Benchmark

Benchmark focuses on early-stage venture investing in consumer, marketplaces, open-source, AI, infrastructure, and enterprise software.

[Eric Vishria @ericvishria]

This is an excellent post on how we go from controlled demos to real-world (ie, messy!), high success rate robotics. As many speculated, high quality pre-training and edge-case post-training, drives real-world generalizability.

But holy shit making that theory work in robotics is HARD. Details on how, and how rigorously they evaluate progress will help everyone move forward.

@sundayrobotics progress is now compounding. So cool to see!

https://t.co/ifVhrhlwu3

[Eric Vishria @ericvishria]

10 minutes into my first meeting with @lqiao I knew I wanted to partner with her on Fireworks. The team and her still worked at Meta & Google, but the entrepreneur within was crystal clear.

The idea has evolved tremendously from that initial pitch deck, but less than 4 years later:
- Over $1B in run rate
- 40 trillion tokens/day
- 95% tks from models specialized to an enterprise's needs

Awesome round with awesome partners.

[Peter Fenton @peterfenton]

Transformational launch

[Jack Altman @jaltma]

Huge congrats to @lqiao and Fireworks 🧨

Insane company and team

[Jack Altman @jaltma]

Something Sam learned with Parker Conrad is the importance of creating a demand-rich GTM environment.

When you don't have enough leads, every deal is too precious, so targets can be easily be missed and more importantly reps might try to close bad-fit deals.

[ollama @ollama]

@jmorgan was on @tbpn this week to discuss Ollama's Series B fundraise and why open models are quickly becoming the default choice for developers

Full video:

[ollama @ollama]

Token usage beginning to tip towards open models.

Ollama’s @jmorgan and Peter Fenton predict that a supermajority of tokens in the future will be from open models.

[Jeffrey Morgan @jmorgan]

Incredibly excited for the next chapter of Ollama. Thank you to our team, investors, and amazing community.

[Everett Randle @EverettRandle]

https://t.co/KLXJRNdpOl

[Brendan (can/do) @BrendanFoody]

Mercor crossed $2B in ARR in June, just 4 months after hitting $1B in ARR.

The civilization-scale effort to collect data is underway.

[Max Junestrand @MaxJunestrand]

We just closed the biggest quarter in @WeAreLegora's history: more than 50% QoQ growth, seven quarters running.

But what I actually care most about is this: well over 100,000 active lawyers are now using Legora. If you'd told me when we started that multiple percentage points of the world's legal professionals would be on Legora less than two years after launch, I wouldn't have believed you.

We have a Slack channel called "Customer love." Quotes like the ones below land there almost daily, and reading them makes me genuinely excited for what we're shipping in Q3.

The growth number is nice. This is the point.

[Dimitri Dadiomov @dadiomov]

Modern Treasury is now FedNow Service-certified. This isn't just a checkbox. Certification requires production readiness across the full ISO 20022 message set + the need to provision connectivity into the Federal Reserve via their FedLine Advantage® product.

Because Modern Treasury’s infrastructure is entirely based in the cloud, this required the need to seek out colocation services from a data center provider and bridge the on-premises hardware with our cloud infrastructure.

[Everett Randle @EverettRandle]

August 2023 🤯

[Philip Johnston @PhilipJohnston]

“The @Benchmark investment in @Starcloud_ was about the people.”
Thanks @EverettRandle and @ChetanP Puttagunta 🙏🥹

@MollySOShea, @sourceryy

[Everett Randle @EverettRandle]

Thank you Molly for having me on for a therapy session on the disorienting situation investors find ourselves in 😅

[Eric Vishria @ericvishria]

Worth a watch!

[Philip Johnston @PhilipJohnston]

New @Starcloud_ facility taking shape! 🚀
@ezrafeilden, @AdiOltean

[Lin Qiao @lqiao]

❤️

Cursor . GLM5.2 . Fireworks

[Daksh Gupta @dakshgup]

it’s been a week since we launched t-rex beta

- more than 50% of all customers have turned t-rex on for their orgs

- it has run more than a billion lines of code and prevented close to 2M bugs from reading production

pretty good for week 1

looks like the community agrees that to review a pr, you have to run the code

[Chetan Puttagunta @chetanp]

Enjoyed talking through how go-to-market for enterprise AI applications is continuously evolving on this podcast. Please listen!