Basis Set

Built by founders and operators. Investing in early-stage companies scaling human potential with artificial intelligence.

[Basis Set @BasisSet]

Join Basis Set Fellowship, if you're graduating with projects nobody asked you to build.

12 weeks in SF, embedded with the fastest growing AI companies.

Apply today and build the future together.

[Lan Xuezhao @xuezhao]

openart must be the most undervalued and least hyped-up ai company. they’ve burned less than $5m to get to the 12th most rev on this chart.

[Lan Xuezhao @xuezhao]

Our SF HQ: when infra turned into a robot

[Lan Xuezhao @xuezhao]

new swag and event drop @BasisSet 🔥

[Basis Set @BasisSet]

Summer 2026 AI Fellows is officially underway.

The kickoff set the tone: great energy, thoughtful conversations, and a room full of people ready to build.

Thanks to all the fellows, and to the teams across our portfolio companies who helped make the kickoff such a strong start.

Interested in joining a future cohort? Apply here:

https://t.co/GmUIByKnGg

[FSH Technologies @FSHTechnologies]

We raised $25M to make local government software that works.

Big thanks to our Series A leads, @lachygroom & @AcrewCapital, to @operatorpartner & @CooleyLLP for joining. Thank you to @contrary, @generalcatalyst, @ScribbleVC, & @BasisSet for the support.

https://t.co/LtDzoKsQam

[Basis Set @BasisSet]

A few weeks ago, we hosted our first Taste & Distribution dinner, bringing together 20 founders, marketers, and GTM leaders for an evening of good food and even better conversation.

A big thank you to everyone who joined us and made the first one so special. We’re excited to keep bringing this community together.

Want to join the next dinner or our GTM Slack community? Comment “taste” or tag someone who should be at the next table.

[Wilson Kyi @WilsonKyi]

We invited the best storytellers to our first Taste & Distribution Dinner at Mister Jiu's Moongate Lounge, and asked everyone for their most tasteful idea?

1) Launch videos are a commodity, but capture the value before and after.

It's a YC checkbox now, and the spike is the easy part. Even before the dinner, we were able to identify the most talented folks, and afterwards the guests asked for a GTM Slack channel. Everyone intros one thing they can help with and one thing they need help with. If they're not active, we kindly ask them to leave to keep the community active :)

@retttx from @clay joined the community to advise on GTM engineering.

2) Physical experiences build a memorable brand.

@reve ran a prompt to print booth (where we discovered our videographer), and 200 totes were gone in 20 minutes. @vizcom ran design challenges with real manufacturers, 500+ submissions, then actually 3D printed the winners. @openart_ai bought NYC subways and AMC cinema ads, and made the cinema ad with their own product.

3) Relationships organically become customers.

@basata_ai runs mastermind customer dinners that open with "if you could wave a magic wand in your practice." @runpensar runs the largest engineering community in NYC and it doubles as their pipeline. Pensar and Noso Labs run their podcasts as a customer acquisition channel, because the guest can be their next customer, and each guest's credibility leads to the next lighthouse guest and customer.

4) Founder voice cannot be replaced by ghostwriting.

Writing is a forcing function to think, and once a founder delegates the writing they also delegate the thinking. If you do use a ghostwriter, it has to be someone who has fully mastered your voice, and it's often someone in the company who has all the context and knows your taste.

Reply "taste" or tag folks who should be in the next dinner and our AI GTM Slack community.

@BasisSet design and swag by the incomparable @Rachel_S_Wong @Monkeythehuman, videography by @efrancisworks

@escgreene @willyhopps @taranjeetio @cocokechun @richardwzhang @Jackyhuang @princeboucher @MelisaSeah @thenuka_k @karine_hsu @kylebhiro @SilvSoph @ChristinaAKehoe @EmilyLonetto, Andrea Wong @rho , @yangsu_13 Winston Chi and Kaled Alhanafi

[Lan Xuezhao @xuezhao]

Saturday vibe @BasisSet

[brexton @brexton]

.@xuezhao and @BasisSet were extremely early across the board in all of the unsexy areas pre-2020: AI, robotics, hardware, supply chains, even being a > 100m+ fund 1 solo-GP 😉

[Gravity @trygravityai]

Over the past year of building Gravity, we’ve had consumer AI applications grow revenue by up to 14,722%, helped teams go from idea to raising a Series A, and most importantly, we’ve given 14.3m people free access to AI products. All by creating an Ad Network for brands to place advertisements inside of AI conversations.

We’ve raised $38m, with @lightspeedvp and Committed Capital co-leading the Series A and @caffeinatedcap leading our Seed round with participation from @BasisSet, @haystackvc, Logos Fund, @grant__gordon and more.

We’re also fortunate for the support of our incredible angels, including @parkerharris, @alexatallah, @scottbelsky, @rauchg, @ianwcrosby, Nick Marwell and @_sholtodouglas, @jgsilverman, @Zep_Haus, and many others.

Our mission is simple: Make AI free by embedding helpful and relevant advertisements into AI products so that everyone has access to frontier technology.

[Lan Xuezhao @xuezhao]

lets go! @PathRobotics

[Will Hoppin @willyhopps]

I left @A24 to start Osmo, a storytelling studio with a software factory.

Today, we’re launching @osmo_studio to the public: an end-to-end editable video platform that turns Figma, code and reference videos into fully editable motion.

We also raised a $5M seed to build it.

[Melisa @MelisaSeah]

a beautiful gift.

did you know that bamboo spends up to five years growing underground before breaking through the surface?

[Basis Set @BasisSet]

Congratulations to @ac_edwards_1, @wellingmax , and the entire team on raising $450M at a $2.6B valuation. Proud to have partnered with @CuspAI from day one. This is only the beginning, and we’re excited to continue supporting the team as they build something truly exceptional.

[Lan Xuezhao @xuezhao]

Excited for @ac_edwards_1 , @wellingmax and the @cusp_ai team to announce their $450M series B and the launch of their commercial program with an impressive list of partners including @nvidia @Meta etc. We at @BasisSet Set are super proud to be day 1 partners.

You know materials is an old industry when we name our ages after materials (Stone, Bronze, Iron, Silicon). Every one of them arrived by accident or by centuries of trial and error. For the first time, we are able to design materials to solve our problems, instead of bending our ambitions to fit the materials nature happened to hand us. Maybe the next age gets named after something we designed on purpose. Grateful to everyone who came together to make this happen and included us along the ride.

[Thomas Dohmke @ashtom]

42 is the answer to everything. This is @EntireHQ’s answer to Git in the era of agents: fast, independent, distributed. Mirror your GitHub repos, let your agents clone and pull from the region(s) of your choice, and…we're open sourcing it. 🤖

[Basis Set @BasisSet]

https://t.co/swOEdtKRZY

https://t.co/aZYJFCicEL

[Basis Set @BasisSet]

@EntendreAI Joins @moonpay to Build the Agentic Financial Infrastructure

We led Entendre's seed on the thesis that every new financial rail requires AI to reconcile, report, audit, and close on top of it. The agentic financial infrastructure needs its own accounting layer.

We met @kvreem while he was at CloudKitchens, now Atoms, and before that Workday and WeWork, building the financial systems enterprises depend on. An engineer turned product expert, he built Entendre's AI agents to turn high-volume transaction streams into clean, audit-ready books automatically, doing continuously what used to take analysts and spreadsheets. Now that layer gets to grow at MoonPay's scale, with Kareem joining as VP of Applied AI.

Congratulations to Kareem and the Entendre team. We're excited to back the best founders spinning out of the most exceptional cultures, building AI that becomes category-defining infrastructure.

More on why we backed Entendre, and the Axios story, below.

[Basis Set @BasisSet]

News: Announcing @alien's $5M Seed

Some products exist because a founder got tired of building the same thing five times.

@alongubkin spent years building BYOC infrastructure (the plumbing that lets a vendor run its software inside a customer's own cloud). He hit the problem at his prior startup Aporia), rebuilt it five times, then watched it show up all over again at the acquirer @Coralogix.

Every vendor selling into regulated or security-conscious enterprises eventually meets this wall: "your software is great, but our data stays in our cloud." Today the answers are bad. Walk from the deal, or hand over a self-hosted version and inherit a maintenance nightmare with no way to debug it.

@alien is the third option. Vendors ship into the customer's cloud and manage every deployment from one place, without sensitive data ever leaving the customer's account. And the need only grows as AI agents reach for the data that lives deepest inside enterprises.

We are thrilled to colead Alien's $5M seed round with Jibe, and to back Alon on this journey to bring BYOC to everyone.

[Alon Gubkin @alongubkin]

We're launching the @alien platform today, backed by a $5M seed from @BasisSet, Jibe, and angels from OpenAI, Google, and Databricks.

We’ve built it so that when your next $300K enterprise deal says they have this tiny little requirement:

"Can you deploy into our cloud?"

... you can just say YES.

You can ship fast, stay in control, and when something breaks, you don't have to debug through screenshots, copy-pasted logs, and Zoom calls.

Here's a short demo video ⬇️