NextView

High-conviction, hands-on seed investors. Championing founders who are redesigning the Everyday Economy.

[Rob Go @robgo]

New Post: Where Do You Live on the Valuation Curve? Inspired by wonderful data from @PeterJ_Walker @cartainc

TLDR - you live somewhere on this curve. But probably not where you started. And I think that has big implications.

https://t.co/FL7Q9RnLOS

[NextView @NextViewVC]

@robgo Read Rob's full blog post here: https://t.co/kJXIXnVbPz

[NextView @NextViewVC]

NextView Partner @robgo on how ownership targets quietly set your valuation discipline, and the bet each spot on the curve makes:

"Like a frog in boiling water, an investor can slip from buying top-quartile-priced deals to the median or lower without ever registering the change."

[NextView @NextViewVC]

And more on our investment and conviction in the business from NextView Partner @davidbeisel here:

https://t.co/CIU064LqS2

[NextView @NextViewVC]

Big news: NextView portfolio company @WaldenRobotics has emerged from stealth today with a $300M seed round at a $1.1B valuation, co-led by our friends at Toyota and @deviationcap 💥

🧵👇

[NextView @NextViewVC]

We spent time at their Cambridge HQ watching it all happen, and that's what turned our interest into conviction 💡

Deeply excited to be backing this team. The future of robotics is now 💪

More on the round from @Bloomberg here:

https://t.co/t7XTopvFI4

[NextView @NextViewVC]

Their robots are already doing real work alongside people at one of the world's largest manufacturing plants... going from first pilot to full deployment in under two months 👏

[NextView @NextViewVC]

@WaldenRobotics is spinning cutting-edge robotics research out into the world, building humanoids that learn new physical tasks from human demonstration rather than hand-coded instructions.

Check them out 🤖👇

https://t.co/sXSuOQ8RIy

[Navier @navierboat]

Friends who foil together, stay together 💙
Oh, hello Austin! 👋

[Boardy @boardyai]

Just build something. Anything.

That’s how your life changes.

[NextView @NextViewVC]

The real world never resets, so why do our benchmarks? NextView portfolio company @skyfallai built Morpheus, the first persistent, real-world RL environment to test Continual Learning.

Congrats on the launch 🚀

[Skyfall AI @skyfallai]

Today we present Morpheus, a persistent enterprise simulation platform designed to make Continual Learning a reality. Morpheus is the world’s first real world Reinforcement Learning environment.

Every Reinforcement Learning environment operates in the game world. Benchmarks like Atari, OpenAI Gym, MuJoCo, and Procgen are all small, game-like worlds that reset every few minutes.

But the real world never resets. A business keeps running and evolving everyday.

We tested how frontier LLMs would perform in realistic and dynamic business environments 🧬on Morpheus. The main conclusion was that LLMs are not continual learners.

🧵Here’s how we did it and what we learned:

[Stuart Landesberg @Stu_Land]

"Picture a Waymo, but in the sky.

That's the idea behind Sausalito-based company @Seneca_Systems's new drone. The technology can be operated by a tablet or cellphone, and it can offer a much faster response than a traditional hand crew on the ground."

We are lucky to live in the moment where advanced technology starts to improve the world in material ways!!

Thanks for the great story @kcranews & My58 Television.

Link in first comment

[NextView @NextViewVC]

More on the round here:
https://t.co/rklDT4Z2bP

CC: @sahilchoudh, @kwasikak

[NextView @NextViewVC]

Congrats to portfolio company @hellohandspring on their $19M Series B 🎉

We've believed in this team since the early days, and this round is a testament to what they've built: a measurement-based behavioral health model for youth that works, for the families who need it most 👏

[NextView @NextViewVC]

20 years ago, NextView partner @davidbeisel wrote down five reasons VCs shouldn't blog — then watched every one invert.

Now he hears the same arguments about AI in venture. He's not making the same mistake twice.

Check out his new Substack, Carried Away, for more 👇

[David @ NextView @davidbeisel]

In 2005, a few months into my first blog, I wrote a post titled "Stop! You Shouldn't Blog. The Risks of Professional Blogging."

I gave five reasons a VC shouldn't write in public. Then the whole thing inverted.

[Navier @navierboat]

“ The companies say the fleet will create the world’s first full electric hydrofoil transport network, connecting Velana International Airport with luxury resorts, private islands, local communities and villas across the archipelago” — @CNTraveler

Full story: https://t.co/F7lofsFBuf

[David @ NextView @davidbeisel]

Lending and aviation both automated the judgment everyone swore was irreducibly human. Venture tells itself the same story today.

The twist: in those fields the tail is the disaster you prevent. In venture it's the outcome you exist to catch. Same word, opposite stakes.

[NextView @NextViewVC]

VC is having its capitalization strategy moment.

Read NextView Partner @leehower's take on how the megacap era has split venture into two different games, and why every firm now has to decide which one it's playing.

[Lee Hower @leehower]

The biggest IPO and M&A exit in VC history have both occurred in the past wk.

VC is starting to segment based on capitalization (small-mid vs large/megacap).

The public equity markets did this in 1980s-90s, PE buyout world did in the 2000s, and now something similar feels inevitable for venture.

[David @ NextView @davidbeisel]

Every VC firm will tell you it has an AI initiative. The technology is the easy part.

The hard part is the operational rebuild almost no one has the will to do.

New in Carried Away, my blog on how AI is upending VC itself: "A New Engine, Not a New Paint Job."

https://t.co/4E1l2kdMvJ