General Catalyst

"Even if your sole mission was to make ChatGPT the best model possible for you, your efforts would be pretty much futile. The next generation comes and washes out all the context engineering and sticky notes you prepared." Every AI model starts each conversation from scratch, re-reading the same files and seeing only sticky notes about you and your work. @dan_biderman left academia to build @EngramLab so AI can truly remember your world. We've backed Engram since its first round and are proud to support its $98M launch out of stealth. Congratulations to Dan, @EyubogluSabri, @jxmnop, @realJessyLin, @scott_linderman, Chris Ré, and the Engram team. Watch @marcbhargava's full conversation with Dan. 00:00 — Meet Dan and the Engram Story 00:25 — From Studying Brains to Building Them 02:10 — Building the Founding Team 05:20 — Why Every AI Model Starts From Scratch 07:44 — Building a Product in a Few Months 11:39 — Cutting Inference Tokens 10–100x 13:51 — The Quality Payoff Beyond Cost Savings 15:43 — Why This Couldn't Have Worked a Year Ago 18:22 — Distilling All of Microsoft and Slack Into a Brain 21:40 — Partnering With Giants as a Months-Old Startup 23:39 — The Self-Serve Bet in a Forward-Deployed World 33:44 — Models That Learn Like a Tamagotchi 34:44 — What Keeps Him Up at Night

Why we invested by @marcbhargava & @max_rimpel: generalcatalyst.com/stories/our-in…

"Even if your sole mission was to make ChatGPT the best model possible for you, your efforts would be pretty much futile. The next generation comes and washes out all the context engineering and sticky notes you prepared." Every AI model starts each conversation from scratch, re-reading the same files and seeing only sticky notes about you and your work. @dan_biderman left academia to build @EngramLab so AI can truly remember your world. We've backed Engram since its first round and are proud to support its $98M launch out of stealth. Congratulations to Dan, @EyubogluSabri, @jxmnop, @realJessyLin, @scott_linderman, Chris Ré, and the Engram team. Watch @marcbhargava's full conversation with Dan. 00:00 — Meet Dan and the Engram Story 00:25 — From Studying Brains to Building Them 02:10 — Building the Founding Team 05:20 — Why Every AI Model Starts From Scratch 07:44 — Building a Product in a Few Months 11:39 — Cutting Inference Tokens 10–100x 13:51 — The Quality Payoff Beyond Cost Savings 15:43 — Why This Couldn't Have Worked a Year Ago 18:22 — Distilling All of Microsoft and Slack Into a Brain 21:40 — Partnering With Giants as a Months-Old Startup 23:39 — The Self-Serve Bet in a Forward-Deployed World 33:44 — Models That Learn Like a Tamagotchi 34:44 — What Keeps Him Up at Night

"Bad ideas that turn good is where the alpha is." Nearly every investor told @l3amm usage-based billing was a terrible idea, and he built @getmetronome anyway. They saw what others couldn’t at exactly the right time. Metronome became the billing system behind some of the biggest names in AI, and @stripe acquired it earlier this year. Watch GC's @quentinclark in conversation with Scott. Chapters 00:00 — Meeting Scott at Dropbox 01:36 — Why Speed and Correctness Go Together 04:18 — Billing Was the Intern Project 06:09 — Betting Half of Software Goes Usage-Based 10:51 — Rejection Road Trip 12:24 — The Only Term Sheet They Got 16:44 — Refusing to Ship a Wrong Invoice 22:24 — Becoming CEO Overnight 27:06 — When Usage Went Exponential 31:45 — Choosing Customers Who Set the Bar 36:50 — Answering the Stripe Call

“If the technology that helps us be competitive in manufacturing comes from an adversarial country, we have a serious problem.” @standardbots is building the robots that bring American manufacturing back, designed so any worker can train them. We’re proud to double down on their $200M Series C. Congratulations to the entire team. Watch GC's @quentinclark in conversation with @evanbeard. Chapters 00:00 — CRM to CNC 02:52 — What 100 Customers Wanted 05:43 — The Garage Years 12:10 — Start Small to Win Big 14:18 — Closing the Manufacturing Gap 19:13 — Designing for the Worker 25:07 — How AI Changes Robotics 36:47 — Reigniting American Industry 38:09 — “The Making of the Product Is a Product” 39:55 — Should the US Ban Chinese Robots? 43:28 — The Physical AI Moment 48:11 — Robots Everywhere in Five Years 54:50 — Inspiring Tinkerers

Today, Ramp raised $750M at a $44B valuation. Last time we grew this fast, we were 1/20th the size. For 2000 years, business was built on two pillars. Today, a third: intelligence. It’s your least governed cost. It’s also your single greatest opportunity.

Martin Scorsese is an advisor to Black Forest Labs. He's spent six decades shaping how the world sees stories. Now he's helping us shape visual intelligence with human taste and craft at the center. We sat down with him for a working storyboarding session using FLUX.

The momentum of @AnthropicAI is generational. Grateful to be part of this journey. Onward.

"There is no truth out there. If the truth is out there, you wouldn't reinvent things or think about things differently." That mindset led @maltekosub and @o_stefan to build @parloa_ai on voice when everyone said chat would change everything, and to turn down $7.7M to keep building. Watch GC's @max_rimpel in conversation with Malte. Chapters 00:00 — Introduction 00:22 — The 15-Year-Old Entrepreneur 01:26 — Betting on Voice Before Anyone Else 03:50 — Turning Down $7.7M 05:32 — Burning It Down and Building from Scratch 08:26 — Navigating Constant Reinvention 09:35 — One Personal AI Agent for Every Customer 11:47 — Partnering with SAP 12:43 — The European Advantage 16:22 — There Is No Truth Out There 17:52 — Hiring People Who “Go To Olympia”

1/ We’ve raised over $1B at a $26B valuation, led by @Lux_Capital, @generalcatalyst, and @8vc. Our enterprise usage has grown >10x since the start of this year, and our run-rate revenue grew to $492 M. We launched Devin two years ago as the first AI software engineer. Since then, cloud agents have gone from niche to mainstream, and today they are the fastest growing way to create software.

Full list: forbes.com/lists/midas/

.@htaneja and @jcfurstenberg have been named to the @Forbes Midas List this year, Hemant for the 10th consecutive year. We exist to back founders working on the big, right problems and to build a company worthy of their ambition. From @AnthropicAI, @AppliedInt, and @deel to @HelsingAI, @WeAreLegora, @stripe, and @ZeptoNow, they have shown up, from seed to scale. Congratulations to both.

“The digital world lacks physical information. The physical world lacks dense digital information. Games perfectly merge these two together, and we believe that’s just the next phase of pretraining.” Every few weeks @gen_intuition ships new emergent capabilities that are orthogonal to anything you see in the LLM world. Watch GC’s @max_rimpel in conversation with @PimDeWitte. Chapters 00:00 — Introduction 00:10 — The World's Biggest Private RuneScape Server 03:09 — From RuneScape to Ebola 07:41 — Mapping the Unmappable 09:47 — Why LLMs Can't See the World 13:45 — The Accidental Foundation of General Intuition 19:10 — Turning Down a Life-Changing Acquisition Offer 21:12 — One Foot in Front of the Other 24:04 — Atoms to Atoms 27:33 — The Talent Flywheel 30:20 — Protecting the Last Weird Corner of the Internet

Meet GC

Q1 review in full: hemant-taneja.com

"Our collective, sector wide ambition is being constrained by our own behavior.” @htaneja's inaugural quarterly review is a reflection on building the AI era with our souls intact. It explores @percepta's LLM-as-computer breakthrough, the Customer Value Fund reaching investment grade, our $5 billion commitment to India over the next 5 years, and more.

BREAKING: General Catalyst Releases First-Ever Quarterly Review Hemant Taneja (@htaneja), CEO of @generalcatalyst Is GC going public?? We cover: - GC’s $43B ecosystem - Why the software buyout model is broken - Anthropic’s Series G at $380B - $5B India commitment - Buying Summa Health, hospital in Akron - Anthropic–DoW controversy, Mythos & Project Glasswing - @nikesharora joining the GC board - “Tech Lash 2.0.” HUGE thank you to @deel Co-Founder & CRO @shuooo Wang for the introduction to Reggie & the GC team, I am SO happy we were able to make this happen so quickly! What a treat. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Hemant Taneja, CEO at General Catalyst (01:21) Present state of General Catalyst (05:08) Seed, Creation & the Customer Value Fund (06:54) The purpose behind GC’s quarterly review (12:26) The biggest AI themes right now (15:06) How AI is changing investing decisions (19:25) Why seed & Series G require the same conviction (22:55) Why does he holds two titles at once? (25:17) Why Silicon Valley glorifies the wrong founders (27:52) Building an AI-native hospital (30:20) Managing funds through bubbles & hype cycles (33:13) How funds sell ownership stakes (34:59) Why the software buyout model is broken (38:44) Vista's new software buyout debt fund (39:20) Global Resilience vs. American Dynamism (41:49) GC’s $5B bet on India (45:48) What global investing teaches you (47:09) The four forces of tech lash (50:12) Anthropic, Mythos & the Pentagon (54:06) Is GC going public? (55:26) The Puka shell necklace era

I've been posting less and writing more. I've found it helpful to slow everything down and take the time for proper reflection. Today I'm putting out a review of the last quarter: Growing AI Anxiety Turning LLMs into Computers Anthropic and the Department of War Iranian Conflict The Incoming Techlash It's easy to feel like the response to this is for tech to "get tough" But I want to encourage the next generation to do something simple: keep your soul

“If we’re going to bend the cost curve in healthcare and change the way people access care, we need to reimagine things from first principles. That’s what got us to where we are today: we’re an operating system for health plans.” We are leading @YuzuHealthInc's $35M Series A to help catalyze more innovation in health insurance. Congrats to @maxkauderer, @up_to_nonsense, @EryDayImRusslen and the team. Watch GC's Alex Tran in conversation with Max and Ryan.

1/4 LLMs solve research grade math problems but struggle with basic calculations. We bridge this gap by turning them to computers. We built a computer INSIDE a transformer that can run programs for millions of steps in seconds solving even the hardest Sudokus with 100% accuracy

Navy submarine officer turned founder @CameronLMcCord: "When you're 484 days underwater, you need to feel motivated and understand how what you're doing plays into a bigger picture. That's something I always try to do at @Nominal_io." The bigger picture is global resilience. Nominal is the infrastructure for the teams building for the physical world. We led Nominal's Series A and are doubling down on their $80M round led by @foundersfund at a $1B valuation. All systems Nominal. Watch GC's Paul Kwan in conversation with Cameron.