NEA

🎉 Congratulations, @ValarianHQ--$50M raised to deliver the sovereign infra layer for high-consequence ops & AI-driven systems. “The critical question of the AI era isn’t which model wins — it’s who controls the environment intelligence operates inside. Valarian answers that question with genuine defence-grade architecture. This is NEA’s first defence and dual-use investment in Europe, and we made it because Valarian is building the control infrastructure layer the sovereign AI era requires.” -@neemustafa @NEA 📰 More details: businesswire.com/news/home/2026…

“Ten or fifteen years ago, it was really hard to get confidence that these companies would be able to get there,” said Aaron Jacobson, a partner at VC firm NEA. “But because you’ve now had success in Palantir and Anduril and others, plus the government’s progress, it’s starting to really encourage folks to believe it’s actually going to be possible to have more innovation in the space.” - @aaronej @nea 📰 Read more about how the defense tech boom via @FortuneMagazine / @agarfinks: fortune.com/2026/07/02/def…

🗣️ Let’s talk about engineer productivity in the age of AI. Only HALF of pre-AI top-performers remain post-AI top-performers. 🤯 We want to know why, so we’re hosting: From Vibes to Evidence: Measuring What AI Actually Does to Your Engineering Team. We’ll welcome expert guests: @yegordb, Engineering Productivity Research Scientist at Stanford University, and @EnoReyes, Co-Founder & CTO at Factory, who will join NEA’s @lilatretikov to discuss: 1️⃣ Why most AI productivity metrics are wrong — What PR counts, survey scores, and lines-of-code dashboards miss, and what the Stanford study of 100,000+ developers actually found when they looked at output quality instead. 2️⃣ What “agent-ready” looks like in practice — How enterprise engineering organizations can restructure their codebases and verification infrastructure to get real, measurable returns from agentic AI tools. 3️⃣ Where the rubber hits the road — How to build a measurement framework that connects research-grade output metrics with the day-to-day realities of deploying AI agents at scale. …and more! We believe this is a vital topic, so in addition to our portfolio companies, we’ve decided to extend a limited number invites to this virtual event to our external network. 👉🏽 Request to attend here: neavc.zoom.us/meeting/regist…

We recently led @Corca_math’s $7.8M seed round to support their mission to democratize math for everyone. Now, we’re sharing why we believe Corca’s team, vision, and opportunity are a winning equation. 🤓 ↔️ The gap is bigger than it looks Writing, coding, design, data — all digitized and AI-native. Math is still stuck on paper and whiteboards, even for cutting-edge research. 🛠️ LLMs aren't the fix General-purpose language models can't operate on mathematical symbols directly, so they stumble on problems that don't look like their training data. Math needs its own tool, not a chatbot wrapper. 🧮 Corca = Cursor, but for math Equations become live, executable objects instead of static text — with agents built natively into that symbolic foundation. Read more from NEA’s @luke_pappas & @MasonOMurray 📝: nea.com/blog/investing…

The UK tech scene is electric! ⚡⚡⚡ Thanks to all of the founders & friends who joined NEA & @AnthropicAI for dinner in London this week. We loved learning about what you’re building and how Anthropic’s @claudeai and other tools can help supercharge your startups.

🎉 Congratulations, @DatabentoHQ--$97M Series B raised to power the market data platform for modern finance! "It's rare to encounter a company where the product, the traction, and the founding team all point in the same direction with this much clarity. Databento has built the modern foundation this industry has needed for a long time, and the fact that it's earned trust everywhere from students running their first strategies to the world's most sophisticated trading desks isn't by design—it's what best-in-class looks like in a category this fundamental. This is exactly the kind of company we back at NEA, and we're thrilled to be along for the ride." -@rickyang, @NEA 👀 More details from Databento CEO, @christinaqi, here: databento.com/blog/series-b

🎉 Congratulations, @twelve_labs--$100M series B raised to build video super intelligence. "NEA backed TwelveLabs in the early days of video intelligence — and that conviction has only deepened as they have shaped this exciting category. Jae and his team built the foundation models that set the standard for what video understanding can be. They're purpose-built to turn millions of hours of footage into intelligence that compounds over time, and as video understanding moves from novel capability to essential infrastructure, we believe TwelveLabs is the company defining what comes next." -@lucktm 💡 Learn more from TwelveLabs' CEO & Co-Founder @_jae_lee here: twelvelabs.io/blog/twelvelab…

@NEA & @AnthropicAI are hosting a dinner in London on Wednesday, July 8th for founders and leaders of enterprise tech startups. We’ll be having a roundtable discussion on how Anthropic’s pipeline of tools can help startups build better and faster while exploring company building in current climate. We hope companies walk away with fresh insights and new connections. We have limited spots available for additional attendees, so apply here to join us: forms.gle/tQmo9SabTKvK5K…!

📢 Exciting team announcement! Congratulations to the following members of our technology investing team on their recent promotions: 🎉 Philip Chopin to Managing Director, Head of Europe 🎉 Ayush Goradia to Principal 🎉 James Kaplan to Principal Thank you, @PhilipChopin, @AyushGoradia, and @jamesekaplan for your tremendous work, unwavering dedication and for exemplifying trust, teamwork, and excellence! 👏🏽 📰 nea.com/news/press-rel…

☀️ Members of NEA's technology, digital health, and business development teams had an awesome visit to sunny San Diego last week to meet with the team from @UCSanDiego's Office of Innovation and Commercialization (OIC) and Entrepreneurship Center. We had a great time connecting with the UCSD community and meeting early-stage founders who are helping to build the future of AI!

ICYMI: NEA’s @neemustafa was recently featured at the @SuperReturn conference to share an AI investor’s take on China. 🗣️ “I would not be surprised if, in the coming years, there's an AI Belt and Road Initiative where China goes to the developing world and says America and the West has left you behind." 📰 More details via @axios: axios.com/pro/all-deals/…

🔊 Listen up! NEA’s @lucktm is featured on the latest episode of @TechCrunch's Equity podcast to discuss AI IPOs, personal agents, and the ROI reckoning. Check it out to hear: • What the tokenmaxxing-to-ROI shift means for how companies measure AI spend. • Why forward deployed engineers are becoming a “Trojan horse” for AI adoption. • How enterprises are mixing and matching models instead of committing to one provider. • Why Tiffany thinks value is being created at every layer of the AI stack, not just at the model layer. 🎙️ techcrunch.com/podcast/neas-t…

🤩 A huge thanks to all of our founders and friends who joined us for dinner during the Data and AI Summit this week. We had a blast discussion startup building in the AI era. Special thanks to the @databricks Ventures team for collabing with us on this event for 3 years running. Grateful to @jefrankle for sharing the Mosiac story with our founders and bringing the banter with @aaronej. 🙌🏼

🗣️ “If you look at what’s happening in the A.I. data center, there are so many roadblocks and things that need to be reinvented.” -@aaronej NEA’s Aaron Jacobson weighs in with @paulmozur @trippmickle @nytimes: It’s Not Just Nvidia. The A.I. Boom Has Ignited Asia’s Chip Companies. 📰: nytimes.com/2026/06/16/tec…

🎉 Congratulations to the @KnotchInc team on the launch of ACE—the AI Experience Infrastructure for the Conversational Era. 🚀 ACE was built to bridge the gap between traditional static websites and modern customer expectations. It’s an AI-first interactive website experience where customers can chat with a website and engage with content in a more modern and meaningful way. Check it out / learn more via the video below 👇🏽

🤠 It’s the Neolab wild west! The era of betting on frontier generalist AI labs may be over — and the next trillion dollars could belong to specialized Neolabs. 🤖🧪 In order to be the ace cowboy, we believe the best Neo Lab formula needs three layers: a proprietary domain corpus, a closed RL training loop, and a domain-specific verifier — each reinforcing the others as a compounding moat. 💡 NEA's @thomastjoshi @lilatretikov @AndrewSchoen & former NEA team member-turned AI operator @maddiehfaulkner collaborate on: The Neolab Wild West 🐎 nea.com/blog/the-ai-ne…

🚀 LAUNCH DAY! Introducing @meetsol an agentic core HR system and full replacement for the HRIS, reimagined with AI from the ground up. Most HR systems were built for a workforce that no longer exists. Sol is built for how work is actually changing. Congratulations to @erinhyang @peteschlampp @StrattonJim @jonruggiero and all of the Solmates--we're thrilled to partner with you to build the next generation of HR platform for the agentic era. 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽 Details below 👇🏽

We are thrilled to partner with @ninjaone who announced a $12.3B valuation today. NinjaOne has been leading the market to bring unified IT operations to overworked and under resourced IT teams and MSPs for years by developing a platform built for simplicity at scale. We’re excited to be on this journey with @salsfer, Christopher Matarese, and the entire NinjaOne team as they keep building around the customers they serve. ninjaone.com/press/12-3-bil…

@eastdakota @pmarca 👀

Two of our worst VC stories: 1. A Sequoia partner passed on Cloudflare because he didn’t think a woman could lead a security infrastructure company. Seriously. 🙄 2. I got introduced to @pmarca. Meeting got scheduled for a Monday, which should have been a clue. I thought it was just a casual meeting. He thought it was a pitch and brought the whole @a16z partnership team. Hilarity ensued. 🤪 At one point one of them said: “You don’t seem very prepared.” Which was true because I wasn’t. I framed the rejection letter they sent.