Aaref Hilaly

Hands-on investing with @slaterstich & @tonyzzhao

@brainstub @BainCapVC @sundayrobotics @amandamhuang Love working with you guys! Such an inspiring team and mission

@BainCapVC @sundayrobotics @aaref and @amandamhuang have been incredibly hands on from day 1, we're lucky to have your team's support and excited to continue the partnership!

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

Beta coming this year!

@tonyzzhao Psyched to be working with you, Tony!

We raised $165M at a $1.15B valuation to stop doing demos. 2026 is about 1) deployment and 2) research. We will start shipping Memo with our new frontier models in a few months. Our series-B is led by Coatue, with Thomas Laffont joining the board. ->🧵

Clear vision and unbridled ambition, coupled with deep humility and genuine empathy -- a rare combination. That’s @joon_s_pk and Team @simile_ai. Another perfect example of companies we back.

@joon_s_pk @karpathy @drfeifei @adamdangelo @rauchg @scottbelsky Huge congrats, Joon and the entire @simile_ai team! Honored to support your journey

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.

People ask what kind of companies we back…

@divyahansg @nilamg Impressive! Congrats, Divya

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.

@Alfred_Lin @roelofbotha Many congrats, Alfred! Very happy for you.

I am deeply honored, humbled, and will have big shoes to fill. @roelofbotha changed my life. He believed in me, brought me to Sequoia, and taught me how to grow from a builder into an investor. He’s demanding and deeply caring — the rare kind of friend, mentor, partner who pushes you and stands with you through every storm.

@gradypb @roelofbotha @Alfred_Lin @sequoia Huge congrats, Pat! Very well deserved

With immense gratitude and appreciation for @roelofbotha and his legendary leadership over the better part of a decade, @Alfred_Lin and I are honored to accept the torch and become the next stewards of @sequoia Here is the note I shared internally:

Whatever it takes

So happy to be working with @ScottWu46, @russelljkaplan and the entire @cognition crew. An incredible journey -- and they're just getting started!

We just backed @krea_ai, one of the most delightful GenAI image creation platforms. Why? 🎨 Gives creators superpowers ⚡ Built for pros—fast, flexible, personal 🚀 A team with taste + wild velocity More below 👇

@kenanhsaleh @BainCapVC @0xMari0 @liamihorne @kevinzhang @RonMiasnik @ChristinaPhili5 @ajay_bcv Psyched to work with you!

Update: I’ve joined @BainCapVC as an EIR. I'll focus on early-stage investing and researching ideas in: - Scaling solar energy - Humanoid robots - Automated manufacturing - AI-enabled services - Government efficiency enablement If you're thinking about any of these, let's chat.

Very excited to share our interview with @jaschasd on the history of diffusion models — from his original 2015 paper inventing them, to the GAN "ice age", to the resurgence in diffusion starting with DDPM. Enjoy!

@mvernal @saranormous @pranavreddy @conviction Congrats to you both - perfect match!

I’m joining @saranormous, @pranavreddy and the team at @conviction! The past two years have been the best. I’ve enjoyed the freedom to travel with my family and (assistant) coach my son’s Little League teams, all while continuing to try to help some of the founders and companies I’ve worked with over the past decade. These two years have confirmed that I love hanging out with my family … and it’s really fun to spend time with amazing, ambitious, impatient entrepreneurs. We are living through the most exciting technological change of our lifetime (of anyone’s lifetime?). We are on the cusp of having an infinite supply of intelligence. We can literally just convert electricity into intelligence. It’s hard to sit that one out. I have known Sarah Guo for years. She’s one of the smartest, hardest-working, most connected and admired investors out there. Founders love her. Over the past two years, she and the team at Conviction have built one of the most exciting new firms in years. In just two years they have partnered with @harvey_ai, @MistralAI, @SierraPlatform, @cognition_labs, @HeyGen_Official, @cartesia and more. That’s pretty good. In a short period, Sarah and Pranav have emerged as the partners of choice for AI-native companies. Even more impressive than the track record is the ethos, ambition and culture of the firm (sarahguo.com/blog/conviction). At Conviction, we are building a small, hands-on team that deeply understands the technological revolution that is underway, that can serve as a connector between the builders at the center of it and that has the patience, independence and conviction to take an extremely long-term perspective. And it’s fun to be back at a startup! There are cardboard boxes everywhere and a random humanoid robot hanging out in the kitchen. The most fun I’ve had in my working career was the early, fast-scaling days at Facebook – it’s fun to be back. I have been fortunate to work with some amazing teams and founders over the past decade (thank you!). Luckily I’ll continue to work with a few – @getcaptionsapp, @clay_gtm, @NotionHQ, @Rippling, @Statsig – for the rest, please don’t be a stranger. I am grateful to Sarah, Pranav, Christy, Niki and Vivian for welcoming me in and trusting me to be part of the team. And lastly and most importantly, I am so grateful to my wife and my kids who have hung out with me for the past two years and have been supportive of this new journey.

@saranormous So great - a perfect match! Huge congrats to you both

Talent is everything in venture investing. Thanks to @kevinzhang, we met Han when he was in college and instantly knew we had to work with him. Amazing (but unsurprising) to see the incredible product and business he’s built since.

@bsilone @BainCapVC In AI, expertise and capital requirements are the constraints, not regulation. But it leads to the same outcome

@aaref @BainCapVC Hopefully more than 5-6. The airline industry is heavily regulated, which is unnecessary in AI

True then, even more true now (post R1)