Geoff Donaker

GP at Burst Capital; ex-Yelp, eBay, Excite

[Sumir Meghani @sumirmeghani]

This morning @nytimes published a story featuring @Instawork Pros and their robotics work. Our Pros are at the center and highlights their thoughtfulness around AI ... and the massive opportunity ahead to create new job types!

https://t.co/wkal0j31pi

[Hugo Santos @20thr]

Today, I'm excited to share that we've raised a $42M Series B led by @scalevp, with participation from @NEA, @20vcfund and others, bringing our total funding to $65M.

The next 100 billion commits are coming faster than any infrastructure was built to handle.

We're building, from the ground up, the developer platform for this next wave of software development.

We already power software development for @spacexai, @tryramp, @ElevenLabs, @SierraPlatform , @framer, @TrustVanta, and more than 1,000 of the world's most ambitious companies.

In the last 12 months, demand has surged, with total revenue growing 8x. We will use the funds to accelerate product development, expand our data centers, and continue hiring world-class talent.

[Jianna Liu @jianna_liu]

As products get faster to build, go-to-market becomes the advantage.

The teams that experiment, iterate, and discover new ways to sell will win.

Today, we're launching Cardinal - the AI Revenue Platform where companies like Deepgram, Giga, and Mintlify design how they sell.

Tell Cardinal the play:
→ "If someone gets promoted, send them a cake."
→ "If a prospect publishes a new engineering blog, email them with my take."
→ "Follow up with people who used my product in the first week but dropped off."

Design how you sell.

[Genius AI @trygenius_ai]

Genius AI is bringing intelligence to the physical economy, where some of the most valuable and human work in our daily lives takes place. Since Day 1, we have been obsessed with helping talented practitioners do what only they can do as technology takes on the repetitive tasks.

We’re excited to share that we raised a Series D at a $1.15B valuation to accelerate our vision. We are also announcing a new brand, Genius AI, as our platform and customer footprint have evolved. Alongside our core flagship GlossGenius product, we’re releasing products that run more of the admin work on their own, so business owners can finally do what they dreamed of.

To the 125,000 businesses who have trusted us to save them 112M hours of admin work and earn billions of dollars in extra revenue already, thank you for your partnership. Our work is just beginning as we make your most repetitive workflows disappear.

Grateful for our investors, including @Lux_Capital that led the round with participation from @BessemerVP @ImaginaryFund @2048vc @L_Catterton and @StepStoneVC .

Here’s a note from our founders @DCohenShohet @Leahcs with more detail below ⬇️

[Willow @WillowVoiceAI]

Introducing Willow Frontier Mini and Willow Frontier Pro.

Frontier Mini gives everyone free, unlimited dictation.

Frontier Pro is our most accurate model yet, built for power users and teams who want the fastest and best dictation experience.

[Spencer Schneier @spenceraviav]

Last year, when the Trump Administration launched its tariff campaign, I was amazed at how hard it was to find good information about what was really happening.

I would read one thing in the Wall Street Journal, and then go to a tax conference in Canada and hear the exact opposite from OECD officials and practitioners.

So when @rossmatican suggested that we should publish a magazine for Commenda, it was a no brainer. Doubly-so when he introduced me to @freeshreeda, our Editor-in-Chief

In this issue, we cover a lot of topics, but one thing Shreeda did an excellent job of is covering some macro themes the world is facing today.

Competitive Governance – now more than ever, jurisdictions are competing for trade, capital, and talent. From SEZs, to European corporate law, to AI and maritime governance, this is a recurring theme throughout the magazine that is deeply relevant to everyone reading it. Gone are the days when wasteful governments have large captive tax bases, and where anti-business politicians can bully corporations without risking their tax base.

The Great Game of the 21st Century – the U.S. and China are locked in a Not Cold War, and the implications of that touch every corner of the globe today. The Chinese model is predicated on centralized direction of capital towards strategic aims – a Capitalist-Marxist fusion offering of sorts, and the American model is still deciding what it wants to be.

The West has lost its understanding of its own prosperity. Industrial policy is the antithesis of what made the West great. The chaotic, bottom-up nature of markets and capitalism is exactly why we are so much more prosperous than even the most successful non-market economies. Yet we seem to have lost that.

Will Europe join the game? Will India? These are players with the capacity to play, but that have not taken the policy decisions required to do so. I explore this in my article on EU Inc, and we will be developing it more in future issues.

I had a ton of fun working with Shreeda and the writers, @JeffJMason @CalebDPetitt @Michael_J_Hil and @rjkarmayogi and am excited to share more in the coming weeks of the process and ideas that went into this first magazine

Read more below!

[Allan Guo @_allanguo]

I broke my cofounder's arm to prove a point: you don't need a keyboard.

Meet @WillowVoiceAI Scribe, our voice AI assistant. It clears your email, Slack, and docs in seconds. We'll pay you $10k if you still need to type after trying it.

Don't believe? Try Scribe below and win.

[Sumir Meghani @sumirmeghani]

Today, we're opening @Instawork Robotics Lab (IRL), connecting the robotics industry with > 10 million skilled workers. IRL is offering the first certified workforce program for the physical AI economy ... with 20,000 @Instawork Pros already certified! 👷

Read more from @alistairmbarr @BusinessInsider

https://t.co/57Jwyabf2P

[Willow @WillowVoiceAI]

Introducing Atlas 1. Willow's new frontier speech-to-text model.

It outperforms ElevenLabs, Deepgram, OpenAI, and more by a wide margin.

Built on the first scalable, human-powered transcription infrastructure ever built for real-time dictation.

[Sumir Meghani @sumirmeghani]

Had a blast talking robot wrangling with @latimes. Robots don’t replace people. They create new jobs, just like every other tech innovation in history. Physical AI revolution is a lot more human than people think.

[Google Flow Music @googleflowmusic]

Producer is now part of Google!

We’re proud to be joining @GoogleLabs and @GoogleDeepMind to build the future of music creation. Producer is here to stay, with more on the way.

Come make music with us!

[Matt Faustman @MatthewFaustman]

As a T1D, I’ve seen how back office work slows care.

Enter @HoneyHealthai — AI staff for the entire back office.

Today, we’re announcing our $7.8M Seed led by @thogg at @Pelion_VP to help providers eliminate the admin paperwork.

Thx @MobiHealthNews https://t.co/C1571eJKHW

[Brad Eckert @ChefEckert]

Prototypes ≠ products.

Hot Vibe Code Summer is over.

Woz has raised $6M to deliver real products, not just prototypes. @cervinvc led the round with participation from @ycombinator @untappedvcLA and Burst Capital.

Every app built on Woz follows the same standards as a serious engineering team: clean, scalable, and built on robust architecture.

AI speed + human oversight = the future of app building.

[Google Flow Music @googleflowmusic]

Meet Producer, your personal AI music agent. It turns your imagination into music.

Powered by FUZZ-2.0, the new state-of-the-art model from the Riffusion team.

Welcome to the studio.

[Mike Ghaffary @newmike]

Techcrunch editor @Julie188 wrote a great piece about our thesis here: https://t.co/hyBgXtp72M

[Geoff Donaker @geoffdonaker]

Thrilled to welcome @newmike as our newest GP at Burst Capital. All four of us have been working together well for 15+ years now. Mike brings to us his boundless positive energy and outlier background as a founder, exec and VC. Onwards!

[Mike Ghaffary @newmike]

Really excited to be joining Burst Capital and to chat with Techcrunch about creating new jobs in the AI era.

We all know massive AI displacement of jobs is coming, and we at Burst are investing in AI because we think it is the future. The optimists among us assure everyone that AI will create more value than the jobs it displaces, and that there will be new work created.

One of our core investment theses at Burst is to actually invest in tech companies creating jobs. We are trying to find companies, using AI or otherwise, that help Main Street, help local and small businesses, empower them, and enable them to grow and thrive.

We already have many examples in the portfolio, including ResQ and Owner helping restaurants, Faire helping local retailers, Next Insurance helping small businesses with insurance, NuBrakes helping auto repair techs, and many more.

So excited to invest with Geoff, Wendy, and Rob at Burst, and to try to do some part in powering job growth in the large economic shift that is coming.

[Geoff Donaker @geoffdonaker]

Welcome Mike!

[Mike Ghaffary @newmike]

I am so excited to have joined my longtime friends at Burst Capital! We all work so well together and I’m confident in our bright future. More in Geoff’s post below. I also want to thank Rebecca and the entire Canvas team for a great six years, and look forward to continuing on as an advisor and serving on our portfolio company boards.

https://t.co/xQQanABVX5

[Jam.dev @jamdotdev]

Meet Jam AI — your AI that writes bug reports for you. https://t.co/Z2nVGUy0hp

[Mike Murchison @mimurchison]

1/ 🧵Today we’re celebrating a big milestone at Ada: we have now powered more than 5 billion customer service interactions, saved our customers more than 32 million hours of labour, and are autonomously resolving up to 83% of conversations.

We are now doubling our conversation volume every 6 months on our new product.

Thought this would be a good moment to reflect on how we got here.