@BessemerVP
For the entrepreneurs who want to build revolutions of their own.
Building a robotics business today looks nothing like it did two years ago. We talked to Ury Zhilinsky (Mind Robotics), Sandy Hefftz (Bellboy Robotics), and @TAStinson (former CEO, @CovariantAI)—three leaders who've built and deployed robots at @amazon, @Waymo, and Covariant, now running them in hotels, warehouses, and auto plants. Here are 7 lessons from the experts 🧵
1️⃣ Build where buyers are primed to embrace robotics Target industries with real labor shortages where one site might need 150 people a day just to keep up. Look for controlled, repeatable environments. Skills built in one setting often transfer to adjacent industries.
Five frontiers defining the next wave of investments in AI infrastructure, each solving a structural limit that model scaling alone can't fix 🧵
1️⃣ "Harness" infrastructure Memory, context, and state management for compound AI systems, plus eval and observability. ~78% of AI failures are invisible: confidently wrong, gradual drift, no complaint. New platforms are building semantic evals to catch what monitoring can't.
1/ Defense tech has advanced more in the past twenty-four months than in the previous three decades. We’ve identified five frontiers driving innovation in defense and national security. 1️⃣Autonomy moving from concept to combat 2️⃣AI permeating DoW workflows 3️⃣New vectors for advanced manufacturing 4️⃣Edge and network resilience 5️⃣Energy and materials independence. 🧵
2/Why now? Multiple transformational forces are both converging and amplifying each other. 🔹 Procurement reform speeds deployment. 🔹 Early wins pull in AI talent that once avoided defense. 🔹Geopolitical threats drive budgets. 🔹 Rising budgets validate public markets, drawing in more capital and founders.
How to build robotics businesses set to scale.🧵 Lessons for applied robotics founders building today. Insights from the experts: 🤖 Ury Zhilinsky of Mind Robotics 🤖 Sandy Hefftz of Bellboy Robotics 🤖 Ted Stinson of Covariant 📺youtu.be/hzXeYUdaGbU?si…
1️⃣Build where buyers are primed to embrace robots. Pick a vertical that faces labor shortages, customer urgency and pain points, including structured, predictable environments and workflows.
New @hoh_pod episode is live! @stephenkraus & Halle are breaking down where capital is flowing, big incumbent bets, AI moving from hype to proof, and a quiet public health crisis brewing. Listen to this month's Digital Health Download: bit.ly/4v60Aho
1/ Autonomous systems and robotics are moving from labs to factory floors and households. The convergence of AI and robotics is reshaping the physical world across every imaginable industry, from defense and manufacturing to healthcare and consumer experiences. 🧵
2/ In our research, the robotics and physical AI market is experiencing explosive growth driven by three key factors: 🔹Breakthrough advances in AI foundation models that enable better perception and decision-making 🔹Dramatic reductions in hardware costs 🔹Acute labor shortages across critical industries
New @hoh_pod episodeis live! @stephenkraus & Eric Larsen are back for round 3, tackling your questions on healthcare's AI revolution: foundation models, pilot purgatory, clinical adoption, liability, and workforce disruption. 🎧bessemervp.team/4w2mQta
We're excited to deepen our partnership with Vetic in their latest $40M round as the team builds India’s first fully connected pet healthcare platform. 🇮🇳Learn about the opportunity and what makes Gaurav Ajmera an exceptional founder → bvp.com/news/building-…
1/ We've been mapping the AI data center stack — and the opportunity is hiding in plain sight. Everyone's talking about GPUs. The real bottleneck is physical infrastructure: power, permitting, cooling, and the grid. 🧵
2/ As of early 2026, 190 GW of hyperscale data center capacity has been announced across 777 projects. Data centers can be built in 12–18 months — but connecting them to the grid takes 5–7 years.
.@fin_ai (formerly Intercom) has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by @salesforce. For any founder wondering what it looks like to transform a SaaS business into an AI-native platform, CEO and founder @eoghan and the Fin team provided the blueprint. When AI arrived, the team didn't just layer on new features and call it transformation. Nearly four years ago, the team jumped on weeks-old modern LLMs, and shipped intensely, to create and define the category we know as Customer Agents today. They reinvented Intercom, a leader in the SaaS era, to make way for Fin, the AI customer agent. Today Fin is a category-defining customer agent company. Once the acquisition has closed, Salesforce will gain Fin’s core capability, resolving complex customer queries end-to-end across live chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, phone, and Slack. At the center is Apex, Fin's proprietary AI model, purpose-built for customer support. Bessemer first invested in Intercom in 2014, when @bdeeter and @ethankurz led the Series B, just a few years after its founding in 2011. Almost a decade later, @TaliaGold doubled down on the company and joined the board as it entered the AI era. The early bet wasn't just on a messaging product, but also its founders: @eoghan, @destraynor, @ciaran_lee, who believed the relationship between businesses and their customers deserved to be fundamentally better. That conviction was clear from the first conversation. So was their willingness to do whatever it took, including the courage to know when it was time to build something entirely new. Congratulations to Eoghan, Des, Ciaran, and the entire Fin team on this milestone!
Where have you seen AI provide the most efficiency gains at your company? See how leaders across Engineering, Finance, GTM, Marketing, and CS are operationalizing AI → bvp.com/atlas/data-tre…
Eight PMF insights before you declare victory 🧩 Read on → x.com/BessemerVP/sta…
Last week, we hosted our 3rd annual Defense Roundtable in Washington, D.C. We were joined by founders, members of Congress, and current and retired senior officials — all in one room, talking honestly about the future of American defense. Thanks to our speakers: @GenCQBrownJr,
AI agents aren't running your shopping yet. But the new stack is forming and the time to build is now. We mapped the entire agentic commerce landscape — from discovery to payment to post-purchase. Retailers already see 15-20% of referral traffic from AI chat. McKinsey projects
🚨 ICYMI—@maintainx acquired by @autodesk for $3.6B This week includes— ☁️ @render founder @anuraggoel shares why the best startup opportunities are in markets everyone assumes are already won 🛰️ @Picogrid raises a $45M Series A to tackle one of defense’s biggest challenges
Defense has always driven innovation. Radar, GPS, the internet. Investor @Jayshellah shares two predictions from Bessemer’s Robotics Day: 1️⃣The first and largest outcomes in robotics will come from defense. 2️⃣Robotics funding will grow dramatically in the next few years. Learn
Congratulations to our partner @TaliaGold on being named one of the 100 Women in AI list! From @fal AI to @perplexity_ai to @Mind_Robotics – her bets on AI-native categories have helped define what's possible. 100womeninai.com/talia-goldberg
Cisco defined broadband networking. Arista defined cloud. We believe @drivenets will define the AI era, which is why we're leading their $410M Series D. The more fragmented inference compute becomes, the more critical a single unified networking stack beneath it. There may be a
A new episode of @hoh_pod is live today! On this month's Digital Health Download, @stephenkraus and Halle sit down to discuss the latest headlines and the growing contradictions shaping digital health right now. Check it out now on bit.ly/4vq78bg.
At our Robotics Day in SF, we sat down with @ArmenAgha,@JasonMa2020, and @philippswu, who shared 8 sharp takes on what the field is missing: → The 'data pyramid' weighs quality vs. scale → Data quality isn't static → Build in-house where the frontier is unsolved → RL works
.@maintainx enters a definitive agreement to be acquired by @autodesk in a ~$3.6 billion deal! Congratulations to Co-founders @CTurlica (CEO) and @dozoisch (CTO) on this milestone and opportunity to strengthen Autodesk's ability to connect operations workflows and real-world
We surveyed nearly 175 leaders across the Bessemer portfolio on how high growth technology companies are leveraging AI. Here’s what we learned, unfiltered and by function. Read the State of Working AI roadmap. bvp.com/atlas/data-tre…
At our Robotics Day in SF, we sat down with three founders at the frontier of embodied AI who shared 8 sharp takes on what the field is missing: → The 'data pyramid' weighs quality vs. scale → Data quality isn't static → Build in-house where the frontier is unsolved → RL
Congratulations to @bdeeter on making @Forbes #MidasList of 2026! From cloud to AI, he's backing the next generation of founders building today. Forge ahead! 🚀
What is the AI tool of choice at your company?
𝐎𝐮𝐭 𝐧𝐨𝐰—𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐀𝐈 📈 We surveyed nearly 175 leaders across the Bessemer portfolio on how high-growth technology companies are leveraging AI. Here’s what we learned, unfiltered and by function. ↴ bvp.com/atlas/data-tre…
🚨 ICYMI: This week includes — 🤖 How @fieldguide is using Claude Code to turn sales reps into their own coaches ✍️ A look inside architecture’s “ChatGPT moment” as Bessemer leads @app_illoca's $13M Seed round 📈 @AxoniusInc surpasses $200M ARR as enterprises race to secure
For the second year running, Bessemer co-hosted The Initial Commit with @zettaventures and @ZeroPrimeVC—the Day 0 kickoff for the @aicouncilconf in SF. ⚡ The room was packed with leaders across AI and frontier tech — no agenda, just builders making connections, sharing ideas,
A $36T market cap is being unlocked. 📈 Trillion-dollar software companies of the 2030s are being founded today. @bdeeter & @silicon_samuel break down the math of the biggest bet in corporate history → bvp.com/atlas/inside-t…
AI agents aren’t running your shopping yet. But the new stack is forming and the time to build is now. 🛍️ Explore our 8 predictions → bvp.com/atlas/agentic-…
Capex from the big five hyperscalers (AMZN, MSFT, GOOGL, META, ORCL) will cross $1T by next year. And $8T cumulative by 2031. Hiding inside that bet is AI's biggest moment. @bdeeter and @silicon_samuel break down the possibility. ⤵️ bvp.com/atlas/inside-t…
AI is creating one of the largest infrastructure investment cycles of our lifetimes. Our new roadmap covers six areas of enabling technology in the data center stack that address the interconnected challenges in AI’s energy layer: 🔹 Permitting & site selection 🔹 Power
AI in healthcare has cleared the "does it work?" hurdle. Now it's about who's willing to deploy it and own the risk. @stephenkraus and Eric Larson revisit last year's Webby Award-winning predictions. Listen to the latest @hoh_pod episode today: bit.ly/4wvYuJnor
How to get an edge on growth. 📈 Get our vault drops → bvp.com/building-ai-di…
.@ArmenAgha and @AkshatS07 made a non-obvious bet on a unified VLM backbone before others did. Perceptron Mk1 is what that bet looks like at the frontier. We're proud to have backed this leading team! 🚀 x.com/perceptroninc/…
New case study—the story of Graph AI 💊 Four enterprise technologists got a call from a life sciences CEO whose previous vendor had spent 18 months trying to build AI workflows for drug safety and walked away. Graph AI said yes. Two and a half weeks later, the team delivered an
12/ The companies building this infrastructure stack today are creating compounding advantages that will be nearly impossible to close. Read our full research on building biology-native data infrastructure: bvp.com/atlas/building…
