Doug Pepper

I'm proud to share that @Glean has surpassed $300M ARR, just five months after crossing $200M and growing ~3x over the past 15 months. This is an exciting milestone for Glean, and it's a signal about where the enterprise AI market is heading. We’ve long believed the real challenge in enterprise AI is not access to models. It is grounding AI in how a company actually works: its people, knowledge, workflows, permissions, and systems. That’s even clearer now. The companies creating real value with AI are not just adopting better models. They are building systems that understand their business well enough to deliver reliable outcomes at scale. That is the real moat, and it is what we’ve been building at Glean: an unrivaled context layer for enterprise AI. That context has to work across the business, not just inside a single team or use case. We see that in how customers adopt Glean: more than 85% use it across five or more job functions. It also has to meet the security and governance demands of complex enterprises. We see that in who is choosing Glean: our Fortune 500 customer count nearly doubled year over year. And it has to make economic sense as usage grows. In our recent benchmark with Claude Cowork, Glean was preferred roughly 2.5x as often as off-the-shelf MCP tools and used 30% fewer tokens on average. Better context improves both quality and efficiency. I enjoyed talking with @CNBC's @dee_bosa about this broader shift. In enterprise AI, the winners will not be defined by better models alone. They will be defined by who builds the strongest foundation for enterprise context. Thank you to our customers, partners, and team for helping us build the future of enterprise AI.

In April 2016, I threatened to climb over @andrewdfeldman's fence to give him his first term sheet for @cerebras. It was April Fool’s day, but I wasn’t fooling around. The story started in October 2007, when Andrew and his co-founder Gary Lauterbach had just started SeaMicro. Even then, Andrew was a force of nature. He was extremely intense and miswired in all the right ways. You could feel the sparks flying off him. We didn't invest in SeaMicro, but we stayed in touch. Andrew and the team built SeaMicro then sold it to AMD in 2012. When AMD acquired SeaMicro, I had a hunch Andrew wouldn't last long inside a big company. He has, as I've said many times, immense ambition and a heart full of disobedience. By early 2014, he was looking for an escape hatch. Over the next year and a half, Andrew and I met 6 or 7 times. Sometimes in our office. Sometimes at a coffee shop in Portola Valley. Sometimes at our local tennis and swim club. We kept coming back to one thing: deep learning workloads were growing exponentially, and traditional compute architectures couldn't keep up. GPUs had become the default for neural network training, mainly because researchers had accidentally discovered they were less terrible than CPUs. Andrew, Gary and Sean saw the GPU for what it was: a battlefield promotion of a chip optimized for graphics. Better than a CPU, but not what anyone would design starting from a blank sheet of paper. Their key insight was that memory bandwidth, not raw compute, was the real constraint on what neural networks could achieve. So Andrew, Sean Lie, Gary Lauterbach, Jean-Philippe Fricker and Michael James set out to do something nobody had pulled off in the 75-year history of semiconductors: Build a wafer-scale chip the size of a dinner plate. In April 2016, I asked Andrew if we could be his first term sheet. @ericvishria at Benchmark and I co-led the round along with Pierre Lamond from Eclipse. Then the hard work began. In the 75-year history of computing, no one had made wafer scale work. Which meant no one had ever had to solve the problems that came from trying. How do you power a chip that large? How do you cool one? How do you maintain electrical continuity across tens of thousands of connection points on a single piece of silicon? To get there, Cerebras had to invent in nearly every modern computing discipline at once: semiconductors, systems, data fabric, software, algorithms. Each was a startup in its own right. Their first wafer self-destructed on initial power-up and Andrew and the team were back in the lab the next morning, identifying what didn’t work and coming up with approaches to solving it. Yesterday, Cerebras went public. 19 years after our first meeting, 10 years after that April Fool's term sheet, they’ve built a generational AI company. From a coffee shop in Portola Valley to ringing the bell at the NASDAQ. What a journey. Proud to have been Andrew's first partner in Cerebras. Even prouder to call him my friend.

We just crossed $500M ARR and welcomed new investors to @ElevenLabs: BlackRock, Wellington, Nvidia, Santander, Jamie Foxx, Eva Longoria and more. Natural, human-like communication will be critical to broad AI adoption - and these new investors help us accelerate that work.

Big news: Hightouch has raised $150M at a $2.75B valuation, led by @GoldmanSachs and @BainCapVC. We’re dreaming big for this next chapter of Hightouch. Learn more about our not-so-secret plan to reinvent marketing with agentic AI: hightouch.com/blog/hightouch…

Uncommon founders build uncommon companies. We're honored to partner with the ones defining the AI era. Thank you to @matiii and @MaxJunestrand for sharing your perspectives and @nmasc_ and @Bloomberg @technology for helping tell our story. Read more: bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Disclaimer: bit.ly/4tSG5Ev