Gradient

Nine years. Same conviction. Fund 5.

Big news: StackAI is joining @asana!  We created StackAI to empower enterprises with secure, powerful agentic workflows that automate manual processes; Asana created the operating system for human-agent teams.  Now, we're building the place where humans and AI agents execute across every system a business runs on. Same product, same team, same brand, and way more fuel. We're just getting started. 🚀

By choosing @Linkup_platform as web search layer, @WeAreLegora gets a dedicated endpoint per jurisdiction, provisioned on local infrastructure as well as the Linkup state-of-the-art results and zero tolerance for hallucination. Read the full story below 👇

SITUATION EXPLAINED: Oura filed confidentially for a US initial public offering. We asked Series B investor in Oura @darian314 to break it down: "The interesting thing about Oura is the amount of technology that went into the ring, even today, is quite significant." "It was hard to copy the battery, getting the battery to sort of curve in the right way, ensuring quality control of the ring manufacturing, getting all the sensors in that form factor. It was not something that could easily be copied." "We've actually looked at a number of [wearables companies], but in general, it, it's just not a great space to invest in because the revenue multiples are usually not that, not that high." "In Oura's case, I think that the business will do well because the quality of the data that they have, the app experience, and the brand itself is significantly more coveted than any other brand I've seen in the wearables market besides maybe the Apple Watch."

1/ Honored to be named #10 on @BusinessInsider's Seed 100 list of the best early-stage investors of 2026! #10.-darian-shirazi" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">businessinsider.com/seed-100-best-… A few thoughts on what this really means 👇

We started Emdash with two beliefs, (1) provider-agnosticism wins, (2) pure CLI gives flexibility. Many, outside the labs, have followed suit and are converging on our beliefs. The more pricing and packaging changes across the labs, the more important these beliefs become. Todays pricing update doesn't affect Emdash users, because they use Claude through the CLI with full functionality. But if it would, our users could switch to whatever pasture is greenest then, without upheaving their workflows.

Is compute really the biggest hurdle in the AI race? Marc Boroditsky, CRO of @nebiusai, Nick Robbins, VP of Corporate Development @CoreWeave, and Charles Fisher, CFO @LambdaAPI argue that the focus is shifting. While the industry has been obsessed with GPU supply, “capital—not compute—is emerging as the primary bottleneck in the AI build-out”. More from our Financing the AI Revolution event: thein.fo/3OZ67Y5

WE RAISED OUR SERIES A!!! 🎉 🚀 Today, we’re thrilled to announce our Series A, bringing @FazeshiftHQs total funding to $22M. Accounts receivable is still one of the most manual, painful workflows inside modern companies. It lives in spreadsheets, email threads, and disconnected systems – and it slows down how businesses get paid. That’s exactly why we built Fazeshift: an AI-native platform that automates and scales AR, helping finance teams move faster, operate with clarity, and unlock cash flow. Since we kicked things off in 2024, the team has executed relentlessly: ✔️ 12x revenue growth ✔️ 8 unicorns now using Fazeshift ✔️ Team grew from 2 → 26 ✔️ Opened our SF HQ and NYC office This milestone is a reflection of the people behind it, and it gives us the ability to invest more aggressively in our AI agent’s capabilities. To our investors, thank you for your belief and partnership. This financing ranks well above the typical Series A, reflecting strong investor conviction in the shift toward AI-native finance infrastructure. F-Prime, @GradientVC , @ycombinator, @0xpioneer_fund, Phoenix Fund, Wayfinder, @RitualVC , @2048vc , The Graduate Syndicate, Vulcan Partners, and incredible angels including Sandor Palfy, Kulveer Taggar, Richard Aberman, Terrence Rohan, Rob Biederman, Mike MacCombie. To our customers, thank you for trusting us with something so critical. You’re trusting us with how your business gets paid, and we don’t take that lightly. And to @0xTimmyG and our team, it’s an absolute privilege to build alongside you. We’re just getting started. This raise isn’t the finish line, it’s fuel. Let’s go do this thing! Read the full story from @bayareawriter in @crunchbase (link in comments).

Congrats @Linkup_platform!

Today, we announced @enzo_health's $26M Seed + Series A raise (@znewm14 + @danieldconger) The U.S. is aging fast, and our healthcare system is shifting to keep up. Home health spend is projected to reach $317BN by 2033. While we've seen incredible AI tools designed for clinicians in hospitals and private practices, the most popular systems in home health were designed in the 90's, and many run on-prem. This is why we led Enzo's seed round in 2024. Since then, Enzo has grown revenue by 40X. The demand from customers and ROI in this space is impressive, but agencies are increasingly tired of point solutions that don't speak together. Enzo has built a set of solutions that all work in tandem to automate workflows with context. Your AI intake tool actually integrates with your clinician's scribe in the field and with your back office QA workflow. Leading home health agencies are now powered by Enzo, and we're excited about this $20M Series A led by our friends @N47capital @vcheng11 @MatthewTCowan gradient.com/blog/posts/enz…

Is the upcoming SpaceX mega-IPO overvalued? @darian314, Managing Partner at @GradientVC, breaks down the math: “If you have a $1.75 trillion market cap for SpaceX when the business is doing somewhere between $20 and $25 billion in revenue, I think that's a pretty rich multiple.” “Probably not a lot of upside for the IPO participants."

highlight of the week was the extensive conversation about ceramics and pottery with @johncoogan on @tbpn

🚨 BREAKING: Agent Vault is on the front page of HN! What it is: An open source HTTP proxy and vault for AI agents built by @infisical. Why we made it: AI agents can be prompt injected into leaking credentials. This is ... BAD. How it works: > You store credentials in Agent Vault and define which services (e.g. api.stripe.com) can be reached through it + which credentials should be appended to proxied requests. > You set HTTPS_PROXY environment variable in your agent's environment and configure it to trust the Agent Vault certificate authority. > Agents like Claude Code, OpenClaw, custom agents etc. automatically route traffic through it. > Agent Vault does credential brokering for you. If you're using a coding agent and want to try this out quickly on your local, you can spin up an instance of Agent Vault and separately run this command to start a routed session: agent-vault run -- claude This takes care of all the environment setup for you and Claude will start routing traffic through Agent Vault going forward. Note that this by itself is not yet secure because the agent can unset the variable but you'll be hearing more on this soon :) In case, you missed it you might want to check a few helpful links in this thread about Agent Vault 🧵

We're at @iclr_conf #ICLR2026 this year with 12 papers and two workshops. Over 20 collaborators across @Stanford, @CarnegieMellon, @BerkeleyRDI, @Google, @nvidia, and @Microsoft helped make this work happen.

Respan Launch Week, Day 4: Introducing Respan Integrations Most teams still spend days setting up observability. That’s why we invested heavily in Respan Integrations. We support major LLM and agent frameworks like OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, LangChain, Vercel AI, and Pydantic AI, with more being added. Run 'npx [at]respan/cli setup' and start tracing in minutes, not days.

.@darian314 worries the promise of landing a tech job after college is at risk. "College, especially liberal arts, was formed for the process of being creative, thinking, philosophy, and writing. We've told people that they can go to college and get a good job at a tech company. I think that's in jeopardy currently." "Today, the mid-level engineers are managing coding agents in English. They're not even coding. At the senior level, the engineers are probably okay because we do need more code reviews and evaluations. But for entry-level positions, we've told a whole generation, including my generation, that they should go to college when I don't think that's necessary." "My hope is that we focus more on real trades like welding, plumbing, ceramics, and pottery. These are going to be more respected lines of work in the future as knowledge work gets completely replaced by AI." "I generally do worry about this because I don't know if colleges should be teaching computer science to everybody." "That being said, I think everyone should take a course to understand how AI and LLMs actually work. I think everyone should do their best to read the Transformer paper because it's kind of the Magna Carta of this generation."

Gradient GP @darian314 is bullish on solo GPs, but only ones that raise sub-$50M funds. "I think that the sub-$50M solo GP is a great business. If you can raise the money, you can get allocation in rounds. You don't have to compete. It's when you get above $50M that it becomes really challenging because you're going to be ownership-constrained. You're competing against someone like us. We write larger checks." "It's going to be really rare for solo GPs to grow fund size well beyond that. So you have to be comfortable being a fund of one with no help. And you have to be, because your fee structure is not going to be able to support much more than that." "But I am bullish on it — especially with AI tools. You can really diligence companies and run your back office entirely without needing other people." "[Solo GPs] have struggled to raise more recently. LPs are not deploying capital at the pace they were when solo GPs were breaking out in 2021 and 2022. I think you're going to see a lot of them join funds, and a lot of the really good ones with good returns will raise their next fund."

Happy Wednesday. On today's show: - @ankurnagpal (USVC) - @avlok (AngelList) - @achakravarthy12 (Adobe) - @ngavini (Extra) - @joelhedwards (Zanskar) - @darian314 (Gradient) - Renen Hallak (VAST Data) See you on the stream.

The @infisical team just launched the most exciting product in agent authentication - a vault & credential proxy for agents that is open source. I've been a big believer for years that enterprise secrets mgmt needs to be open source and Infisical's new Agent Vault is the perfect extension of this thinking to the agentic world.