Amplify Partners

The first investor for technical founders. Early backers of Datadog, Chainguard, dbt Labs, Temporal, Modal, Hightouch, Luma, Scribe, and more.

[Sarah Catanzaro @sarahcat21]

There seems to be widespread understanding that the inference market is huge & growing but more limited understanding of how technically challenging it is to support low-latency, highly reliable inference at scale. Go rebuild k8s in a weekend; hope your coding agent had its coffee.

[Lenny Pruss @lennypruss]

As always, @sarahcat21 nails it. Inference is an inordinately dense technical problem, requiring tons of innovation across systems, algorithms, and data. It is categorically not just taking a model and naively serving it across a some number of GPUs. The breadth and difficulty of the underlying eng effort make it of the most fertile parts of the stack for building deep, durable technical moats. Most people really underestimate this.

[Sarah Catanzaro @sarahcat21]

Everyone wants to own their own intelligence these days

Nobody wants to look at their data and evals

Newsflash: This IS your intelligence

[Amplify Partners @AmplifyPartners]

AI search is actually five separate problems masquerading as one feature. Decision to search, tool calling, SERP APIs, query generation, citations. Each one is hard.
https://t.co/mnb722Hvml

[CockroachDB @CockroachDB]

@largedatabank @kannanlakshmi We love Tiles!!!

[Tiles AI @TilesAIX]

Hello World!

We're Tiles. We help leaders turn scattered AI wins into company-wide transformation by empowering subject-matter experts to build, share and promote AI agents, apps, and skills that move the needle for your business. Tiles works with any model or inference provider, has governance, permissions and a full audit trail built in, and runs fully managed or in your own cloud.

Our founders built the first version at Cockroach Labs: in 12 weeks, 85% of the company used it weekly and built 2,000+ apps, and thousands of agents and skills.

Now we're making it available for every company.

Sign up for early access today at https://t.co/sbGsV9UZ9m.

[Jordan Lewis @largedatabank]

Today @kannanlakshmi and I are launching Tiles to help leaders turn scattered AI wins into company-wide transformation.

We built its precursor at @CockroachDB, which quickly transformed the way the company worked. Within a few weeks, people from every department had created and shared thousands of apps, skills and agents, and made them part of how they worked every day.

Witnessing this rapid transformation at Cockroach Labs gave us the conviction that what’s holding companies back from reaching business outcomes with AI isn’t a newer, smarter model, but an environment where sharing, learning, and collaborating with colleagues is easy. Armed with the lessons from building that first version, we left our jobs — me after 10 years, and Lakshmi after 7 — to build Tiles.

Since June, we've talked to hundreds of enterprise AI leaders. Those leaders have described similar problems: how do you scale the work that your AI-pilled people have produced into the baseline for the whole company?

Tiles is our answer to that question, and it enables teams to turn one person's best agent, app or skill into the team standard: governed, permissioned, on any model and within a company's own cloud.

Tiles is for every employee: the most AI-forward people on your team, as well as the people who just want to get their jobs done. The current conversation about AI makes it easy to believe that the second group is destined to economic failure. We couldn't disagree more. Not everyone needs to keep up with every new model release and harness update just to stay afloat. They just need what their expert colleagues have already built.

AI at work is still in its MS-DOS era. Motivated adopters get incredible value, but how many people are still staring at a blinking text box waiting for someone to help them get started? Or being told to focus on AI by leadership, with no time to figure it out amidst looming, ordinary deadlines? The Windows moment for work AI hasn’t happened yet. But we think it’s coming fast.

We're grateful to be backed by @AmplifyPartners, @Work_Bench, @CockroachDB and a group of experienced angels including @petermattis, @georgebdavis, and @Nate_Stewart.

Sign up for early access on our website, https://t.co/122cEV526J

[Arjun Narayan @narayanarjun]

Jordan was an exceptional manager of some of the most hardcore engineering teams building
@CockroachDB. Jordan was also my last manager, and key to me learning that like Ye, I can't be managed. If Jordan couldn't do it, I guess it can't be done.

Like everyone else last year, Jordan and I were claudemaxxing our various personal workflows and swapping notes. But as a manager of exceptional teams he started to go a level deeper, and earlier this year he started asking: How do teams use AI together? How do best-practice workflows that one hero builds actually turn into durable organizational assets? He built a prototype at Cockroach Labs, and it spread like wildfire.

The surprise was that as they talked to other enterprises, they discovered that every enterprise has this problem in spades. Startups can adopt AI quickly and grow into new workflows, but enterprises struggle to go beyond empowering individuals - that's why there are dozens of deploycos trying to figure out what the enterprise AI journey is. But there is a way to take the work of an AI hero and ship it to the whole org. It's Tiles. And I'm excited that Jordan and Lakshmi are finally sharing what they're building in public.

[Amplify Partners @AmplifyPartners]

@largedatabank @kannanlakshmi @CockRoachLabs Let's get to business

[Amplify Partners @AmplifyPartners]

Announcing @TilesAIX

[Richard Socher @RichardSocher]

Introducing Flint, @Recursive_SI’s first model: a fast local coding model built with our automated research system, the Eureka Machine.

• Best-in-class fast local coding
• Up to 2x faster than comparable models: 125+ tokens/sec on a MacBook Pro, 150+ on RTX Spark
• Built from scratch in under 4 months

Private, unmetered intelligence on your own machine. Open weights available now on @huggingface, run it locally on your favorite framework or try it for free on @opencode or @pidotdev.

[Josh Tobin @josh_tobin_]

1/ Introducing Flint.

It’s a pretty good model for agentic coding locally.

We @Recursive_SI think a lot of everyday coding will move to models running on your laptop or a server down the hall.

Here’s why we built it.

[Elliot Hershberg @ElliotHershberg]

We've been busy at Amplify Bio!

It's a privilege to be in business with the technical founders transforming the life sciences.

And, personally, it's a privilege to work alongside this team every day. If you've spent time with Sunil, David, Luke, or Madelyn, you'll know exactly what I mean.

If you haven't, we've got a whole slate of programming intentionally designed for this ecosystem in the New Year, so we'll see you there!

[David Crawshaw @davidcrawshaw]

New day, new blog post on the nature of agents. https://t.co/3HtCrgnDGN

[Sarah Catanzaro @sarahcat21]

Voice models *should* run on-device (for privacy and latency reasons); very excited by the OSS release of Phonon

[Amplify Partners @AmplifyPartners]

For many top labs, 90% of the GPU fleet dedicated to RL training isn’t actually training. It’s generating data via inference while the trainer sits idle. Some research on how labs are solving this: https://t.co/5uwUWhYteX

[Amplify Partners @AmplifyPartners]

Most AI platforms give you pre-uploaded models and APIs. @modal built a container runtime from scratch, two custom filesystems, and a multi-cloud GPU router — a complete data cloud: https://t.co/vfwqLMkM8x

[Amplify Partners @AmplifyPartners]

https://t.co/kH5Eqte4sY

[Barr Yaron @barrnanas]

Highly recommend browsing @TIME's Best Inventions of 2026 🧪🧠🤖

Especially fun to see two @AmplifyPartners portfolio companies recognized:

- @_inception_ai for Mercury 2, reasoning diffusion LLM

- @AntithesisHQ for stress-testing software by simulating real-world failures

[David Crawshaw @davidcrawshaw]

We are going to make this a regular event, but until we get into a rhythm expect our first meetup to be a couple of great lightning talks and then some informal feature demos in the hallway track.