David Prilutsky

[David Prilutsky @DavidPrilutsky]

At Avenir, we’re leaning into the AI value chain – datacenter to applications – while staying mindful of the dynamism that exists in this sector.

In this 50-page deck we level set on the core dynamics driving the industry (scaling laws, hyperscaler game theory) and share our opinion on each layer of the value chain.

…just in time for OpenAI’s 12 days of ship-mas to test our hypotheses :)

https://t.co/7sR4RFB7sh

[David Prilutsky @DavidPrilutsky]

@joinshift shift

[Jared Sleeper @JaredSleeper]

We’ve been thinking hard about @AnthropicAI and the white-collar productivity stack.

Microsoft is the 800-pound gorilla, winning with a bundling playbook for decades.

We made a deck with some primary-research-backed recs on how Anthropic can beat it.

Link in replies, enjoy!

[Andrew Sugrue @AndrewGSugrue]

@Avenir_Growth is thrilled to lead @hippocraticai's $126M Series C alongside @htaneja @mamoonha and @julesyoo. We believe voice AI is amongst the most exciting frontiers in the Generative AI revolution, and the global healthcare system is one of the largest opportunities to deploy this technology. We are thrilled to back @munjalshah and team as they build the agentic AI platform the global healthcare system needs. Hippocratic’s proprietary voice AI platform and products are the clear clinical market leader and are rapidly being deployed by some of the most respected healthcare providers and payers. We believe AI will be a penetrating technology in healthcare, and Hippocratic is positioned to lead the market due to its focus on clinical safety, the high ROI it drives its customers, and most importantly, because Hippocratic’s AI technology frees nurses and medical professionals to do their most impactful work, while improving the standard of care for patients and driving substantial cost savings for the healthcare system. At Avenir, we have been fortunate to be an early and active investor in AI, backing AI-native companies such as @cognition and @physical_int and scaled AI beneficiaries including @tryramp and @databricks, and we are thrilled to welcome Hippocratic AI to the Avenir family.
https://t.co/Aw79o6yMOV

[David Prilutsky @DavidPrilutsky]

So excited to be backing Sublime Security in their $150M Series C.

Earlier this year, we set out to map how AI would reshape cybersecurity: Sublime stood out. Email remains the top initial access vector for attacks, and GenAI-enabled spear-phishing is making attacks more frequent and convincing. We believe that Sublime delivers what CISOs need to combat this growing threat: market-leading efficacy, enterprise-grade configurability, and now truly agentic detection and response.

[Sublime Security @sublime_sec]

We’re excited to announce that Sublime has raised $150M in a Series C led by @Georgian_io, joined by new investors @Avenir_Growth, @01Advisors, @jonoberheide, and @nicoleperlroth, and existing investors @IndexVentures, @IVP, @slow, and @CitiVentures.

This year we launched ASA and ADÉ, our AI agents that autonomously triage threats and auto-adapt coverage, freeing security teams from repetitive work and delivering rapid, tailored defenses. We’ve grown our customer base 4x since the beginning of the year while maintaining zero enterprise customer churn since company inception.

This funding accelerates our vision to deliver autonomous email security that adapts to each organization's unique needs, stopping sophisticated attacks while eliminating the manual work and vendor bottlenecks of legacy solutions.

Thank you to our customers, partners, and investors for being on this journey with us.

🔗 Read more: https://t.co/6YuVmw9ZqS

[Avenir @Avenir_Growth]

The world is saturated with chatter about AI, but we're still in day 0 of everyday people feeling the magic. @SophieStarck and @Theresa_M_Horne wrote this 55-page deck on why we should all be more hyped about consumer AI.
https://t.co/d6jETrwcC5

[David Prilutsky @DavidPrilutsky]

How long will this last? I did some napkin math...

It took SpaceX 8 years to successfully launch a medium-lift vehicle (Falcon9) into orbit. It took them 7yrs more to reuse a booster.

There's some evidence of Chinese space startups moving faster (building small lift in <4yrs vs. SpaceX's 6yrs for Falcon 1), but not a lot: it's still taking them the same 8yrs to get to medium lift, despite rocket designs eerily similar SpaceX's.

Maybe the path to rapid reusability will be faster? SpaceX's once controversial/novel design choices (grid fins, Starship's steel body, chopstick arms) have now been de-risked and Chinese rocket companies (e.g. Landspace, Space Epoch, CALT) are defaulting to them.

Ambitiously, let's say it's 2x faster. Then we should expect Chinese companies to:
-demonstrate 1st stage reuse in ~3 years
-be where SpaceX is today in ~7 years... by which point SpaceX will be flying v3 Starship with 200T to LEO capacity🤯

Long way of saying, I don't think @zebulgar's chart will look much different 5+ years from now

[delian @zebulgar]

In Q1, SpaceX represented 99%+ of the payload to orbit of the Western World

One of the greatest monopolies ever with an incredibly deep technical moat + lead relative to other players

Still feel like the market underappreciates how dominant they are

[David Prilutsky @DavidPrilutsky]

Was curious if CISOs are accurate in predicting which new categories of cyber will/won't emerge as large standalone pillars.

Tldr; here's a datapoint that says they are. An analysis of sentiment from 50+ Wiz customer calls over time

[David Prilutsky @DavidPrilutsky]

From Red Hat's S1 in 1999: a funny reminder that the best businesses can find ways to weather paradigm tech shifts

[Proby Shandilya @ProbyShandilya]

Deep services is an underrated aspect of building an enduring enterprise SW company. At $60M of revenue, 46% of Workday’s revenue was services and 47% of Veeva’s revenue was services.

A one time (or low volume) fixed investment that pays infinite (or near infinite) dividends.

[David Prilutsky @DavidPrilutsky]

A few other observations below. Nuts to think that George (CRWD) and Stuart (Cylance) were cofounders at Foundstone and then colleagues at McAfee.

For the many out there smarter on cyber than me, what'd I miss or get wrong? :)

[David Prilutsky @DavidPrilutsky]

CrowdStrike and Cylance had near-identical founders (former co-founders and coworkers). One now sits at a ~$90B valuation; the other sold for $1.4B.

How did CrowdStrike outpace Cylance – and what does it teach investors about backing generational cyber business? A short🧵

[David Prilutsky @DavidPrilutsky]

A few investor takeaways:
- Look for tech paradigm shifts that create new budget lines. This enables hypergrowth
- Brand and messaging shockingly matters so much in such a technical category
- Having A+ teams with market credibility is critical
- Don't frown on services-heavy GTMs. This can really help build trust

[David Prilutsky @DavidPrilutsky]

@GavinSBaker If future model improvements come disproportionately from RL during post-training, is this, on the margin, bearish for high-end networking components?

...given they are critical for building coherent training clusters, but less needed for inference clusters

[David Prilutsky @DavidPrilutsky]

@RnaudBertrand I'm not sure this is a fair comparison. There's lots of speculation that DeepSeek trained its models using GPT-4+ outputs.

DeepSeek isn't running a parallel track to OpenAI and opensourcing. It's riding the coattails of OpenAI and benefiting from OpenAI's massive capex