Lightscape Partners

[Alexander Taubman @alextaubman]

Today, Long Lake completed our $6.3B acquisition of Amex GBT.

Long Lake acquires and transforms generational businesses with AI across the American services economy.

Amex GBT is the travel partner for 17,500 businesses in 140 countries. Last year, Amex GBT booked 35 million trips for 10 million travelers.

This marks Long Lake’s 40th acquisition, and our family of companies now employs nearly 30,000 people.

We founded Long Lake three years ago with the thesis that AI is going to change every company, but there’s a large overhang between AI capabilities and how most businesses leverage AI tools.

We partner with strong, profitable, and growing businesses to help them deploy AI and improve their customer service.

Our first cohort of companies has doubled their EBITDA in less than two years through topline and productivity growth, all while increasing headcount. (We’re proud to say that we’ve never conducted a layoff.)

We’re excited to share a bit more about what we’ve been up to.

[Riven Systems @rivensystems]

Riven is partnering with @USARareEarth and @pasqal_quantum to leverage the West’s lead in AI and advanced computing to bring critical industrial capabilities back onshore, fast enough to matter.

[Lightscape Partners @LightscapeVC]

Congratulations to @RonNachum and the entire team at Sapien as they continue to prove why they're some of the best in AI for finance & ops.

[Ron Nachum @RonNachum]

Sapien is the engine behind the world’s most important companies.

Today, we’re announcing our latest fundraise at a $180M valuation.

We build systems that learn how complex businesses work, enabling financial & operational optimization for the people who build everything else.

[Formic @goformic]

Humanoid robotics, physical AI, and a growing fleet already the largest independent one in the U.S. Our Oakland facility is a foothold in the Bay Area's physical AI corridor, and there's much more to come.

Read more: https://t.co/6T6QqXLetR

[Lightscape Partners @LightscapeVC]

Congratulations to @somi_synthefy and the @synthefyinc team on the launch!

Structured data is the largest data set on earth. Synthefy is building the foundational model for it.

[Synthefy @synthefyinc]

We are announcing our $6.5M seed round led by @Wing_VC, with @haystackvc, @samsungnext, Canonical @ai, @LightscapeVC, and angels from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta.

We started Synthefy around a simple observation: most data that runs the economy is not text. It is transactions, sensor readings, trades, inventory, customer records, and time series.

Yet every prediction problem built on that data, from forecasting and fraud detection to pricing and predictive maintenance, still requires a bespoke pipeline and months of data and ML work.

We are building foundation models for structured data to change that.

Our first model, Nori, puts predictive capability into its pretrained weights, so customers do not need to train and maintain a separate model for every dataset and use case.

Our mission is to give customers predictive answers from their structured data that they cannot get from today’s tooling, 100× faster and at one-tenth the cost of bespoke ML.
We are grateful to our team, early users, and investors for believing in our mission.
Try Nori at https://t.co/JrZVJtnQ5A.
Full announcement in the comments.

[Lightscape Partners @LightscapeVC]

We're thrilled for the team at Etched as they ship their first rack to Jane Street. It's been a busy year, and they're only just getting started! 🚀

[Etched @Etched]

We've raised $700M at a $21B valuation from Jane Street, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, A16Z, Peter Thiel, BCV, and Blackstone.

We're also excited to share that we've shipped our first rack to Jane Street.

[JC B @jc_btaiche]

0/ Today @FuseEnergyTech announced FAETON-X hit 1.27×10¹² neutrons in a single shot — the highest yield ever reported by a commercial fusion company, and in a range previously seen only at national labs.

Proud to be pushing the frontier alongside the US national lab community. 🧵 0/4

[Lightscape Partners @LightscapeVC]

Thrilled to back @rivensystems as they come out of stealth.

Chip, Orion, and the team are bringing AI and autonomous labs to one of America’s most important industrial challenges: critical minerals processing.

A hard problem, an exceptional team, and a massive opportunity. 🇺🇸

[Ksenia Moskalenko @kseniam0s]

Half of venture disappears every summer. These pre-seed funds are still saying yes:

- @HannahGreyVC (Denver, CO)
- @AforeVC (San Francisco, CA)
- @CollideCapital (New York, NY)
- @zachcoelius | Coelius (SF, CA)
- @LightscapeVC (New York, NY)
- @GradientVC (San Francisco, CA)
- @GrooveCap (Minneapolis, MN)
- @CortadoVentures (Oklahoma, OK)
- @LookingGlassCap (New York, NY)
- @1517fund (Telluride, CO)

P.S. While everyone else is on vacation, our new AI data room agent is not. Talk to it and it builds, runs, and audits your data room → @ThePageform

[Lightscape Partners @LightscapeVC]

Etched really is faster!

Huge congratulations to the @Etched team on announcing their $300M Series C led by Sequoia.

[Etched @Etched]

We’ve raised $300M in Series C funding at a $10.3B valuation from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, Argo, and SK Hynix.

Our mission is to run the world's inference. This round accelerates production of our inference clusters.

We've opened an 80,000-sqft, 10-MW facility 15 minutes from our office to expedite production and prototyping.

[Databento @DatabentoHQ]

We're excited to announce Databento's $97 million Series B, led by @NEA, with participation from DRW Venture Capital, @Redpoint Ventures, @Tribecap, and more.

In the last few years, Databento has become the market data provider of choice for many of the world's largest hedge funds, fintechs, and AI labs. If you've ever traded a stock in a mobile app or filled your tank at a gas station, you've almost certainly relied on a product powered by Databento.

Market data is a $50B+ industry that underpins nearly every financial decision on the planet. Programmatic access is becoming the industry default — we believe that three years from now, more finance professionals will know how to use a Databento API than a traditional terminal.
This round takes us one step closer, as we increase our storage footprint to over 100 petabytes and expand across asset classes and geographies.

To our customers and community: Thank you for your enormous support over these past three years! We built this for you, and we can't wait to show you what's next.

[Lightscape Partners @LightscapeVC]

Congratulations to Christina and the @DatabentoHQ team! We are proud to continue supporting the journey.

[Christina Qi @christinaqi]

I'm excited to announce Databento's $97M Series B led by @NEA, with participation from @DRWTrading, @Redpoint, @tribecap & more.

[Lightscape Partners @LightscapeVC]

The Etched team has been relentless in their mission to redefine inference hardware. We're thrilled to partner with the team. Congrats on the launch!

[Etched @Etched]

We're coming out of stealth.

We've built our first racks after a successful A0 tapeout, $1B+ in customer contracts, and $800m raised.

Early customer tests show us achieving SOTA throughput, latency, and power efficiency on inference workloads.

Our first racks ship this summer.

[Lightscape Partners @LightscapeVC]

Enterprise customer experience is one of many legacy industries entering a period of profound AI-led transformation. Parloa has continued to reinforce its position as a leader in this shift.

Read more about why we invested here:
https://t.co/YMBHPAa3R0

[Tanmay Agarwal @tanmayxagarwal]

I’m excited to share two key milestones for Parallax Worlds today: a new funding round led by Midas list investors, and an industrial-grade video-to-3D model with an average error of 3mm that needs just an iPhone, all towards a growing vision for robotics simulation that is focused on an abundance of automation in the next decade. We’re hiring for robotics & cloud infrastructure roles, please reach out if our mission resonates! More below & an exclusive from @thecubetv in the thread.

There are two things that state-of-the-art AI can do for robotics: it can allow us to make more intelligent robots, and it can enable us to massively increase the scale & speed of deploying robots in production. Today, I’m grateful to share Parallax’s $4.9M in funding till date towards the latter, led by @pearvc.

Only three metrics really matter when deploying a robot in a facility: cost, throughput, and reliability. Being able to predict, let alone guarantee any of these at an industrial level is a huge challenge for AI-based robots. This creates a conundrum – intelligent robots present the opportunity to automate tasks that could never be automated before and help with near-shoring & labor shortages, yet we will never see them deployed on the factory floor unless we can measure and improve on the above three metrics.

At Parallax, our mission is to help anyone, not just robotics experts, develop, test, and deploy robots at the speed of light. We do this by building photo-realistic simulations of production sites with just an iPhone, and stress-testing robots inside of them to find robot failures before deployment. Our product leverages advanced computer vision methods to perform at industrial requirements – our AI generated models are accurate within 1 cm, with an average error of 3mm. We create meaningful test cases that go beyond naive randomization with AI-agents that run in a full physics-enabled environment.

I’m grateful today to have the support & trust of Mar, legendary investor at Pear & @payamban, a pioneer in the Space industry. I am also excited to welcome to the cap table GS Futures – the VC arm of one of Korea’s largest conglomerates across manufacturing, construction, and retail, @LightscapeVC, @KakaoVentures, @GaingelsVC, Nova Threshold, @Mana_Ventures, and @BoostVC.

Also extremely grateful for the continued support from John & @RTylerCrown at @Unusual_VC who were Day-1 investors in Parallax, @WizLikeWizard at @spacecadet, who has been with us firmly through thick & thin, and @saranormous & @pranavreddy at @conviction (Embed) for helping us maximize our vision for the company. Lastly, a huge shoutout to Monisha & John who were there for our -1 to 0 journey at Stanford, without whom the company may not have even existed.

Proud of our team and all the work we have done. Lots more to do, so now back to work.