IVP

Today marks the beginning of a new era. Introducing: Cowboy Space Corporation. We are building orbital infrastructure for the AI era: a fully integrated system of rockets and satellites designed to deliver high-performance compute and optical data transmission directly from Low Earth Orbit.

AI infrastructure is running into a physical constraint: power. That’s what drew us to @CowboySpaceCorp. The company is solving that head-on by building a power grid in space. 🚀 More on why we're backing the Series B: ivp.com/content/the-su…

Been an interesting past few weeks -- there were 5 major supply chain attacks, but @chainguard_dev customers were protected from each one. @lorenc_dan has been preparing for this. What he once called "a safe source for open source" is now a trust layer for the AI era. It's what we need as AI accelerates both the pace of software development and software supply chain attacks. Chainguard is making its Libraries + Actions product free for the next 90 days @ chainguard.dev

@wonderful_ai 🤝 @McKinsey x @quantumblack McKinsey turns AI ambition into strategy. Wonderful turns strategy into agents in production. See how our new partnership helps enterprises get out of pilot purgatory: mckinsey.com/capabilities/t…

Last month proved that your security is only as strong as your weakest dependency. The attacks against Trivy, LiteLLM and axios showed that you can’t patch and scan your way out of a broken trust model. We took an ad out in the @BostonGlobe to share our POV.

BREAKING: WHOOP RAISES $575M AT $10.1B VALUATION  I am pleased to announce that we’ve raised $575M at a $10.1B valuation to accelerate our mission of unlocking human performance and healthspan globally. This round was led by Collaborative Fund with participation from 2PointZero Group, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Mubadala Investment Company, Abbott, Mayo Clinic, Macquarie Capital, Glade Brook, B-Flexion, IVP, Foundry, Accomplice, Affinity Partners, Promus Ventures, and Bullhound Capital alongside a group of individual investors including Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, Rory McIlroy, Virgil van Dijk, and Mathieu van der Poel. This investor group and this moment reflect a powerful evolution underway for Whoop and the broader healthcare market. Whoop was born in performance - trusted by the best athletes in the world to train, recover, and compete at the highest level. That foundation remains core to who we are. You see that in the iconic athlete investors joining this round.  But it also represents our push into broader health.  In the past 12 months, WHOOP has received medical clearances, launched blood testing, and created a platform that has saved lives. Abbott and Mayo Clinic - two of the most respected and influential institutions in global healthcare - are now investors in Whoop. These are organizations that have shaped modern medicine. Their decision to partner with us is a clear validation of where our technology is headed. Healthcare systems around the world are reactive. For too long, they have waited for people to get sick, then intervene. Chronic disease is rising and costs continue to climb. At Whoop, we believe the future looks fundamentally different. We are building the most powerful, personal, preventive health platform in the world - powered by continuous biometric data, advanced analytics, and AI to help people understand their bodies and improve their health in real time. I am grateful to our team, our members, and our partners for believing in this vision. I’ve been building this company for 14 years and I’ve never been more excited for the future.

What’s it like building at Abridge? “It feels like the beginning of the Internet… It’s love for software that I have never seen.” Watch to see what our builders say about working at Abridge. We’re fortunate to be backed by investors who share our vision, including @a16z @eladgil @khoslaventures @NVIDIA Ventures @IVP @SVAngel @lightspeedvp @Redpoint @sparkcapital @BessemerVP @usv We’re hiring in SF!

We’ve raised our $150 Million Series B round at a $2 Billion valuation. Our investors @insightpartners , @IndexVentures , @IVP, @BessemerVP, and @VineVenturesLP are all tripling down on their conviction in Wonderful’s platform and hyper-local operating model, as we continue deploying production-grade agents across our growing customer base in 30+ countries. And, we’re hiring globally (a lot): Wonderful.ai

Had a great chat with @hwchase17 at @LangChain's first all-company offsite. We got into something I think every scaling founder needs to hear. An astute LangChain employee asked: “Isn't shipping quickly at odds with craftsmanship and product quality?” My counterintuitive answer: No—speed to customer hands improves quality. The sooner users touch your product, the sooner you know if you're building the right thing and the sooner you find bugs. Quality comes from contact with reality, not longer internal bake times. Playing it safe can actually kill product quality at growing companies. Teams keep iterating on fixes and small features internally, but nothing ships for months and the really big, new roadmap item gets bogged down in red tape and death-by-committee. We saw this firsthand at @coinbase . After the 2017 crypto boom, product velocity stalled in 2018 as headcount grew quickly and the company focused on infrastructure (eg, keeping the site up and ready for scale) and navigating regulatory ambiguity (eg, avoiding all risk). It took @brian_armstrong and @balajis cutting through the red tape to get back to shipping. Whenever they were told something would take 6 months or “is not possible” they kept asking “Why?” until they found the root cause. Turned out customers cared more about having new tokens to trade than the 6th nine of uptime. For Series B founders, the #1 thing to protect as you scale is product velocity on legit new product (not just iterating existing features). Growth brings bureaucracy. Your job is to cut through it.

Presentations are one of the most important ways we communicate at work; they also take an inordinate amount of time and resources to create. (Personal note: I have gotten so bad and slow at the process of making slide presentations and memos over the years as my i-banking skills fade into oblivion…) That’s why we at @IVP partnered with @GammaApp, which will help teams think more and format less. @thisisgrantlee lived slide deck problems firsthand, watching great ideas get diluted by bad tools and slow builds in Google Slides. Rather than accept the friction as inevitable, @thisisgrantlee, @jamisonfox and @thatsjonsense decided to rebuild the workflow from the ground up with Gamma. With Gamma’s AI presentation design tools, content is always the user’s primary focus. You can stop tinkering and spend more time making your thoughts more compelling. Just clear thinking turned into polished storytelling, every time. Slides? Document? PDF? Gorgeous website? Yes to all! Without any additional work. Read more about our investment in @GammaApp here: ivp.com/content/gamma-…

Most slide decks slow teams down; @GammaApp does the opposite. By removing the friction of formatting and putting ideas first, Gamma helps teams communicate clearly and move faster. More about our investment in Gamma: ivp.com/content/gamma-…

🔥 𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗟𝗼𝗴𝘀 𝗔𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀 $𝟲𝟬 𝗠𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝗦𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗕 𝗙𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 One year ago today, we announced our Series A. Since then, we have seen 𝟭𝟰𝘅 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘂𝗲 𝗴𝗿𝗼𝘄𝘁𝗵 and now serve ~100 carriers, freight brokers, shippers, insurance companies, ports, and law enforcement orgs with our 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝗰𝗸 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲™ platform. We are the trusted source of ground truth in the trucking industry, and each day our nationwide network of sensors helps combat fraud, recover assets, source quality carriers, and unveil shipper lanes. 𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝗰𝗮𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴... GenLogs is now leveraging satellites, IoT devices, financial streams, and open-source datasets to expand the scope and scale of our market insights. We are taking the U.S. Intelligence Community's playbook and applying it to the trucking industry to keep the bad actors out so the good guys can flourish. 𝗪𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘂𝗻𝗯𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝘀𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗹𝘆 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗼𝗿𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱 𝘀𝗮𝗳𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗿! Check out the video in the comments 👇

BIG NEWS: We’ve formally agreed to acquire @Capterra, @SoftwareAdvice, and @GetApp from @Gartner_inc! 🎉 By uniting four of the top B2B software review platforms, we’re building the data foundation for B2B software in the age of AI while simplifying the journey for buyers and fueling growth for sellers. 💪 What does that look like? 👀Check out the full story from our CEO here: company.g2.com/news/g2-acquir…

We’re thrilled to announce that we have raised $300M at a $5B valuation. The round is led by IVP and CapitalG, both doubling down on their investment in Baseten, and joined by 01A, Altimeter, Battery Ventures, BOND, BoxGroup, Blackbird Ventures, Conviction, Greylock, and NVIDIA. Read more here: baseten.co/blog/announcin…

I’ve been in venture capital for ~2 decades and have sat on many boards, and I’ve never seen the kind of transformation @PodiumHQ just engineered: Annual cash burn went from $95M to $0. AI ARR went $0M to $100M — in 21 months. Here’s what happened… @PodiumHQ had built a communications product for small businesses. It worked, but coming out of the ZIRP era, growth was flattening. We were at a critical moment, Pre-ChatGPT: Was the product a nice-to-have or a need-to-have? It was a problem that needed solving. @ericwilliamrea went into Founder Mode to create a clear need-to-have product. Experimenting with AI in 2023 wasn’t controversial. But as board members, we weren’t sure the product would work or the revenue would stick. Would all of these customers churn? Then @PodiumHQ management made the call: invest more time and money into R&D before hyping the product or going big on GTM. In the first three months, something was clearly different. We’d launched plenty of products before. Nothing had ever taken off this fast. As board members, we wondered (as board members tend to do): was there a catch? Nope. And another three months in, still no catch. Just real value. And now, here we are, 21 months later and AI agent ARR rocketed from $0 to $100M, our overall ARR growth rate is way up and @PodiumHQ has gone from burning $95M a year to $0M. That “AI chatbot” experiment became @PodiumHQ's top employee, singlehandedly driving $100M in ARR. His name is Jerry. Jerry is a customer service agent for auto, home services & wellness businesses. Customers often walk in asking to speak with him. He has hundreds of 5-star Google reviews. He even won “Employee of the Month” 😅Why? Jerry answers text/voice 24/7/365 within ~30 secs. Customers using @PodiumHQ’s Jerry 2.0 are seeing a 30% revenue lift.🚀 Not to mention…Jerry 2.0 can be coached up to any subject in ~60 seconds. I couldn’t be more impressed with CEO @ericwilliamrea and the @PodiumHQ team, who understood that the qualities that make a great AI agent are the same as those that make a great human employee: Knowing the job, industry and playbook, can be coached and work tirelessly. No wonder @OpenAI made Jerry 2.0 a case study: Zero to $100M ARR in 21 months, in > 10,000 customer locations. I’ve watched this go from early conviction to undeniable traction. The market is voting. Find the @OpenAI case study here: openai.com/index/podium /END

We just crossed $100M in AI agent ARR in under 24 months. Not because of a viral launch or AI hype. But because of a crazy bet we made in 2023. At the end of 2023, over 60k local businesses were using @PodiumHQ to centralize their leads and customer communication into one platform. It’s a great product. Customers convert more leads and make more money with it. But one reality became impossible to ignore: Our customers’ biggest constraint isn’t software. It’s staffing. → 75% annual turnover → 30% of leads come after hours → Every missed call can be $20,000+ in lost revenue Business owners don’t care about software. They care about making money. And the best software in the world doesn’t matter if there aren’t enough people to run it. So we built Jerry, the perfect user of our own platform. Not a chatbot. An AI employee that uses Podium to: - Qualify and schedule every lead - Handle objections and follow up - Learn through natural-language coaching - Work 24/7 Demos are easy. Real AI employees are not. To work in the real world, AI has to think, act, understand context, and use tools. It has to handle thousands of edge cases every day. It has to be coachable. Like a human. That leap is enormous. Agents aren’t a feature. They’re the foundation. That’s why we rebuilt Podium as an AI-first system of agents. Today: - 10,000+ AI agents live in production - AI now outperforms humans in many jobs - $100M+ in AI agent ARR, and accelerating This is still day one. The future isn’t software. It's AI employees that do the work and unlock growth for businesses. We’re early in building what we believe will become the most impactful AI employee ecosystem for the $3T SMB market. We’ve seen 300% year-over-year AI revenue growth and we’re just getting started.

A new consumer behavior is taking shape: people are trading what they believe. @Kalshi has shown how large this market can be. Across elections, sports, economics, and culture... More on why we believe → ivp.com/content/kalshi…

“If people have lost faith in themselves, it’s our job to build them back.”  I love this from @someshdash, @IVP partner and member of Thrive Global’s board, who shared these remarks during our @Thrive Global team offsite. As he said, “Sometimes the greatest failures actually don’t come externally, they come internally.”