Chapter One

It takes about 10 years in venture to really hit your stride. I went full time on @chapterone 6 years ago. This is what year six looks like when you're doing the best work of your career with a killer team. We've come a long way.

Our newest investment: Blackstar ✴︎ @DanielEdrisian is a product & eng savant. We invested in his last company, Alex, which OpenAI bought. When he called to say he was building something new, we said yes on the call. Blackstar ✴︎ is a category creating product. Watch it.

friends, I'm finally hiring a BD lead at @Helius you will scale the API for money, markets, and capitalism to the planet you will work closely with me to go hunting minimum 5 YoE, a distaste for incompetence, and love of the game to apply

Jeff Morris on how his deployment pace counters the "digital assets VC is dead" narrative: "The volume of pitches at early stage within crypto decreased a lot over the past 12 months." "But we're pacing in our digital assets vehicle faster than our non-crypto fund." "I have zero emotions towards any market swings. We keep doing the same thing every single day.

Welcome to spring. Winter is over. Drift exploit drama continues. Fun show to close out the week. 1:00p EST @jmj - @chapterone 2:00p EST @hotpot_dao - @megaeth See you on the show.

We’re proud to announce our $40M funding round led by @eladgil and Verified Capital, alongside @01Advisors and @MarathonMP. This capital will expand our foundation, advancing in-house technology and operations, and enhancing our dining, lifestyle and travel offering.

I launched a mobile app - Is it venture-scale? No. Was it fun to build? Yes. Wrote about it (and some personal news) here: jamesin.substack.com/p/i-launched-a…

Jamie Dimon was asked about @ereborbank at Hill & Valley. It was my favorite moment of the day: "I wish them success. We have millions of competitors. If they can do something better than we can, go for it — that's competition. We've lost a lot to competitors over the years. We've done a lot well, but we also didn't build Stripe. We didn't do some of what Block did. We didn't do Revolut. I want to stay conscious of that. We know we get our asses kicked every now and then. And if they do a great job for a certain constituency, I can compete with them and do better — or they can compete with me and do better. Both are fine."

Today, we're releasing Omma. Create 3D, Websites, and Apps with AI agents. Start now on omma.build Follow @omma_ai

NEW: Leonidas Autonomous Ground Vehicle (AGV) debuts at AUSA Global Force. A mobile, autonomously-driven counter-UAS system pairing Epirus' Leonidas HPM platform with Kodiak's AI-powered driving system. Built in partnership with @GD_LandSystems + @KodiakRobotics .

Today we’re announcing $75 million in growth financing from @GeneralCatalyst, bringing our total funding to $175 million to date. More than 20 million creators, small businesses and enterprises use our products around the world. Together, they’ve created more than 250 million videos. This investment marks our next chapter: accelerating global expansion while pushing the frontier of agentic video creation.

Everything we've built for auth on the web assumes two kinds of actors: a human user and a static application, with predefined scopes and known execution paths. Agents fit neither role. They act on behalf of a user or entirely on their own, call external services, discover tools at runtime, need one capability now and a different one later, and often run long after the human who started them has moved on. Agent Auth makes the runtime agent a first-class principal. Each agent is registered with its own identity, granted specific capabilities, and governed by a lifecycle the server controls. The server sees exactly which agent is acting, what it is authorized to do, and can terminate one without affecting anything else. It’s still early days, so there’s a lot of iteration ahead, with more guides and examples on the way.

Today, at the @DARPA expMath kickoff, we launched 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗚𝗮𝘂𝘀𝘀, an open source and state of the art autoformalization agent harness for developers and practitioners to accelerate progress at the frontier. It is stronger, faster, and more cost-efficient than off-the-shelf alternatives. On FormalQualBench, running with a 4-hour timeout, it beats @HarmonicMath's Aristotle agent with no time limit. Users of OpenGauss can interact with it as much or as little as they want, can easily manage many subagents working in parallel, and can extend / modify / introspect OpenGauss because it is permissively open-source. OpenGauss was developed in close collaboration with maintainers of leading open-source AI tooling for Lean. Read the report and try it out:

Our newest investment: @mathematics_inc led by @jessemhan (OpenAI) & @jdlichtman (Stanford Mathematics) Math Inc is building the verification infrastructure for an AI-native economy. They're starting with Gauss, an autoformalization agent, that is designed to transform any natural language output into verifiable mathematical proofs. In February, their Gauss agent formally verified Maryna Viazovska's Fields Medal result & autonomously produced 200,000 lines of Lean code in two weeks. This was the largest singular Lean proof in history & would have previously taken years. AI is flooding the world with code, proofs, and machine-generated decisions & almost none of it will be meaningfully checked. Agents deploy faster than humans can audit. Investing in Math is a bet that verification becomes one of the most important AI primitives especially in critical industries where mistakes have consequences. My friend @ani_pai wrote a great piece on why they're investing in @mathematics_inc too:

You are early.bulk.trade.

Such a good idea from @jmj and the @chapterone team. Going through YC has shown me how incredibly valuable these professional networks can be in the infinite game. Think of how many cos are yet to spin out of Anduril, OAI, etc... C1 is going to have eyes on the inside as they form.

Scout Program: Season 1 Update 📈 500+ investors have applied from Anduril, OpenAI, Supabase, Palantir, Tesla, ScaleAI, and ElevenLabs. Applications close Friday. Apply: scoutprogram.com

Our newest investment: @zodl_app Zcash's best wallet & OG core contributors from the Zcash protocol building a new company together. Dream team led by @jswihart & investors @paradigm, @a16z, @chapterone bringing encrypted money to the masses. Also love that @friedberg invested.

Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) has secured over $25 million in funding from a16z, Paradigm, Winklevoss Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Cypherpunk Technologies, Maelstrom (family office of Arthur Hayes), Chapter One, David Friedberg, Haseeb Qureshi, Mert, Balaji and others. If you aren’t familiar, Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL) is the team formerly known as Electric Coin Company (ECC), the group that launched Zcash, and the creator of @zodl_app. The name is new, but our team has been building Zcash for a decade. A couple of years ago, my team and I set out to change the trajectory of Zcash with an uncompromising focus on the user experience for shielded ZEC. We released Zodl (then called Zashi) and have never looked back. The release of the normie-friendly wallet was the first step. Then came integrations with partners like Flexa for retail spending and Keystone for cold storage. Most recently, we worked with the NEAR team to unlock ZEC swaps through NEAR intents. It worked. The proof is in the numbers. The wallet has driven adoption of the Zcash shielded pool by over 400%, and facilitated more than $600M in ZEC swaps since October. Now is the time to build on that momentum and accelerate. In addition to Zodl, we are building Zallet, a full node wallet that will also underpin new desktop software. Ultimately, we intend to deliver a private, decentralized financial system as an alternative to legacy institutions. This funding allows us to bring these ambitions to life, without relying on Zcash dev fund grants to get there. I’m grateful for these investors who are partnering with us. These are exciting days for the ZODL team and Zcash more broadly. We’re in the dawn of a new era. We will get ZEC in the hands of billions. Download at zodl.com Onward.