Lightspeed

Torsten Reil on why he believes a high talent bar starts with a strong hiring pipeline: "It becomes much easier to move people out that are not a good fit if you know your hiring pipeline is so good that the position will be filled almost immediately." "What happens instead is managers are hesitant to move people out because they know it may take nine months to fill that position again." "So the argument becomes: 'At least they're going to get the job done somehow.' That's not good enough." From @torstenreil's (Founder @HelsingAI) appearance on @davidsenra

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Congratulations to @grafana for reaching 10,000 customers worldwide! The team at Grafana has built an open observability cloud, an infrastructure designed to help engineers to oversee and understand what their AI systems are working on. It has been inspiring to watch the team scale at such an essential time for AI observability over the past seven years. This milestone reflects the enduring value of transparency in the AI era, particularly as companies adopt agents in their operations. CC @gauravgram

businessinsider.com/grafana-labs-a…

"The future battlefield is machines versus machines." Torsten Reil, founder of @HelsingAI: "The number of drones that can fly in a coordinated way is getting better and better. And it's going to be very hard for humans to survive on the battlefield." "That's already the case in Ukraine. You can't really enter the battlefield as a human and survive for very long, whether you're in a vehicle or on your own." "At the moment, the drones attacking you are usually remote controlled. Once they're autonomous, it's going to be even more dangerous." From @torstenreil's conversation with @davidsenra

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“The doctor will really see you now.” @AbridgeHQ is building an AI-native platform for clinicians, anchored in the conversation. By using AI to rethink and redesign the system, the opportunity for healthcare to feel personal and human-first again grows.

An essential component of audit is trust. We evaluated many companies going after this problem. On technical architecture, breadth of vision, and institutional credibility, we believed Andera was a clear outlier. On this episode of The Investment Memo, Andera co-founders @tinahhong and @AryoPatel join Partners @katkzhang and @buckymoore to discuss why they built Andera this way, how customer trust became a product decision, and why they believe AI is uniquely positioned to fundamentally transform audit. Tune into the full conversation below. 0:00 Welcome, Aryo Patel and Tinah Hong! 1:04 Why Start Andera, and Why SOX Control Testing? 2:13 How AI Is Transforming Enterprise Audit 4:34 Why Is AI Finally Transforming the Audit Market? 5:37 How SOX Data Can Map a Company’s Financial Ecosystem 7:10 Andera’s Vision for AI-Powered CFO Decisions 8:22 How Andera Builds Trust With Audit Teams 9:20 The Technology Behind Andera’s Platform 11:05 Why Andera Focuses on Complex Audit Problems 15:00 How the Big Four Are Adapting to AI and Where Andera Fits 16:47 Why Andera Accelerated Its Fundraising 18:06 Andera’s Long-Term Vision 18:50 Building Trust Around Financial Data 19:21 Closing Thoughts

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Check out the full episode on YouTube here: youtu.be/asdr0sIjHpk

Could robots that keep learning after deployment be the path to general-purpose robotics? @SkildAI is showing incredible progress with their S1 that can learn a workflow up to 10 minutes long from a single video, with no task-specific post-training. Today, a single base model can keep learning new work wherever it is deployed. That brings a much broader range of the physical world within reach.

Could robots that keep learning after deployment be the path to general-purpose robotics? @SkildAI is showing incredible progress with their S1 that can learn a workflow up to 10 minutes long from a single video, with no task-specific post-training. Today, a single base model can keep learning new work wherever it is deployed. That brings a much broader range of the physical world within reach.

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Becoming AI-native often starts with an AI-native data layer

Josh and Claire on the potential logic behind SpaceXAI + Cursor: “It sort of felt like there was a marriage where they both needed something from each other.” From Lightwork @Machiz @clairejyz

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The share of S&P 1500 companies warning about AI hacking in their annual reports:

ChatGPT for Teens is attempting to address ongoing safety concerns around chatbots. The catch: the LLM estimates ages based on conversation data. More on Lightwork this week: What Stripe's acquisition of OpenRouter could mean for the future of routing tech The thesis behind SpaceX’s $60B Cursor acquisition, and what they’ve released since Anthropic’s protein binder experiment and what it may indicate for AI use in scientific research Full video below. @clairejyz @Machiz

YouTube: youtu.be/AEn33fvwIKk

“The most important thing a large company has that differentiates it from everyone else is its data. But it’s locked.” So how could you make enterprise data usable by AI without giving up control of it? From Lightwork with @clairejyz and @OfirEhrlich

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We’re excited to continue backing @Castelion for its $1B Series C, at a $13B valuation. A large portion of modern defense is shaped by America’s ability to build sophisticated weapons quickly, affordably, at scale. Castelion is working to build the manufacturing capacity to do exactly that: on top of their hypersonic weapons, they’re building a factory in order to produce thousands of them a year. Since we first invested in 2024, the team has taken Blackbeard, its hypersonic strike missile, from an idea to a U.S. military program, and built a 1,000-acre manufacturing campus in New Mexico. This round is aiming to ramp up production of Blackbeard while helping accelerate longer-range strike weapons and defensive systems. Congratulations to co-founders @hargsb, @sean_pitt_, Andrew Kreitz, and the entire team on this milestone! Cc: @ravi_lsvp, @ravirajjain

Learn more about Castelion here: wsj.com/business/carly…

Thrilled for Neko to bring their vision of preventative health to the US. @Neko is opening its New York clinic on September 24. Waitlists for Miami, SF and Washington DC now open.

Read more: techcrunch.com/2026/08/18/dan…

Congratulations to @raincards on the launch of their Agentic Payments Alliance. The APA is a coalition formed to help guide the way agent-driven commerce actually gets built. Rain is joining forces with 25+ other companies to write the playbook, confronting key questions of liability, authorization, disputes, and more. As we move towards the reality of agents spending on people’s behalf, Rain is working to solve this together, collaboratively, rather than in fragments.

Learn more about Rain’s APA here: prnewswire.com/news-releases/…

Your AI needs the data you’ve locked away. @OfirEhrlich joined Lightwork to talk about why he believes enterprise data is becoming more valuable, harder to protect, and increasingly critical for AI. Ofir’s solution is @Eon_io_inc, a new data foundation that helps protect enterprise data and make it usable by AI. Full video link in the comments below.

@OfirEhrlich @Eon_io_inc YouTube: youtu.be/gQzLtiqi-Rs Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/74BmFH…

“The world is made of atoms, and moving atoms is the ultimate frontier for intelligence.” Lightspeed Partner @ravirajjain on the coming wave of physical AI: “Robots are going to be everywhere.” “[I believe] they’re going to do a lot of really amazing things, things that humans should not be doing.” “These robotics systems and physical AI systems can do that at scale and more safely.”

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AI is designing functional viral genomes from scratch. This week on Lightwork: → Researchers at Stanford and the Arc Institute created 16 new bacteriophages capable of targeting E. coli, including strains resistant to the natural phage. → Dr. @BrentonFargnoli breaks down why proprietary data, distribution, and trust may end up mattering more than the model itself. Brenton and Claire get into what they believe it takes to build a vertical AI company in healthcare. Full video below.

"If you're going to spend your life doing something, do something that matters." Lightspeed Partner @ravirajjain's advice to founders building hard things: "It's a phenomenal time to be alive and a phenomenal time to be in technology and to be a founder." "Make the boldest and bravest bet to change the world as you would like to see it." "No idea is too ambitious. In fact, that's what we get attracted to: the most ambitious ideas." "The journey is not straightforward. You will have a lot of roadblocks... and that's fine, because that's really what building in these hard industries is about." From Lightwork

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“Clinical AI has moved from interpretive work, like reading an image and offering a diagnosis, toward consultative.“ “The frontier from here is procedural and eventually surgical, which will be the point where AI stops living entirely in software and starts physically helping the human body.” Lightspeed Partners @BrentonFargnoli, @GalymImanbayev, and @f_fatemi21 on the future of healthcare AI and where they see the venture opportunity moving.

Lightspeed Partner @ravirajjain on why underwriting frontier companies is completely different than underwriting traditional SaaS: "The breadth of opportunities at the frontier is a lot wider, but the depth of understanding you need is also a lot deeper." "It requires going native on a space: understanding the stakeholders, talking to researchers across the world, speaking to practitioners who will buy the technology, reading papers, and consulting with people in the industry." "In one particular case, we spent a year diligencing the space before we made our first investment." "The frontier requires a lot more upfront underwriting and work." From Lightwork

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Lightspeed Partner @ravirajjain on why underwriting frontier companies is completely different than underwriting traditional SaaS: "The breadth of opportunities at the frontier is a lot wider, but the depth of understanding you need is also a lot deeper." "It requires going native on a space: understanding the stakeholders, talking to researchers across the world, speaking to practitioners who will buy the technology, reading papers, and consulting with people in the industry." "In one particular case, we spent a year diligencing the space before we made our first investment." "The frontier requires a lot more upfront underwriting and work. But when you're right, you're right in a very big way." From Lightwork

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LLMs are increasingly becoming local. @UnslothAI new desktop app enables users to run and train AI on local hardware faster, smarter, and more efficiently. Congratulations to the team on this milestone.

How @basepowerco turns thousands of homes into a virtual power plant: "Instead of having one giant power plant, you have thousands of homes and nodes that connect together." "They network together. They add up to a utility." "Power is often very cheap at night. Base charges up all their batteries cheaply then." "When the grid is slammed, like a very hot summer afternoon in Texas, prices spike." "It's basically buying low and selling high, at scale, thousands of times a day across thousands of homes." From Lightwork

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“We believe fundamentally that we are entering an era of abundance.” Lightspeed Partner @ravirajjain joins @clairejyz to break down the firm's frontier investing thesis. Throughout history, there have been waves of compounding innovation. Before AI, someone had to invent the internet. Before that, electricity. In just the last 200 years, total global output has increased by more than 100x. Raviraj expounds upon his frontier thesis and strategy on this week’s episode of Lightwork.

There’s only so much AI can learn from the public internet. Some of the harder problems require data people have to create. With Luel Labs, @LuelCompany is taking the human-data infrastructure it has built into multimodal research, starting with speech and underrepresented languages where existing datasets fall short. We’re excited to see where @williamnamgyal, @Lenderking, and the team take Luel Labs.

“Your biggest competition, or your biggest challenge, is going to be you yourself.” @Jainarvind on why execution matters more than competition in AI. Great conversation between @Jainarvind of @glean and @KaranVaidya6 of @composio on the massive opportunity they believe is still ahead.

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We’re excited to welcome Brian Kelly to the Lightspeed team. Brian spent his career leading GTM strategy at high-growth B2B companies like Snowflake and ServiceNow. Now, he’s bringing his expertise to Lightspeed as an Operating Partner, working with CEO’s and CRO’s to navigate through their GTM challenges. In this video, Brian breaks down many of the most common sales problems founders face and how to identify them before they get too expensive. We are thrilled to have him on the team. 0:00 The Cost of Poor GTM Strategy 0:59 Early Stage: Founder-Led Sales 3:08 Growth Stage: Scaling Your Sales Team

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Watch the video here: youtu.be/r1aed3eMAvs?si…

AI solves the unsolvable, and shows 294 pages of work humans couldn't do, for only $2,000. This week on Lightwork: - @GoogleDeepMind released three models of their new Gemini Robotics 2 robot family. - The U.S. power grid looks at an upgrade via @basepowerco’s powerful home battery. - Several top researchers at Google DeepMind (@JeffDean, @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @OriolVinyalsML, and @quocleix) are leaving to pursue a new venture, Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI). Full video below. @clairejyz @Machiz

YouTube: youtu.be/Z_7YQ8QIWLc

We’re thrilled to co-lead @Whatnot’s $545M Series G. From day one, founders @GrantLaFontaine and @loganhead13 believed live commerce could accelerate what’s possible for business growth. With Whatnot, the team has built a marketplace where independent sellers and global brands alike can grow businesses around passionate communities. And now, they’re investing in AI-powered tools to make those connections even stronger. We’ve been fortunate to partner with the team for the past two years, and have watched the company continue to scale at an extraordinary pace, reaching a $20B valuation. We’re excited to continue supporting the mission. Congratulations on this milestone! Cc: @bsomaia, @sach_pat

Read more about Whatnot here: fortune.com/2026/08/07/ai-…

.@clairejyz explains why the Meta / BlackRock 1 GW data center build is the "creation of a new institutional asset class around compute." The deal is a $14B campus in El Paso. BlackRock owns 80%. Meta keeps 20%, leases the facility back, and pulls a $1B distribution out. "For the last few years, hyperscalers have been self-funding the compute buildout. Meta, Google, Microsoft were building these data centers out of their own balance sheets and profits." "BlackRock manages all these pension funds and insurers who need a safe place to park their money. In this case, that would be a 20-year lease to Meta, technically one of the most reliable payers on earth."

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Western Union's Stablecard app is now live, powered by Rain. Congrats to the @raincards team on their launch. x.com/raincards/stat…

.@clairejyz breaks down last week’s open letter calling for the U.S. government to support international safeguards around automated AI development. “This is not a pause AI statement.” “What they’re asking for is a technical and diplomatic capability to slow down if needed.” “It’s sort of like demanding that cars have brakes.” From Lightwork.

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We are thrilled to back @OligoSecurity in their recent $60 million raise, bringing their total funding to $140 million. As AI advances, so should security strategies. Oligo prioritizes active threat protection, shifting the focus of modern security from patching to real-time execution. Since Lightspeed first invested in Oligo in 2022, the market has seen increased demand for runtime security as organizations adapt to AI-driven attacks. Congratulations to founders @GalElbaz1, @AvshalomHilu, Nadav Czerninski, and the rest of the Oligo team. CC: @YoniCheifetz

Read more here: businesswire.com/news/home/2026…

How many agents are actually running your organization? This week on Lightwork: - @AxoniusInc CEO, Joe Diamond, unpacks the threat of “Shadow AI,” or the hidden movements of AI agents. - Major labs call for pacing in AI development - The financing structures for OpenAI’s and Meta’s new data centers - What @meetgranola's new Apple Watch app could signal for the future of AI wearables, ambient recording, and personalized tracking. Full video below. @clairejyz and @Machiz

We’re tripling down on @basepowerco for their $1B Series D, bringing their total post-money valuation to $13B. Base Power, co-founded by @ZachBDell and @JLopas, was built with the aim of providing a modern upgrade to the Texas power grid. Since we first invested in the team, Base Power has expanded operations to Illinois, increased its battery fleet to over 500 MWh, and begun partnerships with energy companies across Texas. Now, they’re launching Base Core, one of the largest home batteries on the market. The strain on the U.S. power grid is growing as AI use expands. We’re excited to back a company looking to support this generation of tech. Congratulations to the entire Base Power team. CC: Sebastian Duesterhoeft, @lisabethhan

Read more about Base Power here: wsj.com/business/energ…

Lightspeed Partner @whoisnnamdi argues tokenmaxxing repeats the same mistake gamers made with Starcraft: “The analogy to gaming is uncanny: users and even companies brag about their token usage in nearly identical ways to gamers bragging about their APM. But wasteful tokens are likely wasteful clicks: a vanity metric, at best.” Nnamdi dives deep into the parallels between AI and competitive gaming, what we can learn from @GoogleDeepMind’s AlphaStar, and how he sees the bottleneck shifting from generation to verification. Check out the full article from @FortuneMagazine below. t.co/8XPoGhSM9j

AI agents are becoming one of the largest and least governed parts of the enterprise, yet most security teams cannot see them at all. New research from Clutch Security measured agent activity across tens of live enterprise environments spanning millions of endpoints. What they found: AI agents now outnumber the engineers they assist 3.6 to 1, the median agent holds tens of credentials, and in most enterprises, agents run with approval guardrails switched off. Read the full report: t.co/Hg0q0MsPAd

Brothers @KaranKunjur and @neelkunjur set out to solve one of the space industry’s hardest engineering problems. The pair bet that the future of space required bigger, more powerful satellites. Today, we’re excited to continue backing @K2SpaceCo in its $500M Series D. Their decision to build larger, more capable satellites meant that the team had to redesign most of the satellite in-house. Most recently, the team successfully completed their 2026 Gravitas mission, marking 120 days in orbit for their first giant satellite mission. We’re proud to continue supporting Karan, Neel, and the K2 Space team on their mission. CC: @ravi_lsvp, Sebastian Duesterhoeft

Read more about K2 Space here: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

We’re excited to support @brale_xyz as they launch their new ION Protocol. ION is designed to deliver cross-chain liquidity for stablecoins and keep a 1:1 value across any chain. Congratulations to the Brale team! CC: @arfrank x.com/brale_xyz/stat…

Read more about ION Protocol here: brale.xyz/blog/introduci…

.@doctronic just acquired @joinsummer, to expand into pediatrics. Founders @mattpavelle and Dr. Adam Oskowitz, MD, PhD started Doctronic to give more people access to reliable health information. With the acquisition of Summer Health, that access extends to pediatric health. @ellenjdasilva created the telehealth platform with parents and guardians in mind. To raise a healthy generation, they believe children’s healthcare must be prioritized, specialized, and evidence-based. Summer Health’s database provides a unique foundation for developing pediatric-specific AI models. Making the platform more useful for patients at every stage of life could help to make the future reality of healthcare more accessible. CC: @f_fatemi21 and Dr. @BrentonFargnoli

Read more here: businesswire.com/news/home/2026…

A prevailing critique of humanoid robotics is that they take longer than humans to complete simple tasks. But should that be the threshold for what success looks like? True economic value is created by minimizing scarce human attention, not just simply minimizing elapsed time. Once a machine can perform work asynchronously, opportunity cost (not task duration), becomes the more meaningful unit of analysis.

We’re very excited to announce that we are leading @harmonyio_’s $34M seed round. Harmony is helping reshape enterprise service management by giving every employee an always-on agent that acts as an expert for every service request, inside the tools they already use. Their AI agents aim to resolve work directly in Slack and Teams, drawing on a context graph that connects each employee's identity, devices, applications, and work history. “Harmony is helping drive a fundamental shift in how employee support is delivered, moving from a model built around tickets and queues to one powered by AI agents that resolve requests instantly and at scale,” said Lightspeed Partner @YoniCheifetz. Congratulations to @nitzanshapira, @ranrib, and the entire team on the round!

Read more about Harmony here: businessinsider.com/harmony-pitch-…

113 projects shipped in less than a day. Lightspeed was thrilled to co-host The Future of Agentic AI in Healthcare with @AbridgeHQ and @AnthropicAI. AI is shaping many facets of the patient journey. As more clinicians and engineers collaborate and build together, we believe we’ll see incredible transformation in the space. Congratulations to all the hackathon winners!

"This is nostalgic. This is an analog moment for a digital idea.” @machiz speaks with Lightwork’s set designer for an in-depth look at Lightspeed’s in-house studio. Tune in below to learn more about the design philosophy behind Lightwork. @clairejyz x.com/Machiz/status/…

Abridge gives clinicians “a team of assistants, of agents” working behind the scenes so they can focus on delivering care. The result: two to three hours back each day and more of every visit spent focused on the patient. @ShivdevRao on The Upstarts Podcast with @alexrkonrad.

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“We are entering what we call ‘The Perpetual Conflict Era.’” Our security practices were built to defend against human adversaries. Today, we are facing machine-based adversaries. Yossi Torati (CEO & Co-Founder, A Security) joined Lightspeed Partner @guruchahal on The Investment Memo to talk about how offensive agents are changing cybersecurity: “The speed, the scale, the comprehensiveness is something that we have never seen before.” Yossi built A Security with the goal of turning those strategies on their head and using AI agent technology to beat weaponized AI to the punch. On the security strategy, he said, “We have to move from a checklist-based approach to a challenge-based approach…challenging our defenses continuously to make sure that we’re always protected and always in line with the threat.” We’re thrilled to partner with Yossi Torati and the A team as they seek to define the next generation of cybersecurity. Here’s the story behind their $37M fundraise: 0:00 Welcome, Yossi Torati! 3:02 Why Leave Signia to Build A Security? 4:04 The Difference Between Human and AI Hackers 5:15 The Biggest Security Challenges Today 6:40 Why Attack Windows Are Shrinking 8:22 Why Defenders Are Falling Behind 9:38 AI Can Now Run the Entire Attack Chain 10:43 What Is the "Perpetual Conflict Era"? 13:32 Why Traditional Security Testing Is Broken 16:15 Building Security for the AI Era 17:38 How A Security Differs from Human Pentesting 20:25 Why AI Models Alone Aren't Enough 22:31 The Future of Autonomous Remediation 24:49 Building a New Cybersecurity Category 27:38 Who Needs Autonomous Security? 29:11 Why A Security Can Win This Market 31:50 Choosing the Right Investors 33:24 The Vision for Cybersecurity's Future CC: @TalMorgenstern, @GullOmer, @YuvalItzchakov

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Congratulations to the @andera_ai team! Thrilled to be your partners. x.com/AryoPatel/stat…

“Models only have so much sort of capacity to ingest a stream of tokens.” “As an agent goes through its loop, it’s basically stacking these on top of each other.” And long before the context window is full, “it turns out the models get a lot dumber in this zone.” @whoisnnamdi on context overflow and the emerging practice of engineering around it. From Lightwork.

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“In a weird way, the ideal environment for an agent is the file system—files and folders and various commands to interact with them.” @whoisnnamdi on why agents are returning to computing’s oldest interface. From Lightwork.

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Fintech funding is up 23% while overall deal count is down more than 25%. In @Crunchbase, Lightspeed Partner @jmover shares our conviction around the next generation of financial infrastructure. “We’ve never been busier: The quality of founders, the size of the markets they’re going after, and the maturity of the technology being built has never been more impressive,” Justin said. Investments in money movement infrastructure, stablecoins, and tracking of real-world assets on the blockchain have been especially prominent. Check out the full article below. t.co/UlpKEz4foo

AI is accelerating the discovery of new materials from years to months. CuspAI, led by co-founders Dr. @ac_edwards_1 and Prof. @wellingmax, is working to shrink timelines for materials discovery and evaluation. Since we invested in @cusp_ai’s 2024 Seed round, the team has made extensive progress on several projects, including industrial engineering with Hyundai and PFAS chemical solutions with Kemira. Their platform leverages generative AI, deep learning, and molecular simulation to create advanced materials for some of the most critical challenges in sustainability. Like the 'Bronze Age' and 'Stone Age,' critical materials define eras of progress. We are excited to continue backing the company and their mission to solve the breakthrough materials needed to help power human progress. Congratulations to Chad, Max, and the team on the raise. We’re thrilled to be your partners. CC: @antoine_moyroud

Read more about CuspAI here: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

AI is accelerating the discovery of new materials from years to months. CuspAI, led by co-founders Dr. @ac_edwards_1 and Prof. @wellingmax, is working to shrink timelines for materials discovery and evaluation. Since we invested in @cusp_ai’s 2024 Seed round, the team has made extensive progress on several projects, including industrial engineering with Hyundai and PFAS chemical solutions with Kemira. Their platform leverages generative AI, deep learning, and molecular simulation to create advanced materials for some of the most critical challenges in sustainability. Like the 'Bronze Age' and 'Stone Age,' critical materials define eras of progress. We are excited to continue backing the company and their mission to solve the breakthrough materials needed to help power human progress. Congratulations to Chad, Max, and the team on the raise. We’re thrilled to be your partners. CC: @antoine_moyroud

Read more about CuspAI here: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

How do you design good loops for agents? Lightspeed Partner @whoisnnamdi breaks down loop engineering: how it works, where it tends to break, and how to leverage loops alongside your prompts. @clairejyz and @Machiz also unpack 1X NEO robot’s hands shaping robotics and explore three essays that emerged this week on AI: • Hassabis calls for institutional changes in the AI space • Nadella exposes the hidden cost of how AI is operating right now • Murati explores the philosophical approach to AI’s trajectory, and nailing down what knowledge itself actually is Full video below.

YouTube: youtu.be/8kZ714UEXL0

Internal audits affect nearly every public company, and yet much of the work still runs on systems that often lag behind. Andera seeks to make the process more efficient with AI. Today, we are thrilled to announce that we are leading Andera’s $37M Series A, as they aim to help build the AI-native platform for audit. Founded by @AryoPatel and @tinahhong, Andera’s platform is designed to automate audit workflows from end-to-end, from control testing to evidence gathering to exception management. We believe that audit is one of the most consequential categories for AI transformation, and Andera is helping push the frontier forward.

Read more about Andera in our blog: lsvp.com/stories/audits…

Enterprises are looking to control their AI destiny with their own data. @FireworksAI_HQ is helping to make that possible. We are excited to continue backing Fireworks for their $1.5B Series D raise, bringing the company’s total valuation to $17.5B. We first backed the team for their Series C, believing that open models can give developers greater control over how they build and scale. Since then, Fireworks has reached $1B in annual revenue and serves more than 40 trillion tokens each day. Congratulations to the entire Fireworks team on this remarkable milestone. CC: @anoushkavaswani

Read more about Fireworks here: cnbc.com/2026/07/16/fir…

Congrats @thinkymachines on the release of their first open-weights model! Inkling: 975B parameters, 41B active, supporting a context window of up to 1M tokens. Inkling’s controllable thinking lets developers dial performance with token efficiency, which we believe is a meaningful step towards making AI model customization more accessible.

“What if AI could make a real clinical decision?” Last month, Lightspeed had the privilege of co-hosting Humans in the Loop alongside friends at @ForerunnerVC. On stage at HITL, @Doctronic co-founder Dr. Adam Oskowitz unveiled their master plan to build the best AI doctor: “The hard truth is, there will never be enough doctors to meet the demands of patients. This is a human capital problem.” “Utah just released the data. 97% agreement with human doctors. Zero adverse events.” “That same system that orders prescription renewals, it can order and interpret labs. Based on those labs, it can stop something that’s not working, start something new.” “All of a sudden, that human capital problem becomes a compute problem.” And we believe that problem is solvable. Thanks Adam & @Doctronic for joining us. CC: @f_fatemi21, @BrentonFargnoli, @mattpavelle

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Most healthcare starts with a symptom. @Neko starts much earlier. We’re excited to deepen our partnership with Neko Health and lead the company’s $700M Series C. The company brings together two dynamic founders who entered healthcare from two very different directions. Hjalmar Nilsonne (@HNilsonne) grew up in a family of doctors before becoming an engineer, and Daniel Ek (@eldsjal) turned his attention to healthcare after building and scaling Spotify. Daniel and Hjalmar joined forces with the aim to help the healthcare system shift its focus: from reacting to symptoms to preventing diseases from breaking out in the first place. Together, they asked a fundamental question: If we were designing healthcare from scratch today, what would it look like? Neko is their answer, and “preventive healthcare” is the thesis behind their operation. Neko’s 60-minute full-body scan aims to give people a fuller picture of their health, looking at everything from cardiovascular health to skin, and working to catch any potential problems. This investment is our doubling down on the Neko Health team, after leading their Series B in 2025. We are thrilled to continue supporting their vision as they seek to reimagine medical approaches to disease prevention. Congratulations to Hjalmar, Daniel, and the entire Neko team on this raise. CC: @bsomaia and Dr. Brenton Fargnoli

Learn about Neko here: nekohealth.com/us/en/press/ne…

We may look back on colds the way we now look back on cholera. @clairejyz and @machiz discuss why airborne disease could become a problem we actually solve: "For hundreds of years, society just accepted that water had diseases." "We've done the same thing with airborne disease. We've accepted that people get sick 10 to 15 days a year, power through it, and treat it as an annoyance." "Over the course of your life, 5% of it is spent fighting a cold." "The way we've engineered waterborne diseases out of society, we can do that for airborne diseases too."

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Do models have something like a subconscious? @clairejyz on Anthropic’s research into J-Space and the hidden processing behind model behavior: "For many years, people have been trying to understand how a model's brain works." "Could a model have a divide the way humans do between accessible thoughts and all the unconscious, below-the-surface processing?" "The J-Space is, in essence, a mental whiteboard." "In the same way that humans have a mental whiteboard where a lot of thoughts are processed behind the scenes, models have a similar concept."

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NEW: $500M is being poured to end respiratory diseases. This week, @clairejyz and @Machiz unpack why some big names in tech are backing Intercept, a new initiative focused on making illnesses like the common cold, flu, and COVID far less common. Lightspeed Partners @GalymImanbayev and @f_fatemi21 break down the AI care model, how they see healthcare going from being reactive to proactive, and companies like @Doctronic and @Neko are shaping consumer health. They also dive into: • How AI could change advertising with the first media generation models from Meta Superintelligence Labs • Anthropic’s latest interpretability research and the race to understand what AI models are “thinking” • Amazon Leo reaching a major milestone as a potential Starlink competitor Full video link below.

@clairejyz @Machiz YouTube: youtu.be/Y7F0ctQ4laM

@clairejyz @Machiz Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/7BNEu5…

@clairejyz @Machiz YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=l_7Zjs…

Europe's defense infrastructure is being rebuilt. The New York Times @dealbook covered @HelsingAI’s drone factory in Germany. When @torstenreil, Niklas Köhler, and Dr. Gundbert Scherf started the company in 2021, democracies were looking to future-proof their defenses. Today, Helsing has assembled a strong management team that is embedding AI-enabled software in next-generation defense technology. We believe Helsing is a leader in building intelligent autonomous systems and are excited to support their journey. Read more via the link below. @ravi_lsvp, @ravirajjain, @alex_schmitti

nytimes.com/2026/07/11/bus…

We’re proud to participate in @HelsingAI’s $1.8B Series E, bringing the company to a total valuation of about $18B. As software develops further, so too must the technology that defends our infrastructure. We first backed co-founders @torstenreil, Niklas Köhler, and Dr. Gundbert Scherf for their Series C in 2024. Since then, Helsing has tripled in valuation. Helsing’s commitment to mission-ready, AI-native software for the defense industry has led to strong partnerships with hardware companies and governments across Europe. We are very excited to continue partnering with the Helsing team. Congratulations on the raise! CC: @ravi_lsvp, @ravirajjain, @alex_schmitti

Arena started as “a side project of another project.” In spring 2023, after Meta released Llama, Berkeley students spent a weekend fine-tuning it on shared GPT conversations. The result was Vicuna. They put it on the web and believed it was better than base Llama. But then came the harder question: “How do you show that it’s better?” Existing benchmarks were mostly “static tests.” They did not capture real interaction between humans and LLMs. So they built what they called “battle mode”: ask anything, compare two randomized models, and vote. “That’s how Arena was born.” @istoica05 on Lightwork

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We believe great consumer hardware needs three kinds of genius in the room. Hardware, software, and design. That’s why we’re excited to lead @Nirva’s $8M Seed Round. Nirva seeks to design the world's most beautiful and insightful AI wearable. Consumers are spending billions trying to optimize themselves. But AI wearables only get smart if you wear it. We believe co-founders @realweilyu, @jasonqchen, and @HanyingHu have the kind of genius to make a wearable that people choose to wear everyday. Wei and Jason’s experience building hardware and software products at Meta, combined with Hanying’s design DNA can bridge the gap that we believe consumer hardware demands. Nirva understands how difficult it is to understand one’s own patterns and chronicle them. Their AI wearable was built to track users’ moods throughout the day automatically, mirroring their lives in the form of a journal. The next iconic consumer device may not look like a gadget at all. Instead, it may look like a beautiful piece of jewelry. We are incredibly excited to partner with the Nirva team. Congratulations on the launch. CC: @LightspeedIndia, @PinnLawjindakul, Chris Halim, @kaluwi, and @kumarharsha2212

@Nirva Learn about Nirva here: lsvp.com/stories/why-we…

.@OrcaBio just received FDA approval for their new immunotherapy drug, TREGZI. This new precision-engineered cell therapy aims to help patients with blood cancer strengthen their immune systems. Many patients with blood cancers are at risk of developing chronic graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) following a donation, and Tregzi is designed to use stem cells to help the immune system fight back. Congratulations to founders Ivan Dimov, Dr. Nate Fernhoff, Jeroen Bekaert, and the entire Orca Bio team on this accomplishment! We first partnered with the team when investing in their Seed round back in 2016. It has been incredible to see them grow and continue to work towards their goals to aid the treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases. CC: Partner @AggShaurya and Venture Partner Jonathan MacQuitty