@8vc
8VC is a leading technology investment firm based in Austin, Texas.
From inception, @OutsetAI has been dedicated to maximizing and multiplying the human element of research. Their latest launch, Digital Twins, is the boldest and most elegant expression of their mission to date.
Aaron Cannon@AaronLCannon·2023: we invented the AI interviewer. 2026: we invented the AI user. Digital Twins by @OutsetAI is live today. Accurately simulating humans is now possible. But it has done by building one-to-one synthetic twins anchored on real humans, not just asking a foundation model to regurgitate population level responses. That's why we did it. We reinvented the way companies understand their customers a few years ago. We built the most rigorous and high scale mechanism to capture and process customer data. And since then, we've captured millions of deep, multimodal human responses around the world. The future of insights will be a combination of understanding and simulating human experience. We're doing both.
Proud to lead @LazarusEnergy's $16M seed, and accelerate supercritical CO₂ turbines for super critical industries: data centers & nuclear SMR. @AtomsNotBits breaks down how Lazarus is attacking the power supply constraints standing between the 🇺🇸 and AI dominance:
Atoms Not Bits@AtomsNotBits·EXCLUSIVE: 8VC leads $16M Lazarus round to build modular supercritical CO₂ turbines for America’s data center buildout. Today, @LazarusEnergy, the Hawthorne-based startup, has secured an oversubscribed $16M seed round led by @8vc, with additional investment from Marlinspike, DST Global, Neuron Power Ventures, and @relentless_inv, as well as follow-up investment from @fiftyyears and @sidedoor_vc. The company is betting that a new turbine architecture can help solve one of the biggest constraints on America’s data center buildout, power. Supercritical carbon dioxide could decide America’s AI sovereignty. CO₂ crosses into the supercritical phase above 31.1°C and 73.8 bar, where liquid and gas collapse into a single fluid with liquid-like density and gas-like flow. It plays a special role in closed-loop Brayton cycle turbines, which could become core to data center power generation. Turbines are becoming increasingly important for data centers as power demand exceeds grid capacity and operators look for reliable on-site power. The traditional turbine market is behind, with wait times exceeding 5 to 7 years and OEMs even turning down new orders because capacity is maxed out. Lazarus is attempting to shift the supply curve. The LA startup was founded by George Kitromelides (CEO) and Luke Malcolm (CTO), both formerly on the propulsion team at Anduril, alongside team members from Siemens Energy, Williams International, and Ursa Major. The startup is developing turbines that enable a forward-deployable power plant fitting inside a shipping container. “Supercritical CO₂ lets you reduce the size of your components significantly,” according to George Kitromelides (CEO), thus enabling the distributed form factor. Traditional turbines are optimized for specific heat sources. Lazarus designed its system to be heat-source agnostic, allowing it to convert heat from nearly any major energy source into electricity. Lazarus has created a natural edge. It can serve today’s data center market with proven inputs like natural gas while remaining positioned for future heat sources like small modular reactors. Deployment is another edge. Traditional turbine players can require months or years of construction to set up on-site, while Lazarus’ platform is fully assembled at its facility and requires zero on-site construction. In areas like nuclear, this can be key. Luke Malcolm (CTO) states, “SMRs are supposed to be compact, modular, deployable power. And when you build your compact reactor and then spend a year building all your steam infrastructure on-site, that kind of defeats the whole purpose.” Lazarus is focused on two end markets, data centers as the beachhead market and small modular nuclear reactors as the secondary market, both with unique business models. In the data center market, “The OEMs are straight up rejecting new orders. They’re turning customers away because they just can’t keep up with demand,” according to George Kitromelides (CEO). Lazarus wants to provide power-as-a-service in the data center market, where it would own and operate the asset instead of the data center operator incurring CapEx. Additionally, the own-and-operate/PPA model allows Lazarus to generate significantly more long-term revenue than a one-time equipment sale. Under a power purchase agreement (PPA), customers pay for the electricity generated by the system over time rather than purchasing the power infrastructure upfront. Lastly, behind-the-meter power is surging as data centers seek dedicated, off-grid generation to avoid grid delays and secure reliable power. Lazarus enables that by delivering compact on-site power systems built for data center demand. On the nuclear side, Lazarus would integrate with SMR companies to supply the power cycle, with nuclear heat going into the Lazarus cycle and electricity coming out. This model would focus on selling units to reactor companies, followed by multi-year maintenance contracts. Lazarus is developing a true picks-and-shovels play for the AI power gold rush. But the broader opportunity extends well beyond data centers. As the forward-deployed stack expands across compute, manufacturing, medical units, and logistics, compact containerized power could become critical infrastructure for Department of War installations, remote mining operations, disaster response, and any site where reliable power needs to move closer to the edge. The team of six full-time engineers is focused on firing a 1-megawatt sub-module of its system by late this year or early next year. The system will be powered by natural gas. Additionally, the startup has secured an MOU with a nuclear customer and has received strong interest from the data center market.
The era of sovereign AI has arrived for Latin America, with @Primero_ai leading the charge. Co-founder @jose_murillo_d offers a powerful articulation of the moment, what it means, and how he and his team are meeting it.
José Murillo@jose_murillo_d·1/ Today, @Primero_ai is announcing its public launch and a $12m seed, one of the largest seed rounds in LatAm. Primero is the AI transformation company for Latin America's largest enterprises.
Latin America is a cornerstone of the global economy. Today, the region has a cornerstone AI platform of its own. @Primero_ai is sovereign AI for LatAm’s critical enterprises, with a unified ontology, customer-controlled models and data, and FDEs delivering world-class, locally fluent transformation. Primero has built an exceptional talent foundation, with a founding team honed in top technical cultures and numerous ICPC, IMO, and IOI alumni. We’re proud to pledge our support as they announce their $12M seed round (below).
@Primero_ai As covered by @kylie_madry in @Reuters: reuters.com/world/americas…
A few years ago @jmelaskyriazi bet big on making @metrics_co an AI-first platform. Now, amid record VC/PE deals and competition, top investors are turning to Standard Metrics for powerful new AI workflows and insights. Proud to triple down and lead their Series B!
John Melas-Kyriazi@jmelaskyriazi·Standard Metrics (@metrics_co) has raised a $20M Series B led by 8VC (@8vc) to accelerate innovation in the private markets! Trillions of dollars of economic activity in the private markets still run on spreadsheets, email threads, and PDFs. This critical ecosystem remains surprisingly analog and inefficient despite financing many of the world’s most innovative companies. This problem matters. A better-functioning innovation economy would lead to new big technological breakthroughs, life-saving medicines, jobs, and game-changing new products. AI expands both the urgency and the scope of this opportunity. New AI models have fundamentally changed how data can be organized, analyzed, and acted upon, and they are beginning to drive rapid software adoption in an industry that has historically lagged behind. We believe AI-native infrastructure will reshape the private markets over the coming decade. Two years ago, we bet our company on the idea of building the AI-native portfolio management platform for venture capital and private equity. That was the single most consequential decision in our history: it led us to create the first MCP server in our space, launch an AI-driven document processing service, and build cutting-edge agentic reporting and analytics tools. Today, we’re proud to support more than 150 investment firms who collectively manage over $400B, along with more than 10,000 of their portfolio companies. 30% of the Forbes Midas List are customers of Standard Metrics. But we’ve still only scratched the surface: we work with roughly 1% of active global VC/PE firms. We’ve raised roughly $50M to date. Most of that capital has come from our customers. Investors in this round alongside 8VC include Salesforce Ventures, Spark Capital, January Capital, First Trust Capital Partners, Socii Capital, Kindergarten Ventures, Calm Ventures, Gaingels, and more. It’s been an honor to partner with some of the world’s most forward-thinking investors on this journey. Thank you so much to our team, customers, investors, and supporters. We’re just getting started!
When we first backed @peteflorence and @GeneralistAI, our thesis was simple: robotics was ready to move beyond narrow, task-specific systems toward general-purpose intelligence. Our deepest conviction was in Pete and the team: world-class researchers with a rare focus on what actually ships, sells and compounds. Pete is as much a builder as a researcher. In early August, @JTLonsdale visited Generalist and got a sneak preview of GEN-1.5. The model was still in development, but the early progress reinforced our confidence in the team and trajectory. We decided to double down in a much more meaningful way and lead Generalist's latest round. A few days later, we recorded this @AmOptimistShow conversation. In the weeks that followed, GEN-1.5 showed just how quickly the frontier was advancing. The model can learn a new physical task in seconds from a single demonstration, without fine-tuning, alongside emergent capabilities in generalization, improvisation, novel tool use and ambidexterity. What we've seen since has only strengthened our belief that Generalist can be one of the defining companies bringing general intelligence into the physical world.
American Optimist@AmOptimistShow·EPISODE 161: The Robotics GPT-3 Moment @JTLonsdale sits down with @peteflorence Pete and @GeneralistAI are changing everything we know about robotics: -- robots trained on new tasks in seconds (seconds!) -- self-taught ambidexterity & other breakthroughs -- 10X more science and how the world will change (00:00) Episode intro (01:30) Bay Area to MIT and DeepMind (03:55) Pete's epiphany: robots sitting still (08:30) Why intelligence, not hardware, is the next frontier (13:20) The GPT-3 era of robotics (14:55) Why leave DeepMind? (16:50) How to train robot brains (18:30) Emergent ambidexterity (20:40) LLMs vs robot world models (23:50) GEN-0, GEN-1 & scaling laws in robotics (27:28) 10x more science per year (32:50) Skilled trades, reindustrialization & future of robots
@peteflorence @GeneralistAI Learn more about GEN-1.5 here:
Generalist@GeneralistAI·Introducing GEN-1.5, a one-shot learner. It can learn new tasks in a few seconds. Show it what to do, and it generalizes. This capability emerged from pretraining on physical data at scale, as a step towards our mission of building general intelligence for the physical world.
Before founding @ValsAI, @RayanKrishnan was a college radio host. We're thrilled to get him back in his element with @vvkgopalan, this time talking all things benchmarks and evals. As AI capabilities compound, measuring them is becoming both harder and more important. What started as an academic exercise is quickly evolving into critical infrastructure for understanding what AI systems can actually do, and how they perform in the real world. Rayan and Vivek go deep on how benchmarks are evolving, measuring increasingly agentic systems, the weird and wonderful ways we test intelligence, the global AI race, and why evals sit on the critical path to ASI. 0:44 Importance and evolution of benchmarks 8:16 From academic artifact → real-world value 10:57 The next generation of benchmarks 13:34 Benchmarking models vs. agents 16:20 Building benchmarks for organizations 22:09 Weird and wonderful benchmarks 25:58 The AI arms race: US vs. China 31:02 Why evals are on the critical path to ASI 32:50 Vals Series A
AI is getting more capable and harder to measure. Benchmarks test contrived tasks. Test sets leak. Leaderboards get optimized against. Labs grade their own exams. @ValsAI builds benchmarks the way work is actually done: evaluations authored alongside practitioners on real professional tasks, with private test sets that can’t leak into training data. As models, harnesses, and applications multiply, every serious adoption decision routes through the same question: what can these systems actually do? Vals is building the trusted answer. We led the seed and are proud to continue partnering with @RayanKrishnan, @langstonnashold and the team as @a16z leads their Series A. Our investment thesis: t.co/ootQ7Me4xp
.@Snowflake and our portco @bespokelabsai collaborated on this custom data engineering eval which mimics real-world workflows. You can try it yourself. x.com/RamaswmySridha…
One of the defining characteristics of human intelligence is the ability to use tools. Seeing that emerge with real generality in robot intelligence is a profound milestone. Congratulations to @peteflorence and the @GeneralistAI team! 🤖 x.com/GeneralistAI/s…
Medical billing shouldn't be an unsolved mystery, let alone a $280B one. Thanks to @candid_health, the tide is turning. Nick, Doug, and friends are bringing a new standard of financial infrastructure to healthcare, and stamping out inefficiency with every release and customer. Proud to have backed them since seed and renew our support today as they announce their $120M Series D.
@candid_health As reported by @FortuneMagazine: fortune.com/2026/07/22/can…
Explaining what your product or service does is one of the few parts of business that never got cheaper. The real constraint isn't information. It's the ability to put human judgment in front of every customer when they need it. Until now, the only way to do that was headcount. Today, we're excited to announce that @8vc co-led @withsableai's $45M raise alongside @sequoia. Sable is building an AI employee that can understand what a customer is trying to accomplish, interact with the product alongside them, and reason through complex problems in real time. As models improve, new possibilities open faster than any roadmap can absorb. We're proud to partner with @Nim_Ravid1, Linda He, Leon Chen, Itamar Rocha Filho, and the entire Sable team as they build the future of customer interaction. Our investment thesis: t.co/Z0E3MO52VE
Much of the AI narrative revolves around architecture research, compute scaling & buying human data. Very few understand the deep technical discipline of "data research," which has driven many of the gains in model capabilities. @vvkgopalan sits down with @madiator & @AlexGDimakis, founders of @bespokelabsai, a company defining the category of data research. (00:00) Introducing Mahesh and Alex (03:40) Teaching a 1000 person ML class at Berkeley / changes in CS education in the age of AI (06:10) Open source data for frontier model training, OpenThoughts & training models for data curation (12:00) Why multiple-answer yields more performant models, benefits of keeping unverifiable examples in datasets (17:20) RL scaling laws / introduction to Bespoke (19:45) "Environment-driven Development" (28:35) New capabilities in frontier models & coding agents (34:30) Market outlook for RL environments (42:30) Exciting recent research and how we arrived at today's state of RL (50:00) Bespoke's Series A
@vvkgopalan @madiator We are very proud to partner with this team since the beginning! bespokelabs.ai/blog/bespoke-l…
Thank you to everyone who spent part of your busy Config week with us at Pixel Eight Cafe. It was great to see designers, artists, builders, and friends all in one place!
We wanted Pixel Eight Cafe to feel less like a networking event and more like an afternoon worth spending: a place to discover local SF artists, meet new people, and leave inspired.
Congratulations to the entire team at @DeepFission on today's IPO. We’re proud to have backed Liz, Rich, and friends since their seed, and to support them in bringing proven nuclear tech to new frontiers. 🇺🇸⚡️
We’re co-hosting two events for Config Week: ✦ Design × Research with @cognition — Tues 6/23, 6–9pm ✦ Pixel Eight Café with @indent — Thurs 6/25, 2–5pm Matcha, zines, local artists, vintage pop-ups, and a vinyl DJ for a mini creative market. More on our microsite below:
Come check out what's going on during config on our muni-inspired microsite here: 8vc.com/pixeleight
Robotics is going to get its Claude Code moment long before its ChatGPT moment. Everyone keeps waiting on the big general-purpose humanoid demo, the one that's supposed to make the whole thing click. But that's not how LLMs broke through. Coding got there first. It was narrow,
Dexterity is the hardest unsolved problem in robotics, and the clearest path to everything that follows. Cracking it takes research depth and commercial focus that rarely coexist. @GeneralistAI has both. Proud to be on the journey with @peteflorence, @andyzengineer and the team. x.com/GeneralistAI/s…
Our design team is incredible. Custom microsite for our Rocket League tournament this Friday with @cognition. Melee and other games will be featured as well. @ScottWu46 will probably school everyone, but that shouldn't stop you from trying. Limited spots @ x.com/DrCapsoul/stat…
Bringing operational intelligence to industry is core to 8VC’s thesis. Saris tackles underserved FI back office workflows end to end, orchestrating and executing with staggering depth and speed to ROI. Proud to lead their $28.8M Series A, as detailed by @AlexKolicich &
@AlexKolicich And don't miss the round coverage in @axios: axios.com/pro/fintech-de…
We hosted talented designers and design leaders from companies such as @cognition, @tryramp, @stripe, @MagicPathAI, @floraai and many more at Pixel Eight NYC. There were great conversations on AI + emergent design processes and amazing vibes all around!
Artifacts for our in-house design lab for next week's NYC design meetup from. Most spots are filled but we encourage any interested designers to join the waitlist if space frees up or if you want an invite to the next one. Link below.
Join the waitlist here: 8vc.com/pixeleight
We're hosting this quarter's design meetup NYC. @DrCapsoul whipped up this fun event landing page with a few hidden easter eggs. If you're a ravenously talented designer/design engineer consider joining us! Space is very limited, link below.
RSVP here, only a handful of slots available. 8vc.com/pixeleight
Movie night at our sf office with our friends at @browserbase, may be the beginning of a fun new tradition. x.com/DrCapsoul/stat…
The era of the agentic systems integrator has arrived. Thrilled to lead @RilianTech's seed funding, and support their expansion as a critical security partner to the US, GCC, and numerous allied nations. x.com/RilianTech/sta…
Software engineering was the first function to get a digital employee. Finance is next. Proud to partner with @tanujt, Mani, and @kos_ai_inc — the world's first AI accountant, purpose-built for the finance backbone of America's reindustrialization. More on why we invested:
Join the waitlist to our Austin Design Meetup here: gatsby.events/8vc/rsvp/regis…
