Kindred Ventures

Hello! Some news. We are thrilled to announce our latest funds: $312M for seed stage founders who want to build the future!🌎✨ kindredventures.medium.com/announcing-kin…

Perplexity started as a small business tool for ourselves. We had 4 people and no revenue with AI at our fingertips. The pivot to Computer is actually a full circle. Founders are using it to grow companies that matter to the economy and their communities.  It’s rewarding to see it now powering small businesses and startups in big ways. Perplexity is still a startup. We just 5X’ed revenue from $100M to $500M with only 34% growth in team size. 2x revenue growth in 2026 with same small team. And we’re just warming up. Everyone here works at a small business, and everything we build is for people who build.

We’ve been exploring what a Stream SDK could look like—where agents & voice are always within reach @sandbar

"There's a little bit of a false dichotomy between physical AI and digital AI. Anything in physical AI is instructed and supervised by digital AI," @stevejang, founder and managing partner of @KindredVentures, tells @msergie. "Self-driving cars are really the first consumer robot that everyone has used in the modern era."

We're extremely excited to announce the release of PATINA, a first-of-its-kind model that excels at PBR texture generation 🚀 🥇 SOTA commercial offering of PBR material creation, bridging the gap between AI image generation and traditional CGI 🌱 Homegrown by us at fal 🤑 Estimate your own material maps at $0.01 / map / megapixel 🖼️ 1K up to 8K material generation starting at just $0.08 for a complete five-map-plus-render material from text (and optional image) 🔍 Identify and extract materials from images with plain language

Seedance 2.0 is now available to everyone without any restrictions! fal.ai/models/bytedan…

Real roads come with real-world surprises. When a traffic light is out of order, the Nuro Driver responds the same way a skilled human driver would: it stops, assesses the intersection, and proceeds when safe. Smooth, natural, and reliable, our AI driver handles situations like this every day as we validate our universal autonomy platform in major cities across the country. #autonomousvehicles #selfdriving #drivenbynuro

pplx computer = [personal finance] agent

Insight Health rising! 📲🏥🩺⚕️📲

Nuro vehicles are now driving autonomously with safety operators in Japan—with no prior training on local data! This milestone demonstrates our universal autonomy model’s adaptability across new roads, cities, and countries. 共に未来へ。 Read more: nuro.ai/blog/one-model… #DrivenByNuro #SelfDriving #AutonomousVehicles #Tokyo #zeroshot

EXCLUSIVE: AI startup Sandbar has raised $23M in Series A funding for its note-taking smart ring, Stream, launching widely this summer. I spoke to CEO Mina Fahmi (@minafahmi) about his vision for a voice interface for your thoughts -- and for working with AI agents. "The thing that gets me excited is the promise of technology as an augmentation of the individual, that places the human in control,” he tells @UpstartsMediaCo.

The future of games is being built with AI. Tomorrow at @Official_GDC in SF, @deshrajdry, our Co-founder & CTO at @mem0ai, will join @kindredvc’s panel discussion on how generative models, agents, and persistent memory are reshaping gameplay and development. Alongside leaders from @fal, @iconicgamesio, @overworld_ai, @kotoba_tech, and more. Register ↓

Great talk tonight @KindredVentures in collaborations with the @Official_GDC in San Francisco for a conversation that explored how AI is reshaping the way game are being built, experienced, and scaled. #gdc #gaming #vibe

The way we game is changing. On March 11th, we're hosting an event during @Official_GDC in SF. We’ll hear from technical leaders at @fal, @iconicgamesio, & @mem0ai on how AI is reshaping games and media, and see live demos from @overworld_ai @kotoba_tech @DedalusLabs, and more! Generative models. Agent architectures. Persistent memory. New mechanics, new workflows, new categories of experience. Register to attend: luma.com/z1wtesph

Introducing Perplexity Computer. Computer unifies every current AI capability into one system. It can research, design, code, deploy, and manage any project end-to-end.

over 2 years in the making, but extremely well worth it. congrats @AravSrinivas @dmitry140! 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

No one has this breadth of data like the @fal team. They’ve put together research insights from their platform of nearly 1M of developers/users and thousands of models about generative media adoption and use cases of AI video, image, voice, and music. The full research report available for download below, with thoughts inside from our own @stevejang and friends @JenniferHli @sonyatweetybird!

hello, we are hiring. we get our minds properly blown every ~10-15 days. come see why. kindredventures.com/announcement/r…

Endless design magic ✨

We’re in the earliest days of world models - for autonomy, robotics, entertainment, and much more. Thrilled to share our investment in @overworld_ai, founded by ex-@StabilityAI researchers building open real-time world models for virtual worlds/games: kindredventures.com/announcement/o…