8VC

There's a reason @cognition keeps winning deals against companies 10x their size. @vvkgopalan sat down with @theodormarcu, @bryceehunt and @moritz_stephan (all former founders!) to discuss hiring philosophy, infinity stories, enterprise coding agents, and what it actually takes to compete. (00:00) Introduction (03:45) Cognition team & hiring philosophy (06:00) Infinity stories (13:15) Product surface area and future goals (17:20) Activation energy, experimentation, and customer-driven innovation (19:00) Adoption, operational changes, and ownership (22:05) Vibe coding hot takes (24:15) AI-first engineering organizations and managing AI agents (28:40) Future of software engineering roles and misconceptions about Devin (30:00) Model development, learnings, and Cognition's journey in vertical integration (38:10) What should you do as a new grad?

Cognition is partnering with @MercedesBenz to accelerate software engineering across their global engineering teams, representing one of the most extensive deployments of AI software engineering in the automotive industry to date. @ScottWu46 sat down with Katrin Lehmann, Mercedes-Benz CIO, to discuss the work:

Movie night at our sf office with our friends at @browserbase, may be the beginning of a fun new tradition.

We at @8vc are excited to lead the seed round for Valius Sciences. When @sytses was diagnosed with cancer, he didn’t just follow the standard of care. Instead, he teamed up with @JAC0BSTERN and ran maximal diagnostics (single-cell, bulk DNA/RNA, imaging) then used it to drive treatment decisions. It worked. But few people have the resources to assemble a team of scientists and oncologists to interpret data in the same way. Valius is scaling up Sid's approach to help more patients find actionable markers not identified by standard diagnostics. Read more about Valius here: valiussciences.com/news-insights/…

The era of the agentic systems integrator has arrived. Thrilled to lead @RilianTech's seed funding, and support their expansion as a critical security partner to the US, GCC, and numerous allied nations.

Adversaries aren't slowing down. Neither are we. Rilian has raised $17.5M in seed and seed extension funding. Built by practitioners, for practitioners. 🔗businesswire.com/news/home/2026…

Software engineering was the first function to get a digital employee. Finance is next. Proud to partner with @tanujt, Mani, and @kos_ai_inc — the world's first AI accountant, purpose-built for the finance backbone of America's reindustrialization. More on why we invested: 8vc.com/resources/intr…

800-page invoice. Reviewed in seconds. By an employee that doesn't exist. Meet @kos_ai_inc . The world's first virtual finance employee. Own computer. Own software seats. Own identity in the org chart. You talk to it over email, Teams, Slack, Zoom. Teach it new workflows over screenshare like a new hire. Datacenters. Energy. Defense. Factories. @8VC @xyz_vc @MVPVentures @kos_ai_inc kos.ai

@tanujt @kos_ai_inc 🚀

Today we're announcing $95M in Series C funding led by @ValorEP and the Valor Atreides AI Fund, with participation from @8VC, @foundersfund, @IndexVentures, @JPMorgan Growth Equity Partners, and Tao Capital Partners. We're building the intelligence layer for the physical economy.

EPISODE 150: How AI Is Transforming Diligence, Decision-Making & the Future of Investing @JTLonsdale sits down with @jmelaskyriazi, co-founder & CEO of @metrics_co (00:00) Episode intro  (02:10) Academia to investor and founder  (08:00) The pain point that led to Standard Metrics (12:10) How AI is transforming diligence, data collection & VC (14:20) AI as a technical copilot (17:10) AI analyst vs Human in the loop (19:20) Parsing pitch decks and new AI tools  (23:10) How AI search is changing marketing  (28:30) Powerful new capabilities and workflows  (33:47) How quickly is everything changing?

Anthropic’s Opus 4.7 just seized the #1 spot on the Vals Index with a score of 71.4%, a massive jump from the previous best (67.7%). It also ranks #1 on Vibe Code Bench, Vals Multimodal, Finance Agent, Mortgage Tax, SAGE, SWE-Bench, and Terminal Bench 2.

There's a distinction most people miss about AI coding agents. They assume all agents are basically the same and some just run in the cloud for convenience. But local and cloud agents are as different as writing code yourself and hiring someone to write it for you. A local agent works alongside you. It's in your editor, sees what you see, and waits for you on every step. It's a very good pair programmer, but when you close the laptop, it stops. The ceiling on a local agent is your attention. A cloud agent is a different thing entirely. It has its own machine and its own environment. You can hand it a task and it goes and it just does it. It can work for hours, open PRs, run tests, QAs its own work using computer use, and tells you when it's done. We built Devin to be the second thing. You can just close your laptop and grab a cup of coffee while Devin is working in the background. The difference is so powerful that people get addicted to it. For example, the best engineers at Cognition (folks like @moritz_stephan and @premqnair) can't stand going to sleep or leaving their laptops without starting a few Devins. The problem is that until now, local and cloud agents lived in completely different worlds. You'd plan something in your editor, context-switch to Devin, wait for the PR, then context-switch back to touch it up locally if you needed to. Windsurf 2.0 puts the whole loop in one place. We built an Agent Command Center so you can manage all your agents - local and cloud - from one place.

Excited to share what I've been putting together with the wonderful help of @bantervc, @8vc, @lowercarbon, and others! El Segundo interns are the future founders of America's most consequential companies. Gundo Grants exists to bring them together... and save some $ on rent :)

We hit 99% AI adoption at @tryramp but it wasn't enough. Most people were still stuck in a chat window while power users ran laps around them, and teaching everyone how to use the terminal wasn’t going to scale. So we built Glass: our own AI productivity suite on @AnthropicAI's Claude Agent SDK with 700 daily active users in one month. We don't believe in lowering the ceiling. We believe in raising the floor.

@MxMnr See you there 🫡

@8vc 🔥 Looking forward to the design meetup this evening

Here is a look behind the curtain of some of work currently brewing in our Design Lab. As of this week our design team has grown to 8, our favorite number. If you’re a designer in Austin we’re hosting a design meetup this evening, come out and talk shop with us.

Join the waitlist to our Austin Design Meetup here: gatsby.events/8vc/rsvp/regis…

Michael is building Bobyard, one of my favorite AI platforms and new high-growth companies. Really cool to see what’s now possible to support the trades, and increase productivity in construction.

This is really impressive! With the proper harnesses, and some guidance, we were actually able to find that same FreeBSD zero-day using Sonnet 4.6.

@maya_l39 @vercel Amped for this summer!

can't believe my notion internship is already over! i'll miss everyone there so much <3 next up: @vercel, @8vc fellowship, and hopefully probably graduating 😬