Ben Quazzo

I’m really excited to share today that I’m joining @qualitateio ! Two years ago, I led the first financing into Qualitate on behalf of Crew Capital. Today, Qualitate comes out of stealth, announcing its $7M seed financing led by Crew Capital and IA Ventures. When I first met @S_Kadakia , Qualitate was just an idea in a pitch deck. But when he explained his vision for Qualitate, it immediately clicked. I’ve spent the last decade as an investor and analyst across both private and public markets. The throughline in my career has been primary research - how to get an informational edge that can drive conviction in an investment thesis. Over the last 30 years, expert networks have grown as a dominant way enterprises and investment firms have tried to get that edge. But like so many industries, AI has made expert networks obsolete. Qualitate is creating a new category of primary research for the AI era: continuous intelligence. Our AI moderator interviews experts across the economy and aggregates their insights into the world's largest structured database of primary intelligence, and it compounds with every new conversation. That's the foundation. On top of it, customers can embed Qualitate's data into their own tools and systems, combining our data with their data to power end-to-end research workflows, like interviewing experts, interviewing employees, generating executive briefings, and analyzing potential investments. Qualitate helps companies understand not just the world around them, but what’s happening in their own company as well. All powered by the world’s largest structured database of primary research. I’ll stay on as an advisor to Crew, and nothing changes with the portfolio companies whose financings I led or the boards I'm a part of. After a decade of evaluating companies from the outside, as we stand on the precipice of the biggest tech cycle of our lifetimes, I wanted to help build an AI company. And after two years of working with Sagar, it’s clear Qualitate was the one. The team he has assembled is incredible, and I’m excited to be joining them as VP of Operations.

Eleven years ago we started @EclipseVentures and bet everything on atoms. Rockets, robots, chips, factories, power systems, defense. The things civilization actually runs on. Today, we're announcing $1.3B in new capital to keep building. The physical world is overdue for transformation. Transportation runs on systems designed decades ago. The energy grid cannot keep up with demand. Healthcare depends on manual procedures that don't scale. Defense development moves at a fraction of the speed threats evolve. These are not software problems. They are full stack engineering and operations problems, and they have been underinvested in for a generation. But there has never been a better moment to solve them. The best engineers are leaving big tech to build in the physical world. AI is compressing timelines from years to quarters. Policy is aligned. And customers are not waiting — the DoD, the hyperscalers, hospitals, and the Fortune 500 are all desperate for technology that makes physical systems smarter, faster, and more resilient. Talent, capital, technology, policy, and demand are all converging at once. This is our moment 🇺🇸 We built Eclipse for this exact moment and in doing so, we launched a movement. Today that movement is 100 companies strong (and growing!). These companies supply each other, share customers, and help solve each other's hardest problems. Propulsion systems powering orbital defense. Modern supply chain infrastructure moving the worlds goods. Autonomous vehicles on three continents. Surgical robots performing procedures that used to require the world's best hands. Cloud hardware powering the AI revolution built on American soil. That's not a fund. That's an economy — an Eclipse Economy. The door is open to rebuild the physical infrastructure of the country. We intend to run through it.

few things in life are better than watching a close friend achieve well-deserved greatness

@OpenAI announced today that it’s acquiring @astral_sh. This is a testament to @charliermarsh and the entire Astral team’s craft, dedication, and skill for building tools that developers love. Thank you to Charlie and to everyone at Astral for welcoming us as partners on this journey. We’re cheering you on in this next chapter. Read more from @caseyaylward about what Astral has accomplished and where they’re headed next. ⬇️ accel.com/noteworthies/a…

Thanks @RashiShrivast18 for telling the @speak story! We’re pushing hard to make the world’s best AI language tutor available to everyone. Super excited for the slate of new feature launches coming later this year! Stay tuned. forbes.com/sites/rashishr…

We're hiring for pyx. Small team. Big impact. Work with me directly, for better or worse. Come define the next phase of Astral as we build our own, end-to-end infrastructure.

New episode on life as a child prodigy and founding @speak with @adhsu corememory.com/p/the-child-pr…

"I went to South Korea and I saw skyscrapers that were filled with English classrooms. It was very clear the country was obsessed with learning English." - @connorzwick (Co-Founder & CEO @speak) "We thought, the only way we're going to build something interesting is if we actually built something substantially better, a 10x solution. That market (South Korea) was the market where we would get the most signal." "Today we are the clear number one leader. We've had double-digit percentage of all South Koreans try our product."

The day has finally come! @speak is no longer an English language learning app. You can now learn 🇪🇸 Spanish, 🇫🇷French, 🇯🇵 Japanese, 🇰🇷Korean, and 🇮🇹Italian as well! And I'm not talking about memorizing vocab in a dopamine machine, I'm talking about good old fashioned spoken fluency.

We’ve been fortunate to partner with @alexandr_wang and the @Scale_AI team since the days when they were working out of @daniel_levine’s basement. Thanks for bringing us along for the ride, and here’s to what’s next. 🚀 Read more about Scale, Meta, and our continued partnership here: accel.com/noteworthies/t…

Why Korea? What have we learned from building Speak? @connorzwick joined @Accel's @bquazz to dive into AI-driven language learning, Speak's journey & more: accel.com/podcast-episod…

"We see companies that are gaining real traction and driving real value both in enterprise and consumer." Matt Weigand of @Accel sees real growth emerging from AI applications and further maturation of AI agents to come trib.al/rrOD65P

These guys were among the earliest of all the startups we've funded to understand what AI was going to make possible, and they have executed perfectly on that early insight.

OpenAI-Backed Language Tutor Startup Doubles Value to $1 Billion trib.al/CpCYvOk

OpenAI-backed Speak raises $78M at $1B valuation to help users learn languages by talking out loud tcrn.ch/3D9gZw4

4/4 As Speak expands globally in 2025, it's set to make the world more fluent - and we couldn’t be more excited to partner with @connorzwick and @adhsu, alongside our friends at @openai. Check out our blog to learn more #AccelFamily accel.com/noteworthies/o…

3/4 AI can recreate the nuanced, interactive experience of talking with a native speaker, tailoring lessons to each learner’s needs. @speakeasy_labs is at the forefront of this revolution. With 10M+ downloads and 1B+ sentences spoken, Speak is changing lives through fluency.

1/4 Today, I’m excited to announce that @Accel has led @speakeasy_labs Series C. Language learning reflects one of the most compelling applications of consumer AI we’ve seen yet, and Speak is poised to define the category.