Aaref Hilaly

“Moat” might be the most overused word in venture. @aaref thinks it might also be the most irrelevant, at least right now. No one in AI has one. Models get distilled in weeks, yet the best companies continue to grow. Our questions are shifting: Can this team build with enough speed to stay ahead? And is there genuine demand, not just interest? In the current AI era, staying ahead matters more than keeping competitors out.

📣 Update: we raised our $60m Series B from @Lux_Capital, @IndexVentures and @01Advisors, with participation from @sequoia, @eladgil and @BainCapVC . When we came out of stealth 283 days ago, we had negotiated contracts worth $30m for our clients. As of last month, that number is over $1 billion. We work with the most ambitious companies in the world, including @tryramp, @clay and @RogoAI. Today, we want you to hear from some of them directly. Contracts are the rails of commerce. @crosbylegal is a hybrid AI law firm that gets them signed 80% faster. We’re announcing our Series B to keep scaling the dream law firm.

Memo is a robot that uses AI to perform household tasks effectively. Today @sundayrobotics announced its Series B, and we’re proud to be investors. Training robots for the home is hard — the environment is messy, dynamic, and full of edge cases. So Sunday is training robots directly on real households. Founders @tonyzzhao and @chichengcc built a glove-based system that lets hundreds of contributors record everyday tasks in their own homes, creating high-fidelity demonstrations that feed directly into robot learning. Home robotics will be defined by the companies that learn fastest from real homes. Sunday is building that loop. More here: baincapitalventures.com/insight/robots… @aaref @amandamhuang

Introducing Simile. Simulating human behavior is one of the most consequential and technically difficult problems of our time. We raised $100M from Index, Hanabi, A* BCV, @karpathy @drfeifei @adamdangelo @rauchg @scottbelsky among others.

Instead of a Series Seed pitch deck, we showed this video to @foundersfund @BainCapVC and @LongJourneyVC and they invested $4.5 million in us a few weeks later. This was the first data center that @ChaseLochmiller and I ever built way back in 2018 when we founded @CrusoeAI with a crazy dream to mine bitcoin with wasted gas across the oilfields of America. We’ve come a long way, but the roots of energy-first, vertically-integrated digital infrastructure started here in NE Wyoming with a <0.5MW deployment and geosynchronous satellite internet.

Introducing Beacon: the AI holding company for Main Street. Today, we're announcing a $250M Series B led by @generalcatalyst, @lightspeedvp & D1 Capital to give mission-critical software & services businesses a permanent home that preserves their legacy & scales their ambition. businesswire.com/news/home/2025…