Benchmark

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

[Sierra @SierraPlatform]

Today we’re releasing Personal Agent Protocol (Poppy) v1.0.

It’s on for everyone who uses Muse, @Meta's AI agent, enabled for every merchant on @Shopify, and backed by more than 100 design partners.

[Chetan Puttagunta @chetanp]

From Benchmark leading the seed round in 2022 to a $3B valuation today, LangChain is setting the pace in the industry by enabling startups and enterprises to build AI agents that work. Truly remarkable team and company.

[Noah Shinn @noahrshinn]

Instinct + @Zocdoc

Americans make about a billion doctor visits a year. Over 30% of our users have already asked Instinct for help with theirs, and 5% of those requests are for someone else - a child, a parent, or a partner.

Today we’re making health a core part of Instinct, starting with @Zocdoc. Your Instinct can now find providers who take your insurance, check who is available, and book the appointment for you. It fills in your details, confirms with you before booking, and adds the visit to your calendar.

We want Instinct to be the easiest way to take care of your health. Ask your Instinct to find you a doctor.

[Yash Patil @ypatil125]

Applied Compute has acquired Delegate!

We were one of Delegate’s first customers, and their product is how we kept up with hundreds of accounts before we had a sales team. Felix Su and Jason Yang’s attention to detail, pace of shipping, and product sense are unparalleled, and I’ve wanted to work with them ever since we met.

Before Delegate, they helped build Scale AI’s enterprise business from the ground up, getting AI into production at some of the largest companies in the world.

Much of our team is former founders like Felix and Jason. They bring a rare combination of ambition, agency, and the ability to run through walls.

Welcome, Felix and Jason! I couldn’t be more excited to build with you. 🚀

https://t.co/evgqzXuFKA

[Everett Randle @EverettRandle]

While the public markets decide whether they want to turn bullish or bearish on the AI trade, in private markets the capital calvary ($60b+ more dry powder) is coming

[Everett Randle @EverettRandle]

Benchmark Breakfast.. with actual breakfast this time!

[Jack Altman @jaltma]

Benchmark breakfast with my guy @EverettRandle, episode 2:

Anthropic IPO, NVIDIA, the AI trade, midterms, VC firms raising $60B+ this winter, etc.

(0:00) Intro
(0:42) Anthropic IPO pricing
(2:02) S-1 amended: $81B run rate
(4:08) Zooming out without Twitter
(5:10) Ev’s IPO prediction
(8:37) Structural volatility of AI labs
(10:31) Jensen Huang and the spy allegations
(13:22) Commoditize your complement
(15:31) Winners and losers from the Jensen news
(18:28) AI trade pulls back
(21:37) 70GW to 40–50GW
(23:00) Buyers of tokens and diffusion
(29:02) The RSI unlock
(30:37) Midterms: Democratic sweep
(31:47) America hates AI and data centers
(35:35) Amazon HQ2 role reversal
(38:13) Gallup poll: China vs. US on AI
(41:28) $60B in VC in the next 1–4 months
(43:08) Mega funds squeezing mid-size funds
(45:49) Reflexivity and the traffic wave
(51:03) Seeds are permanently expensive
(56:16) Sequoia’s restructure
(1:01:11) Tesla YL and iPhone Duo

[Paul @paulerlanger]

Cool to see @fomo at the top of @theinformation's top fintech companies

[ollama @ollama]

We made @theinformation list of top 50 promising early-stage startups for 2026 🎉

Thank you to everyone who runs, builds on, and talks about Ollama.

https://t.co/747CEKaWff

[Peter Fenton @peterfenton]

great to add depth to the capital base that sees the expanding market opportunity for @mercor

[Jack Altman @jaltma]

So thrilled to back @nilscmr and the team at Tendrils, who are taking advantage of advances in AI to rebuild the CPU.

Absolutely brilliant and ambitious founders who I feel lucky to be around.

[Brendan (can/do) @BrendanFoody]

We raised our $750 million Series D at a $20 billion valuation from @benchmark, @generalcatalyst, @nvidia, @salesforce, and @zoom.

@mercor scaled from $1M to $3B in run-rate revenue in 27 months, the fastest in history to $3B.

For 2 years, we've organized human intelligence to build evals and training data for every frontier lab.

The labs are the leading indicator for AI startups, then the Fortune 500.

Our growth has accelerated over the past 6 months as enterprises start evaluating and training their own models. For many, owning their intelligence is existential.

[Tendrils Compute @TendrilsCompute]

Tendrils has raised $30M led by @benchmark to rebuild general-purpose computing. @jaltma is joining our board.

At Tendrils, we believe that the future of general-purpose computing lies beyond legacy architectures for legacy software.

[Peter Fenton @peterfenton]

Aaron @ceo_clickhouse asks hard questions, cuts through the fluff, and—in my case at least—elevates the conversation. It’s part of what makes him such a great leader. A joy to join him at the @ClickHouseDB Berlin all-hands for the first episode of Real Time.

[Chetan Puttagunta @chetanp]

fomo is a remarkable company powered by an incredible team. Super excited to have joined "in the trenches" for Episode 100!

[Sophia Yang @sophiamyang]

🤩 @lqiao and @JensenHuang discussing open models and specialized intelligence 🎆

[Philip Johnston @PhilipJohnston]

Exactly a year ago today, we launched Starcloud-1 to space. To celebrate its birthday 🥳, we have put together some previously unseen footage we have from around the launch. I particularly like the footage we have of the @Starcloud_ kids! 😅👌

Starcloud-1 is operating today with the only @NVIDIA H100 in space, still the most powerful SI compute on orbit. With it we became the first entity to do training and high powered inference on orbit, and we now have 3 more launches coming up in the next year! We are planning to move almost all compute off Earth 🚀

See the careers page on our website if you want to join this awesome team!

[Legora @WeAreLegora]

The hot new role emerging in law is the legal engineer. The New York Times dug into their rise at the intersection of law and technology.

"As artificial intelligence is becoming a bigger part of legal work, technology vendors like Legora, law firms, and in-house legal teams are all looking for people who understand both law and technology well enough to rewrite work flows and teach others how to use A.I. tools."

“It’s a true profession,” Daniel Himmel told @nytimes. Read the full story here: https://t.co/LoqE0b6WKJ

[David Eckstein @davidneckstein]

Legal professionals are moving from assistive to agentic AI, and @WeAreLegora is firing on all cylinders as a result. Coming off the strongest quarter in our history, we reached new highs in October.

On the business side:
- YoY top line growth was more than 6x, and October was the best pipeline month in Legora’s history, up 50%+ vs. last quarter-opening month.
- The number of new customers added grew 20%+ vs. the last quarter-opening month. Legora now has more than 2,600 customers across 80+ markets.
- Gross margin was up more than 10 points MoM.
- @JonesDay, @HoganLovells, @Littler, @BMWGroup and @Loyens_Loeff chose Legora.
- We raised $550 million at an $8.8 billion valuation, in a round led by @GavinSBaker at @Atreidesmgmt with participation from @Fidelity, @CapitalGroup, @BaronCapital, @GladeBrookCap, @jpmorgan,@MenloVentures, @benchmark, @Accel, @generalcatalyst, @Redpoint, @BessemerVP, @ICONIQCapital and others.

Product momentum:
- Big improvements in Agent quality and reliability, which is translating to MAU platform usage of ~20 hours per month
- Launched Ontological Legal research: Comprehensive legal data built on an ontology of law, with an AI-native citator that checks authority is current and binding.
- Launched Skills: Reusable instructions for the Legora Agent, with 250+ pre-built and the option to build your own.
- Launched Intake: A front door for in-house teams that turns business requests into tracked work, with a first draft from the Agent.

Personal highlight:
I grew up in New York and visited the @Guggenheim often as a kid. Returning this month to host Precedent New York, Legora’s flagship global summit, with 250 legal leaders in the room was surreal. The same building, but a very different reason for being there.

Thank you to our customers for trusting us as partners, and to the entire Legora team for the relentless work behind this record-breaking month. October belongs to all of you.

Let’s get to work.

[Max Junestrand @MaxJunestrand]

Today we launch Ontological Legal Research. The best data and the best technology, together at last.

Available now in the US. More jurisdictions to come.

Read more in our launch blog: https://t.co/kWZghlVtxw