Steven Lee

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of my $40M pre-seed and seed-stage fund, @SevenStars_VC, where I’ll be focused on partnering with visionary founders building enduring AI application companies across consumer and enterprise technology. Seven Stars is deeply personal. It’s named after my parents, who immigrated from South Korea and started a clothing small business in Downtown Los Angeles - Seven Star Fashion. Their tireless work ethic gave me a future and inspires me to show up for founders with that same dedication. I’m incredibly grateful to our founders, limited partners, co-investors, advisors, and my family for their unwavering support. Read more via @agarfinks in @FortuneMagazine! fortune.com/2025/06/11/ter…

Excited to double down in @Doctronic’s Series B round! Congrats to @MattPavelle, Dr. Adam Oskowitz, and team for building one of the most exciting companies in healthcare. They’re making care faster and more affordable, with 15x ARR growth in 6 months and now over 24M AI consultations. wsj.com/articles/start…

Today, @elevenlabs is announcing a $500M Series D at an $11B valuation, led by Sequoia, with a16z quadrupling down and ICONIQ tripling down. It reflects the trust of customers and partners building at the frontier alongside us - and gives us momentum to ship even faster.

I’ve spent the last 6 years building for pharmacies in India, to the heart of the AI boom in SF. Today, we’re coming out of stealth with @oximyhq and joining the @ycombinator W26 batch. We are building the System of Record for Enterprise AI Usage. 🧵

Another big milestone for @SkildAI. Congrats @pathak2206, @gupta_abhinav_, and team!

Big day for @TheCorgiCompany: regulatory approval to launch the first AI-native, full-stack insurance carrier for startups, plus $108M raised from top investors. @nico_laqua, @emily_yuan_, and Team Corgi have shown incredible tenacity and ambition since Day 1, and we’re proud to be on the journey with them at @SevenStars_VC.

What a way to start 2026. Congratulations to @MattPavelle, Dr. Oskowitz, and the @Doctronic team on the partnership!

Congrats to @bonatsos on an epic run. Niko has had a profound impact on my career, and I know hundreds (if not thousands) of founders and VCs feel the same from his mentorship. Thankful he’s encouraged me to dream bigger, from starting Seven Stars to being the best partner I can be to founders. Excited for what’s next!

@jackie_bona @Valora @stripe Big congratulations @jackie_bona and @valora team!

Today, I'm excited to share the next chapter in @Valora's journey. The Valora team will be joining @stripe, marking an important milestone in our mission to unlock access to financial opportunity for people around the world. We founded Valora on a core belief and mission: everyone should be able to create and share value without barriers. For too many people worldwide, financial systems remain inaccessible and fragmented, limiting participation in the digital economy. Valora set out to help change that by making it easier for anyone to move financial value, access digital assets, and save, all from your mobile phone. Over the years, Valora has become a trusted way to send, save, and use digital assets with ease, demonstrating that global money movement can be better and more inclusive. Through this work, we’ve seen firsthand how access to stablecoins and crypto rails can expand economic opportunity. In the past few months, it became clear that we could accelerate this mission by joining Stripe, one of the world’s leading financial infrastructure platforms. Stripe shares our conviction that stablecoins and crypto can dramatically expand who gets to participate in the global economy. We also saw significant overlap in shared values and passion for impact in our conversations with the Stripe team. By bringing Valora’s team to Stripe, we’ll be able to contribute our expertise in web3 and user-first experiences to a platform with unparalleled reach. We are incredibly proud of what we’ve built at Valora — and even more energized by the opportunity ahead. Joining Stripe allows our team to continue to pursue the mission of expanding global access to financial systems. The Valora app will continue to live on by returning to its original home at @cLabs, which will steward its future development. Over four years ago we spun out of cLabs and throughout that time we’ve stayed closely aligned with our broader community. As we enter this next chapter, it's appropriate that the app returns to the team best positioned to support its continued growth. To our users, partners, investors, and especially to our team members: thank you for believing in this mission and for your support every step of the way. This transition marks the close of one incredible chapter and the start of an even more exciting one. And I couldn’t be more optimistic about the impact our team will continue to make within Stripe. We look forward to continuing in our work to increase economic opportunity in this next chapter! 🎉

Excited to back @RichardYWang and Team @VoyaEnergy alongside Sean Liu @foundersfund, @MattMulvey17 @scootermontana @Liquid2V, @mikesholiu @svangel! They’re developing metal fuels and a new energy generation approach to accelerate time to power. Learn more here: voya.energy

@divyahansg @nilamg Big congrats @divyahansg and Beacon team!

Founding Beacon with @nilamg has been the most intense but also fulfilling time of my life. In just a year, we’ve grown to a team of 30+ and acquired dozens of mission-critical software businesses that quietly power everyday life, helping them bring AI to real-world industries. We are deeply thankful to the entrepreneurs who have entrusted us with their life’s work and our partners at General Catalyst, Lightspeed, D1 Capital, MSD & BDT, and Sator Grove, along with our angels and advisors. This $250M Series B fundraise enables us to increase the scale of our ambitions to build a generational AI holding company. We are hiring across many roles! Check out our careers page.

THE LOS ANGELES DODGERS ARE BACK-TO-BACK WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS!

@ArashMarkazi 2018 WS Game 3?

AI is rewriting how businesses understand people, and @trydialogueai is turning research into an instant superpower for every team. Excited to partner with @lobenja, @justangmustang, and @hubertpchen alongside my good friends @f_fatemi21 @lightspeedvp, @eddiekoai, and @patrickmandia!

Today we're sharing the next phase of Reflection. We're building frontier open intelligence accessible to all. We've assembled an extraordinary AI team, built a frontier LLM training stack, and raised $2 billion. Why Open Intelligence Matters Technological and scientific progress is driven by values of openness and collaboration. The internet, Linux, and the protocols and standards that underpin modern computing are all open. This isn't a coincidence. Open software is what gets forked, customized, and embedded into systems worldwide. It's what universities teach, what startups build on, what enterprises deploy. Open science enables others to learn from the results, be inspired by them, interrogate them, and build upon them in order to push the frontier of human knowledge and scientific advancement. AI got to where it is today through scaling ideas (e.g. self-attention, next token prediction, reinforcement learning) that were shared and published openly. Now AI is becoming the technology layer that everything else runs on top of. The systems that accelerate scientific research, enhance education, optimize energy usage, supercharge medical diagnoses, and run supply chains will all be built on AI infrastructure. But the frontier is currently concentrated in closed labs. If this continues, a handful of entities will control the capital, compute, and talent required to build AI, creating a runaway dynamic that locks everyone else out. There's a narrow window to change this trajectory. We need to build open models so capable that they become the obvious choice for users and developers worldwide, ensuring the foundation of intelligence remains open and accessible rather than controlled by a few. What We've Built Over the last year, we've been preparing for this mission. We’ve assembled a team who have pioneered breakthroughs including PaLM, Gemini, AlphaGo, AlphaCode, AlphaProof, and contributed to ChatGPT and Character AI, among many others. We built something once thought possible only inside the world’s top labs: a large-scale LLM and reinforcement learning platform capable of training massive Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) models at frontier scale. We saw the effectiveness of our approach first-hand when we applied it to the critical domain of autonomous coding. With this milestone unlocked, we're now bringing these methods to general agentic reasoning. We've raised significant capital and identified a scalable commercial model that aligns with our open intelligence strategy, ensuring we can continue building and releasing frontier models sustainably. We are now scaling up to build open models that bring together large-scale pretraining and advanced reinforcement learning from the ground up. Safety and Responsibility Open intelligence also changes how we think about safety. It enables the broader community to participate in safety research and discourse, rather than leaving critical decisions to a few closed labs. Transparency allows independent researchers to identify risks, develop mitigations, and hold systems accountable in ways that closed development cannot. But openness also requires confronting the challenges of capable models being widely accessible. We're investing in evaluations to assess capabilities and risks before release, security research to protect against misuse, and responsible deployment standards. We believe the answer to AI safety is not “security through obscurity” but rigorous science conducted in the open, where the global research community can contribute to solutions rather than a handful of companies making decisions behind closed doors. Join Us There is a window of opportunity today to build frontier open intelligence, but it is closing and this may be the last. If this mission resonates, join us.

We are so lucky to be working with Seven Stars and to get Steven's guidance every day. He was the first one to believe, and we'll never forget it!

Thrilled to partner with @gdelepine, @danimman, and Team @Longeye_ai as they build the leading AI workspace for the justice system. They're growing their team in SF - check out Guillaume's post or message us at @SevenStars_VC to learn more!

Congrats to @CLattner_LLVM, @IAmTimDavis, and the entire @Modular team on today's Series C announcement! Check out open roles if you're interested in helping build AI’s unified compute layer: modular.com/company/careers

Huge congrats to @SevenStars_VC portfolio company @doctronic on today’s announcement! It’s an honor to partner with @mattpavelle, Adam, and this mission-driven team as they've now surpassed 15M AI consultations, helping bridge the gap for 100M+ Americans without easy access to primary care.

We raised $20M to scale @doctronic from 1M to 100M users. Led by @lightspeedvp with @usv, @mantisVC, @SevenStars_VC plus @drfeifei @jdesai01 @scottbelsky But funding isn't the story. The story is that Americans have already chosen our AI for healthcare. 50,000 to 100,000 visits weekly. Half come back in 7 days. Treatment plans that match board-certified clinicians 99% of the time. While others debate if AI belongs in healthcare, we shipped it. We've handled 15 million medical conversations. Instead of waiting three weeks for primary care, you can get it in 20 minutes from a licensed physician for $39. The physician shortage hits 120,000 by 2034. We're not waiting. Neither are our users.

Frontier language models like GPT-5 may seem advanced, but our latest benchmark with extra-long-form corpus uncovers persistent misalignments from privacy breaches to self-harm risks. Explore how @Go_JulyAI’s unique dataset is driving progress in AI safety and robustness here: blog.gojuly.ai/p/ai-risk-benc…