Gradient

The seed fund designed for founders in AI.

[Gradient @GradientVC]

Nine years. Same conviction. Fund 5.

[Tech Funding News @TFNBreakingNews]

💰Firstwork has raised $15 million in a Series A round led by @EarlybirdVC.
https://t.co/dF9LiMvpWh
LegionVC, Deel Ventures, and existing investors @GradientVC and @ycombinator joined the round. @SomaCapital, @468Capital and Houghton Street Ventures also participated.
#ai #hrtech #ustech #startups #funding #investment #innovation #vcfunding #technology

[Akash Bajwa @AkashBajwa96]

Thrilled to be leading Firstwork $15m Series A alongside @GradientVC, Legion VC, Deel Ventures, @ycombinator and many great angels.

We couldn't be more excited to to be in business with Vardhan Kapoor, Shubham Choudhary and the rest of the Firstwork team.

Firstwork is going after what we believe to be one of the biggest markets in applied AI: frontline workforce operations. They're already processing tens of millions of actions and reducing the time it takes workers get to their first shift from days to minutes.

This is only the beginning, the ambition is much bigger.

@EarlybirdVC

[ASI @AirSpaceIntel]

While hundreds of billions have been spent teaching AI to manipulate words and generate videos, ASI builds AI systems that can manage and control critical physical infrastructure - where there is zero margin for error.

Today we announced our $325M Series C to scale America’s Engine: the automated nervous system keeping the country running.

[Respan @RespanAI]

Respan OSS Gateway: the last AI gateway you ever need.

Because it can connect anything: LLMs, images, video, realtime voice, and MCP tools like web search and long-term memory, all through one endpoint. Each one is just a plugin you switch on.

Against LiteLLM on the same machine:
- 0.08 ms vs 5.9 ms added latency (78x less)
- 61,062 vs 1,348 requests/s with 50 in flight (45x more; LiteLLM on 14 workers)
- 33 MB vs 494 MB memory (15x less; LiteLLM on 1 worker)

Fully written in Rust. MIT/Apache-2.0.

[Daniel McKinnon @danielmckinn0n]

At @GamowLabs, we are committed to solving rare disease. This means understanding the clinical impact of >9B possible mutations in the human genome.

Computational models like @GoogleDeepMind AlphaGenome, @arcinstitute Evo2, and @biohub ESM3 serve their purpose, but the only way to accomplish our mission is through large-scale collection of experimental data on variant effects.

The only way to collect these data is through robotic labs like ours, which historically have required deep expertise in automation engineering to scale, limiting velocity.

To solve this problem, we are building frameworks to enable AIs to drive our lab robots and just unveiled our first eval showing that we have some work to do!

[Darian Shirazi @darian314]

Huge congratulations to @AirSpaceIntel on raising $325M at a $3B valuation led by @sparkcapital @Citadel @MeritechCapital! We’re thrilled to have led the pre-seed @GradientVC from the beginning and continue to be blown away by @pbuckendorf and team 🚀

https://t.co/iOoHQKApUw

[Darian Shirazi @darian314]

Congrats @gigsdotcom on being named to @TIME’s Best Inventions of 2026 alongside @Starlink for connectivity! https://t.co/xAGO1U3en4

[Feather Robotics @featherrobotics]

Back-to-back robot shipments to New Zealand and India this week — have fun in your new homes, Feather!

[Gradient @GradientVC]

Congrats @labelbox on raising $100M!

[Labelbox @labelbox]

Today we’re announcing our Series E.

We’ve raised $100M+ led by Infinitum Partners. We believe every company will soon run on agents that learn from their own work.

- For frontier labs, Horizon provides RL environments that teach frontier models to do real work.
- For enterprises, Recursion brings managed agents into the apps your teams already use, improving with every run.
https://t.co/quI77KRsbK

[thomas neckel @neckelthomas]

Fragment is automating commerce.

We think there are millions of businesses that haven't been invented yet. Not because folks lack imagination, but because it's too hard to build the financial systems that run them. Fragment removes that constraint.

Today, people run companies. With Fragment, they'll run on their own.
https://t.co/MLIu2ZUknq

[Darian Shirazi @darian314]

Nice coverage of @GamowLabs from the @GradientVC portfolio in the Gemini 4 launch!

"Researchers at Gamow Labs used Argon to analyze de-identified genomes from newborns with rare developmental lung disorders. In one case, Argon pinpointed a chromosomal rearrangement that routine software missed for years, and explained why it went undetected. On private Gamow Labs evals derived from real clinical and lab data, Argon topped on RareBench (57% on assistance with rare-disease diagnosis) and LabBench (52.2% on wet-lab reasoning). These advances point to faster diagnosis for families facing rare conditions."

https://t.co/lEEWMlLqLd @GoogleDeepMind

[Daniel McKinnon @danielmckinn0n]

Big G is back! 🙇

@GoogleDeepMind Gemini 4 takes the 👑 on @GamowLabs RareBench and LabBench by a healthy margin over previous champ Opus 5.5.

A tip of the hat to @melvinjohnsonp, @taotu831, @divy93t, and the rest of the science team for this very strong release.

We've moved essentially all of our biology and genomics research work to Gemini 4 in agy with science skills since joining the EAP program and look forward to seeing if this model can help diagnose some new kids!

[Pushmeet Kohli @pushmeet]

In rare disease research, scientists at @GamowLabs used Argon to analyse de-identified genomic data samples from newborns with rare developmental lung disorders. It successfully pinpointed a chromosomal rearrangement that routine software missed for years, and explained why it went undetected. Read more here: https://t.co/Mga7ct8s5f

[Darian Shirazi @darian314]

“If you overbuy, you could bankrupt the company by having too many lease commitments, and if you underbuy, you could knock down your growth trajectory and have a bunch of unhappy users,” said @thezbg, a general partner at @GradientVC

https://t.co/8MWEWCDBd9

[Madeline Renbarger @maddierenbarger]

9 Videos from Machine Earning: 9 Videos from Machine Earning: Town’s Jean-Denis Greze, Lead Bank’s Jackie Reses, Chime’s Ryan King & More

https://t.co/PNdOM5Yn3o

[Clayton Petty @Cdpetty]

Very difficult problem to solve b/c every layer of the internet (not just captchas) are built for humans, not agents. We'll need to re-work a lot of the web infra to support agents, and even then, many vendors like Amazon may choose to block them regardless

https://t.co/y7ffCZuO92

[Zeroset @zerosetinc]

Today, we’re announcing Zeroset’s $5.2M pre-seed round to deploy world models into enterprises, co-led by @GradientVC and @2048vc, with participation from Leblon Capital and others.

Frontier intelligence is capable of enormously complex tasks. And yet with an abundance of general capability and mandate, automation still requires enormous handwork. The models and systems that exist today lack an understanding of the world they act in.

Robotics faced a similar problem. Building capable robots required more than compute-scaling on policies; they needed representations of their environments, encoding state and how it changed under actions. Over time, those representations shifted from hand-specified states toward learned models of the world.

What is missing in the enterprise is a general system that represents work and learns from it. At Zeroset, we believe the same paradigm that enabled progress in robotics can be applied to represent enterprise “worlds.”

We open with Nebula, a system that captures the state and traces created as people and agents work across systems, using them to model how an enterprise works and changes over time.

These models contain the decisions, dependencies, and unwritten processes bespoke to a company. They are derived from the enterprise, and they should belong to the enterprise.

Companies should be able to use the best models for their work and train them on their own operating knowledge freely. The underlying system does not need to change.

Nebula is currently in closed research preview. If your team is automating complex work or exploring how to learn from the work your organization already does, please contact us.

We are building the system through which that intelligence becomes increasingly specialized to the enterprise, allowing agents to act through it, and models to learn from it.

If you’d like to join us in building this future, we’re hiring researchers and systems engineers.

Read more here: https://t.co/sAae9FFGzH

[Business Insider @BusinessInsider]

"Models off the shelf have no understanding of the dynamics of how an enterprise actually works," Akshat Kannan told Business Insider. "They have no understanding on how the work gets done." https://t.co/FZl5WiFuUx

[Gradient @GradientVC]

No model, no matter how capable, knows the ins and outs of how a company operates. Until it's captured in a way that an agent can actually use, enterprise agents will keep failing.

@akshatkannan and @wzhang are building @zerosetinc, which recreates workflows and states of how enterprises run so agents can operate inside it.

More on our investment from @denise_teng25:
https://t.co/s1Ff0CkCCB

[Denise Teng @denise_teng25]

Agents are only as good as their ability to remember the right things at the right time.
Proud to back the @zerosetinc team building temporal memory for agents!! 🚀@akshatkannan @wzhang @GradientVC