James Kaplan

Sharing our thesis here: nea.com/blog/our-inves…

Excited to announce our partnership with Valarian to lead their $50M Series A, our first defense and dual-use investment in Europe. While so much of the media is focused on physical sovereignty and the supply chain, Valarian is building the infrastructure layer that lets governments, primes and regulated businesses across the free world to achieve digital sovereignty. Shared more on our thesis below.

I know many people who remove the F1 key from their keyboard with pliers because Excel Help is so bad but maybe a poetry pharmacy is what we all really needed

@maithra_raghu Super cool benchmark, wonder what the average hedge fund analyst would score 👀

Excited to be releasing FrontierFinance, the largest and most challenging open benchmark for evaluating AI agents across the full investment workflow! FrontierFinance is substantially harder than current finance benchmarks: Existing benchmarks like FinanceBench and Finance Agent focus almost entirely on data extraction. FrontierFinance spans diverse use cases across the full investment process: Screening & Discovery, Company Research, Sector/Industry/Macro, Earnings & Events, and Coverage & Catalyst Monitoring. Created for ambiguous, long-horizon agents: 220 examples paired with 11,543 expert-crafted rubrics, following Samaya's Criteria Eval methodology. The rubrics are what let us evaluate the reasoning and steps behind a true expert-level output, not just a plausible-looking one. Evaluations: We evaluated Claude Fable 5, Claude Opus 4.8, GPT 5.5, Gemini, open-source models including GLM and DeepSeek, and others. We used the same public rubric and a standard harness for financial tasks. Samaya's AI system reached state-of-the-art accuracy at 50.8%, at 4x lower inference cost than Fable 5. Next best was Fable 5 (49.2%), then Opus 4.8 (45%) and GPT 5.5 (43.5%). We're releasing the benchmark, methodology, and full evaluation results - see link in comments. Future releases: FrontierFinance was curated from Samaya's larger internal set of ~5,000 examples, and we plan to release subsequent, harder benchmarks as well as a more detailed technical report!

Amazon really blew an 18 yr lead on Mercor

@maithra_raghu @NEA @PhilipChopin Thanks!

@NEA @PhilipChopin Congrats @jamesekaplan very well deserved!!

📢 Exciting team announcement! Congratulations to the following members of our technology investing team on their recent promotions: 🎉 Philip Chopin to Managing Director, Head of Europe 🎉 Ayush Goradia to Principal 🎉 James Kaplan to Principal Thank you, @PhilipChopin, @AyushGoradia, and @jamesekaplan for your tremendous work, unwavering dedication and for exemplifying trust, teamwork, and excellence! 👏🏽 📰 nea.com/news/press-rel…

@nylesykes @jasonyuan @newcomputer Super cool!

I met @jasonyuan in 2024 while he was building Dot at @newcomputer. I was struck by his thoughtfulness, authenticity, and deep passion for what he was building, and as I looked at what he’s created over time, it became clear that he’s a special person whose intuition allows him to see the future before it’s obvious. In 2019, Jason created Mercury OS. He told us the story of how it came together: at the time, he felt, “This computer doesn’t adapt to my brain. I have all these files. There’s so much value from emails. It has Siri. Why am I opening all these apps to do things, to respond to emails, to coordinate?” This led him to envision a computer that understood context and could generate interfaces on the fly – which seven years later, we now refer to as generative UI. In 2023, he teamed up with @sjwhitmore to build Dot, an AI with deep, personal memory designed to help you better understand yourself. It was an early bet on memory and proactivity before either became central to consumer AI, and I felt it was a beautiful product, both visually and how it felt to interact with. @hivemind is the culmination of a lifetime of Jason’s insights and intuition and years of experimentation at the intersection of AI and social. And I believe that, once again, he’s seeing something the rest of us haven’t – a new kind of social network (check out the video!). It’s a privilege to have had the opportunity to back Jason when he had nothing but an idea, and to have since seen firsthand so many magical moments in the Hive. The team is hiring – please reach out to me or Jason if you want to learn more!

@amytam01 @SpaceX @xai Congrats!!

Personal update: I’ve joined @SpaceX and @xAI. After investing in the future of work and AI at Bloomberg Beta, it became clear: AI capabilities are advancing and compounding at an unprecedented rate. It only made sense to join the team accelerating the fastest and to build the future directly. Excited to be working on making life multi-planetary and building AI to understand the universe. If you’re a high-agency builder and want to join the mission, DM me. Ad Astra! 🚀

Everything is a wrapper

Excited to be a small supporter of Trajectory! Today, most production agents for serious enterprise use cases require a deterministic harness that encodes edge cases or company-specific business processes. In this paradigm, to make agents better, companies make their deterministic tree / policy graph bigger and bigger since models can’t learn on their own. Trajectory re-writes this paradigm. Their platform helps models learn from a company’s own product usage data, building the rails for specialized AGI. And they hiring fast, DM if interested!

@luisocampox @AnthropicAI Congrats Luis!!!

life update: after nearly 5 years at partiful, i’ve joined @anthropicai to manage our influencer community and events pumped to be a part of this incredible team. if you’re a creator who’s been building with claude, i’d love to chat :)

@rronak_ Excited for what’s next!

I’ve left Google DeepMind. The last two years have been an incredible whirlwind. A couple years ago, I joined a small startup called Codeium. There, I got to ship Windsurf, train SWE-1 (a frontier agentic coding model), go to DeepMind in the $2.4B acquisition. Now, I decided to leave the acquisition money and DeepMind. I’m grateful to the mentors, teammates, and friends I worked with along the way. At Windsurf, thanks to @_mohansolo and Douglas Chen, I got to see what a fast moving startup that ships relentlessly and builds for the future looks like. I learned from @thenickmoy how excellent research leadership can drive outsized innovation. At DeepMind, I got to push the frontier of agentic coding, be part of the amazing team that shipped Antigravity and contributed to Gemini 3. DeepMind is a rare place: deeply curious people, exceptional research taste, and access to enormous compute and Google-scale infrastructure. A few things that I learned: 1. Finding the right hill to climb. Now more than ever, there are a multitude of directions to push the frontier in AI research. It’s easy to optimize for the wrong benchmark or capability. You should step back regularly to question if you are climbing the right hill, and adjust course often. 2. The secret to being a fast-moving team. Moving quickly is not just about working hard and long hours. It requires making concrete bets about where the world will be in 6 months, aligning around them, and cutting everything else. This was our journey from the Codeium Extension → Windsurf IDE → SWE-1 → Antigravity → Antigravity CLI 3. Silicon Valley is small. Since the split of Windsurf to DeepMind and Cognition, many of my colleagues have gone to other exciting places - Thinking Machines, OpenAI, xAI, Cursor, fast-moving startups, or started their own companies. I’m grateful to have worked with so many talented, hungry people whose stories are not yet finished. So what’s next? We are living in one of the most exciting and powerful times in human history. Just like we transformed software engineering, soon every industry, every unit of work will be radically transformed, democratized, accelerated. With this comes new challenges, and new doors of frontier research to be opened. More soon.

@NeilTewari Super cool!

We raised $30M for this moment. Today, we launch Conversion Agents. The first marketing platform where AI agents do the work and your team does strategy. We call it vibe marketing. Marketing teams spend 50%+ of their time on monotonous work. Conversion Agents cut that to 5%.

Excited to partner with Hilmar and the Fenris Games team as they become an independent game studio. And pumped for their new partnership with @GoogleDeepMind, who will be investing with us. As someone who’s played thousands of lifetime hours of strategy games, this has been special!

@jpgg Congrats Jonathan!

For as long as I can remember, I've wanted this job. Apple's "Think Different" posters covered every wall of my teenage bedroom. I got my first taste of venture at Greylock, I learned how to build at Airbnb as their first product manager, scaling with them as they 100x'd over every metric, and I partnered with truly exceptional founders at NEA. At Deviation Capital, I get to build and invest. @csbeirne, Dusan, Sidney and I started @Deviationcap to find and support the founders operating at the frontier and in the fringes, harnessing data, computing, and AI to build the defining companies of our time. We're hiring in SF –– reach out.

@maddiehfaulkner True, which is why many FDE roles are being called “Agent PM”

my hot take is I think anyone in PM should move to SE/FDE yesterday

@jurvistan @OpenAI Congrats Jurvis!!

Excited to join the consumer hardware team at @OpenAI this week! It seemed time to stop leaving computers to their own devices

Similar to looking at lines of code written, token spend isn’t necessarily indicative of productivity, but if the number is 0, you’re probably doing something wrong

@_WEEXIAO Super cool

We recently added LoRA RL support for Qwen3.5 MoE models like Qwen3.5-122B. The process involved merge conflicts, dependency issues, and a tricky race condition related to LoRA weight syncing. We wrote up a post that goes into more detail and shares our work - link below!

@harrygestetner1 Congrats Harry!

Orion has raised $22m to transform longevity through better sleep. Now you can sleep soundly without forced subscriptions.