how to build a deep tech startup. “It’s a cheat code for starting a deep tech startup.” – Eric McShane, 5050 alum. • Eric McShane and Evan spun out of Stanford and co-founded Electroflow to tackle the lithium shortage. They’ve scaled their tech by 200x in 6 months. • Mark Budde 🦕🏆 joined 5050 as a postdoc at Caltech. Two years later, plasmidsaurus enables scientists across all 50 states and most European countries to go much faster. • Niccolo joined as a Tesla engineer. Three months later, he co-founded Clippership and is building autonomous sailboats to decarbonize maritime shipping. • Chi and Tay Shin joined as postdocs at MIT. Within weeks, they spun out and are now working to enable in vivo cell reprogramming. At Fifty Years, we’ve built deep tech companies ourselves. We’ve backed over 100 deep tech startups from the earliest stages and helped them raise over 4.6 billion dollars. We distilled everything we know about deep tech startups into 5050: a free program to help world-class scientists and engineers start indispensable companies. Phase I: Explore We’ll help you answer: How do I turn my breakthrough science into a business? What do I need to make a startup idea work? Am I ready to be a founder? You’ll learn if entrepreneurship is right for you, identify the idea to build, and pivot quickly if necessary. We’ll guide you through the early days of building in deep tech. At the end of Explore, those ready to build a startup will be invited to the next phase, Build. Phase II: Build You’ll join a cohort of fast-moving founders who will challenge you to ramp up. We’ll coach you to level up into a great founder and guide you through the early days of building in deep tech. Build will help you de-risk your technology, hit key milestones, raise a first round, and reach takeoff speed fast. Helping great scientists and engineers become great entrepreneurs is our jam. Apply / nominate! ➜

Seth Bannon

106,391 просмотров • 2 лет назад

ETH/ACC at Devcon 8 | Mumbai, India 🇮🇳 wasn’t just a Demo Day. It was a statement about where Ethereum is going, and who is building that future. 22 teams stepped onto one stage, and the ecosystem listened. As Losi opened the room: “We’re not just here to see founders or meet investors. We’re here because we believe in what’s possible when technology is used for good.” Odisea, alongside partners across the ecosystem; Founder School, Ethereumfndn’s Founder Success Team, Base, Uniswap Foundation, Agora, Protocol Labs, Arbitrum, Octant, Mantle, OpenZeppelin, Alchemy, Virtuals Ventures, Ledger, Founder School, Rayo Capital Group (Rayo), AKINDO | The world’s first Buildathon Platform🌊⚒️, and Founders Forge came together to spotlight founders building with clarity, intention, and ambition. And they delivered. For our Acelera cohort, BitFinding, Bu Finance, Kompensa, Safu, A0x, and Lid, this was the culmination of six intense weeks of product work, GTM, storytelling, and pitch practice. For the 16 additional teams who joined us on stage; DerbyFish, Alphix, Upshot, Index Network, Seedy Frens, Lumis, Openbands, PistachioFi, 𝗞𝗛𝗨𝗚𝗔, mimic, skyFall, Talentir, gm tribe!, Peanut, Delta and neurobro this was a chance to stand shoulder to shoulder with world-class founders, to pressure-test their narratives, and to share the work that will define the next cycle of crypto and AI innovation. ETH/ACC was about proof. Proof that LATAM builders are not playing catch-up, they are setting the pace. Thank you to every founder who took the stage, to every partner who backed this vision, to every judge and panelist who brought rigor, clarity, and high-trust feedback, and to the entire Odisea team whose months of work made ETH/ACC possible. latam/acc
1:01

ETH/ACC at Devcon 8 | Mumbai, India 🇮🇳 wasn’t just a Demo Day. It was a statement about where Ethereum is going, and who is building that future. 22 teams stepped onto one stage, and the ecosystem listened. As Losi opened the room: “We’re not just here to see founders or meet investors. We’re here because we believe in what’s possible when technology is used for good.” Odisea, alongside partners across the ecosystem; Founder School, Ethereumfndn’s Founder Success Team, Base, Uniswap Foundation, Agora, Protocol Labs, Arbitrum, Octant, Mantle, OpenZeppelin, Alchemy, Virtuals Ventures, Ledger, Founder School, Rayo Capital Group (Rayo), AKINDO | The world’s first Buildathon Platform🌊⚒️, and Founders Forge came together to spotlight founders building with clarity, intention, and ambition. And they delivered. For our Acelera cohort, BitFinding, Bu Finance, Kompensa, Safu, A0x, and Lid, this was the culmination of six intense weeks of product work, GTM, storytelling, and pitch practice. For the 16 additional teams who joined us on stage; DerbyFish, Alphix, Upshot, Index Network, Seedy Frens, Lumis, Openbands, PistachioFi, 𝗞𝗛𝗨𝗚𝗔, mimic, skyFall, Talentir, gm tribe!, Peanut, Delta and neurobro this was a chance to stand shoulder to shoulder with world-class founders, to pressure-test their narratives, and to share the work that will define the next cycle of crypto and AI innovation. ETH/ACC was about proof. Proof that LATAM builders are not playing catch-up, they are setting the pace. Thank you to every founder who took the stage, to every partner who backed this vision, to every judge and panelist who brought rigor, clarity, and high-trust feedback, and to the entire Odisea team whose months of work made ETH/ACC possible. latam/acc

Odisea Labs

17,812 просмотров • 7 месяцев назад

Here we go again 🚀! Excited to announce that we're building A1Zap (YC W25) with Pennie Li and that we're in the Y Combinator W25 batch in San Francisco! What is A1Base? A1Base gives AI Agents a real world identity for work. We do that by rebuilding Twilio and Okta from the ground up, putting AI Agents first. This means developers can make AI-first agentic applications 10x easier with our API's. ⁉️ Why are we doing this? Because there's a huge torrent of new valuable companies possible with AI agents, but to get their AI Agents to users, they have to chain custom apps, chat interfaces, awkward Slack integrations, browser bots, and wrestle with Twilio’s legacy API (which is built for marketing). We solve this by providing developers with an easy to use API to interface your AI agent with humans/coworkers/users where they are in this case in Whatsapp, Slack, Teams, SMS and more) - with AI Agent features built in. These digital workers are poised to transform how we work and we're the critical infrastructure to help them interact naturally in human workflows. We're not just building another AI tool. We're creating the infrastructure that will enable AI agents to become a natural part of the workforce - handling everything from customer support to sales development to creative work. We're backed by Y Combinator and working with founding teams who share our vision. We believe that in the near future, AI Agents with human coworkers will enable us to pursue more creative and impactful work. Our mission is to help developers build AI Agents that people can partner with and rely on as trusted allies—always with a human-first mindset. If you're thinking about the Agentic future of your company reach out! If you're looking to build your first AI Agentic company - reach out too - we have some amazing open source templates to get you started on the journey. Excited to share more of what we're up to soon 🔜.
1:52

Here we go again 🚀! Excited to announce that we're building A1Zap (YC W25) with Pennie Li and that we're in the Y Combinator W25 batch in San Francisco! What is A1Base? A1Base gives AI Agents a real world identity for work. We do that by rebuilding Twilio and Okta from the ground up, putting AI Agents first. This means developers can make AI-first agentic applications 10x easier with our API's. ⁉️ Why are we doing this? Because there's a huge torrent of new valuable companies possible with AI agents, but to get their AI Agents to users, they have to chain custom apps, chat interfaces, awkward Slack integrations, browser bots, and wrestle with Twilio’s legacy API (which is built for marketing). We solve this by providing developers with an easy to use API to interface your AI agent with humans/coworkers/users where they are in this case in Whatsapp, Slack, Teams, SMS and more) - with AI Agent features built in. These digital workers are poised to transform how we work and we're the critical infrastructure to help them interact naturally in human workflows. We're not just building another AI tool. We're creating the infrastructure that will enable AI agents to become a natural part of the workforce - handling everything from customer support to sales development to creative work. We're backed by Y Combinator and working with founding teams who share our vision. We believe that in the near future, AI Agents with human coworkers will enable us to pursue more creative and impactful work. Our mission is to help developers build AI Agents that people can partner with and rely on as trusted allies—always with a human-first mindset. If you're thinking about the Agentic future of your company reach out! If you're looking to build your first AI Agentic company - reach out too - we have some amazing open source templates to get you started on the journey. Excited to share more of what we're up to soon 🔜.

Pasha Rayan

53,904 просмотров • 1 год назад

In Signal Dialogues #04, we explore what it takes to build the foundational layer of voice AI from the ground up. Karan Goel, Co-founder and CEO of Cartesia, sits down with Aakrit Vaish to unpack the bet behind one of the most ambitious infrastructure plays in AI. Karan and his co-founders came out of Stanford's AI Lab, where Albert Gu (now Cartesia's Chief Scientist) co-authored Mamba and pioneered State Space Models, the architecture they believe will define the next generation of real-time, interactive AI. Backed by Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Lightspeed and NVIDIA with over $120M raised, Cartesia is building voice models engineered for real-time latency and efficiency at scale. If you're a founder, researcher or builder thinking about voice, infrastructure or the next architectural shift in AI, this one's for you. Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 02:46 - What Cartesia Does: Interactive AI Models 03:24 - Founding Story: From Stanford PhDs to Cartesia 04:03 - The Unique Insight: Efficiency and Beyond Transformers 09:07 - Voice Company, Neolab, or Big Lab? 14:57 - State Space Models and Algorithmic Innovation 26:04 - The Four Big Bets in Interactive AI 30:24 - Products, Customers, and Going Full-Stack 41:44 - The BPO Disruption: India's Call Center Future 54:17 - Competition, Moats, and the Long Game Karan Goel Aakrit Vaish Cartesia
1:01:29

In Signal Dialogues #04, we explore what it takes to build the foundational layer of voice AI from the ground up. Karan Goel, Co-founder and CEO of Cartesia, sits down with Aakrit Vaish to unpack the bet behind one of the most ambitious infrastructure plays in AI. Karan and his co-founders came out of Stanford's AI Lab, where Albert Gu (now Cartesia's Chief Scientist) co-authored Mamba and pioneered State Space Models, the architecture they believe will define the next generation of real-time, interactive AI. Backed by Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Lightspeed and NVIDIA with over $120M raised, Cartesia is building voice models engineered for real-time latency and efficiency at scale. If you're a founder, researcher or builder thinking about voice, infrastructure or the next architectural shift in AI, this one's for you. Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 02:46 - What Cartesia Does: Interactive AI Models 03:24 - Founding Story: From Stanford PhDs to Cartesia 04:03 - The Unique Insight: Efficiency and Beyond Transformers 09:07 - Voice Company, Neolab, or Big Lab? 14:57 - State Space Models and Algorithmic Innovation 26:04 - The Four Big Bets in Interactive AI 30:24 - Products, Customers, and Going Full-Stack 41:44 - The BPO Disruption: India's Call Center Future 54:17 - Competition, Moats, and the Long Game Karan Goel Aakrit Vaish Cartesia

Activate

12,489 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

Starting Tako was a fresh beginning for me. I wanted to apply what I had learned as a founder and to be part of the AI future. I wanted to do this based on humanistic values and beliefs, alongside formidable technical talent across Brazil and the US. AI occupies most of my thinking and I often return to this idea: we want an AI that amplifies the human spirit and that eliminates the work that suffocates the soul. Tako operates exactly on this second point by replacing bureaucracy with LLMs and code. Tako’s AI agents run payroll and workforce operations, with AI trained on Brazil’s labor laws. Today, we are launching our first agents. Brazil is a country of creative and entrepreneurial people. But it's also a place where paperwork, and regulations suffocate this potential every day. I remember leaving a meeting back in 2017 as I was launching Rappi and looking at a post of tangled electrical cables. I thought to myself: "This is how entrepreneurs feel when trying to build here." Tako is my call to action to change this. Technology is a tool to drive change and build new realities. AI can take over grunt work and simplify it on behalf of humans. As a foreigner who speaks the language, loves the culture and has lived through the pains of entrepreneurship here, I believe Brazil needs and deserves a new infrastructure to operate. It's an ambitious goal but Brazil will be better off when 20m companies and 50m workers run on Tako. We also raised $18m.
1:11

Starting Tako was a fresh beginning for me. I wanted to apply what I had learned as a founder and to be part of the AI future. I wanted to do this based on humanistic values and beliefs, alongside formidable technical talent across Brazil and the US. AI occupies most of my thinking and I often return to this idea: we want an AI that amplifies the human spirit and that eliminates the work that suffocates the soul. Tako operates exactly on this second point by replacing bureaucracy with LLMs and code. Tako’s AI agents run payroll and workforce operations, with AI trained on Brazil’s labor laws. Today, we are launching our first agents. Brazil is a country of creative and entrepreneurial people. But it's also a place where paperwork, and regulations suffocate this potential every day. I remember leaving a meeting back in 2017 as I was launching Rappi and looking at a post of tangled electrical cables. I thought to myself: "This is how entrepreneurs feel when trying to build here." Tako is my call to action to change this. Technology is a tool to drive change and build new realities. AI can take over grunt work and simplify it on behalf of humans. As a foreigner who speaks the language, loves the culture and has lived through the pains of entrepreneurship here, I believe Brazil needs and deserves a new infrastructure to operate. It's an ambitious goal but Brazil will be better off when 20m companies and 50m workers run on Tako. We also raised $18m.

Sebastian Mejia

13,914 просмотров • 11 месяцев назад

🎧 New The Peel episode: The $4 Trillion Business of Financial Crime Natasha Vernier is the Co-founder and CEO of Cable, the all-in-one effectiveness testing platform for financial services. Prior to Cable, Natasha joined UK neobank Monzo when it had less than 100 customers. She built and led Monzo's financial crime team for five years, and is arguably one of the most knowledgeable individuals in the world on financial crime - which amounts to over $4 trillion per year, or 4% of global GDP. Natasha started Cable in 2020 with her co-founder Katie Savitz, and has since raised over $16 million supported by investors like LocalGlobe, CRV, Stage 2, and Jump Capital. Topics discussed: - How crime is a $4 trillion market - Why we only catch 0.2% of financial crime - The reason banks are incentivized to stop fraud, but not crime - Why it's so hard to stop financial crimes - The $20 billion in crime committed on crypto rails in 2022 - The fastest growing types of fraud - Joining Monzo as one of the first employees and staying through a $4 billion valuation - What it’s like to be fully invested in a startup when you’re not a founder - Building Cable to enable regulatory and financial crime teams - Signing the first customer and raising a Pre-Seed round without a product - Why compliance officers want to buy complicated products - How Natasha diversified her cap table, raising a Seed round from CRV and a group of angels with broad skill sets, ethnicity, race, and sexuality - How she got two funds to pre-empt her Series A - Why founding a startup means getting punched in the face every day, and her biggest mistake was not enjoying the little things early on - The two founders she most looks up to - The one interview question she asks every candidate at Cable Stream here on X or grab a link to stream in the replies.
1:05:51

🎧 New The Peel episode: The $4 Trillion Business of Financial Crime Natasha Vernier is the Co-founder and CEO of Cable, the all-in-one effectiveness testing platform for financial services. Prior to Cable, Natasha joined UK neobank Monzo when it had less than 100 customers. She built and led Monzo's financial crime team for five years, and is arguably one of the most knowledgeable individuals in the world on financial crime - which amounts to over $4 trillion per year, or 4% of global GDP. Natasha started Cable in 2020 with her co-founder Katie Savitz, and has since raised over $16 million supported by investors like LocalGlobe, CRV, Stage 2, and Jump Capital. Topics discussed: - How crime is a $4 trillion market - Why we only catch 0.2% of financial crime - The reason banks are incentivized to stop fraud, but not crime - Why it's so hard to stop financial crimes - The $20 billion in crime committed on crypto rails in 2022 - The fastest growing types of fraud - Joining Monzo as one of the first employees and staying through a $4 billion valuation - What it’s like to be fully invested in a startup when you’re not a founder - Building Cable to enable regulatory and financial crime teams - Signing the first customer and raising a Pre-Seed round without a product - Why compliance officers want to buy complicated products - How Natasha diversified her cap table, raising a Seed round from CRV and a group of angels with broad skill sets, ethnicity, race, and sexuality - How she got two funds to pre-empt her Series A - Why founding a startup means getting punched in the face every day, and her biggest mistake was not enjoying the little things early on - The two founders she most looks up to - The one interview question she asks every candidate at Cable Stream here on X or grab a link to stream in the replies.

Turner Novak 🍌🧢

19,640 просмотров • 2 лет назад

we just raised another $25M after 10x'ing our ARR in 5 months. the crazy part is this almost never happened. 17 years ago, I watched Iron Man as a 10-year-old kid in Delhi. that night, I pulled my first all-nighter teaching myself to code. not because I wanted to build apps or make money. because I wanted to build Jarvis. my parents gave me 1 hour of screen time per day. so I coded in secret, sleeping every alternate night through middle school and high school. built 50+ apps. got a cease and desist from Google at age 12. all for this one obsession: making computers understand us like humans do. fast forward to today: - we've raised $81M total to build the voice operating system - growing revenue 40% month-over-month this year - 70% user retention after one year (unheard of in consumer) - teams at 270 of the Fortune 500 use Wispr Flow daily our Series A2 was led by Hans Tung at Notable Capital (who was an early investor in five companies that made it to $100B valuation like Slack, Tiktok, and Airbnb). we also brought on Steven Bartlett as an investor and partner. but here's what matters more than the money: we cracked voice input. not transcription - actual understanding. our users hit "send" in under 0.5 seconds without checking. they trust it blindly. that's never existed before. in a recent benchmark, Wispr came out as 3-4x more accurate than OpenAI, ElevenLabs, and Siri. and we're just getting started. voice input was step one. now we're building the assistant that actually does things for you. to my co-founder Sahaj Garg - there's no one else I'd rather build Jarvis with than my college roommate and closest friend. to our team pulling all-nighters and shipping magic - you're the reason that 10-year-old kid's dream is becoming real. we're hiring cracked engineers and growth marketers who want to build the future of human-computer interaction. the keyboard had a good 150-year run. time to build what comes next. PS: like, retweet, and bookmark to get wispr flow for free for 3 months ❤️ — Written with Wispr Flow
2:00

we just raised another $25M after 10x'ing our ARR in 5 months. the crazy part is this almost never happened. 17 years ago, I watched Iron Man as a 10-year-old kid in Delhi. that night, I pulled my first all-nighter teaching myself to code. not because I wanted to build apps or make money. because I wanted to build Jarvis. my parents gave me 1 hour of screen time per day. so I coded in secret, sleeping every alternate night through middle school and high school. built 50+ apps. got a cease and desist from Google at age 12. all for this one obsession: making computers understand us like humans do. fast forward to today: - we've raised $81M total to build the voice operating system - growing revenue 40% month-over-month this year - 70% user retention after one year (unheard of in consumer) - teams at 270 of the Fortune 500 use Wispr Flow daily our Series A2 was led by Hans Tung at Notable Capital (who was an early investor in five companies that made it to $100B valuation like Slack, Tiktok, and Airbnb). we also brought on Steven Bartlett as an investor and partner. but here's what matters more than the money: we cracked voice input. not transcription - actual understanding. our users hit "send" in under 0.5 seconds without checking. they trust it blindly. that's never existed before. in a recent benchmark, Wispr came out as 3-4x more accurate than OpenAI, ElevenLabs, and Siri. and we're just getting started. voice input was step one. now we're building the assistant that actually does things for you. to my co-founder Sahaj Garg - there's no one else I'd rather build Jarvis with than my college roommate and closest friend. to our team pulling all-nighters and shipping magic - you're the reason that 10-year-old kid's dream is becoming real. we're hiring cracked engineers and growth marketers who want to build the future of human-computer interaction. the keyboard had a good 150-year run. time to build what comes next. PS: like, retweet, and bookmark to get wispr flow for free for 3 months ❤️ — Written with Wispr Flow

Tanay Kothari

904,393 просмотров • 8 месяцев назад