Gradient

Nine years. Same conviction. Fund 5.

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.

Pic from Lambda's booth at NIPS 2017. @chuanli11 and I built our booth with parts from Walmart and IKEA. At that time, nearly a decade ago, Lambda was at a $3M revenue run rate yet we remained extremely frugal. Everybody else had these super fancy and expensive booths. When we first hung the black sheet over the IKEA bookshelves, we realized that it was wrinkly. So, we took it back to the hotel room and ironed it out so that it draped nicely. There's some sort of lesson there about caring about the details even when you don't have a lot of resources. I also used to personally hand out $2,000 off discounted quotes for conference attendees. Video below. I cringe a bit looking at this but I know that's the kind of hustle that is required to make it. If the flier led to a purchase, it often meant winning a customer for life. So the math works out. I'm sure some people on X still remember our fliers. I don't know who needs to see this, maybe it's a founder out there, maybe it's a future or current Lambda team member. I hope that the message of frugality, not being afraid of putting yourself out there, and caring deeply helps somebody.

Folks… Why are we still using .env files?? infisical run — npm run dev Thank me later.

Huge congrats to the @krea_ai team on cracking the Forbes AI 50!

Congrats to the Helical team on their $10M seed round from @GradientVC @redalpine @BoxGroup! A diverse set of bio foundation models have been developed to aid with computational tasks that lie on the path from research hypothesis to pharmaceutical program. Helical has built the interface to unify access to these models and the infrastructure to run in-silico experiments at scale.

Huge congrats to @calcsam and team @mastra on raising a $22M Series A led by @natalievais @sparkcapital! We @GradientVC were lucky enough to lead the seed and continue to be blown away by all the progress and growth 🚀

The web was built for humans. AI agents are exposing the limits of that design. From MFA and CAPTCHAs to session timeouts and impossible travel alerts, much of the internet still assumes the user is a person. Our latest from @Cdpetty on why web auth is becoming a major bottleneck: gradient.com/blog/posts/why…

Congrats to the @patlytics team on their $40M Series B! @GradientVC @8VC @SignalFire @N47 more from @BLaw: news.bloomberglaw.com/legal-ops-and-…

Honored to be included! Appreciate this amazing community! 🙌 cc @GradientVC

Infisical signups have grown 46% MoM (up from 25% last month)