Rohan

@emory alum

[Rohan @RNidmarti]

AI is one of biggest technological shifts of our lifetime. But unlike large enterprises, small businesses have historically been the last to benefit from breakthroughs in technology.

@trygenius_ai is making world-class AI accessible to the service businesses that need it most. Grateful to @DCohenShohet, @Leahcs, and the entire team for giving me the opportunity to watch that vision up close.

[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 ⬇️

[Defense Analyses and Research Corporation @DefenseAnalyses]

The notion of a middle power is a quaint relic of a dying global order, a polite fiction of the Davos roundtable.

The reality of great power competition is that no such distinction can exist: there are only sovereigns, supplicants, and the hard logic of the sphere of influence.

[ₕₐₘₚₜₒₙ @hamptonism]

This is by far one of the most important things I’ve watched in 2026.

[Dina Yerlan @dina_yrl]

only four types of companies from now on: labs, data cos, deploy cos, and rollup cos.

[Dennis Hong @dennisihong]

If Anthropic’s revenue grows 220x, that compute spend has to live somewhere. Google Cloud and AWS are the primary recipients. So the chart is simultaneously arguing that Anthropic explodes while Alphabet grows at a boring ~7% CAGR. Those two trajectories can’t really coexist.

[Rohan @RNidmarti]

Very well written @Avanika15. Reinforces the idea that the US needs export controls on critical technologies - AI being one of the most important. Hope this is read by the right people in Washington.

The risk isn’t just at the frontier. It’s stack creep. A developer grabs an open-weight Chinese model for a simple local use case. Then they need scale. What starts as a model choice becomes full infrastructure dependency. Distillation makes this possible

[Avanika Narayan @Avanika15]

Honored to be published in @ForeignAffairs.

For 2 years we've made the case for local AI. Here's the geopolitical angle: the U.S.–China race isn't about who trains the best model. It's about whose models, chips, and frameworks run by default on billions of devices.

Joint work w/@jdunnmon & @JonSaadFalcon

(1/N)

[Packy McCormick @packyM]

AI Data Centers are the villain du jour, but they are doing god's work, or at least the DoD/NASA's.

They are a new buyer somewhere between commercial and governmental Buyer of Capabilities bootstrapping all sorts of new tech down learning curves.

https://t.co/bFgzY7hEtt

[Rohan @RNidmarti]

Indian critics saying India’s stature is diminishing because Pakistan is mediating the Iran war are making a category error. A thread on why Pakistan’s mediator role is vulnerability, not influence.

Pakistan isn’t at the table from strength. It shares a 900km border with Iran, has a defense pact legally binding it to Saudi — with 8,000 troops already deployed there, a Shia domestic minority watching every move, and an ongoing energy crisis. It’s mediating to avoid being pulled into a sectarian war it cannot survive.

And it’s not even a clean mediation. Both Iran and the US have moved the goalposts repeatedly. Every time talks stall, Pakistan absorbs the failure. The mediator who can’t deliver becomes the story. That’s not diplomatic stature — that’s diplomatic liability.

Then there’s the obvious question nobody’s asking: is Pakistan even doing this voluntarily? A country running on American aid dollars, with the IMF on speed dial, doesn’t say no when Washington needs a back-channel. This looks less like independent diplomacy and more like a top-down assignment.

And here’s the real tell on Indian critics: if India had been the mediator, these same people would be screaming that Modi sold out India’s strategic autonomy to do Trump’s bidding. The criticism isn’t principled. It’s reflexive.

Yes, Trump’s warmth toward Shehbaz is a legitimate observation. But that’s about optics, not structural influence. Conflating it with Pakistan’s mediator role is sloppy analysis. Pakistan is at the table because it cannot afford not to be. India isn’t because it doesn’t have to be. Those are very different positions.

[Cam Hardaway 🇺🇸 @hardaway_cam]

As a reminder: https://t.co/JYgvlQeoYf

[Brendan (can/do) @BrendanFoody]

The next 12 months will be dramatically better for infrastructure companies upstream of Anthropic and OpenAI than for application-layer companies downstream of them.

[Andrew Ziperski @andrewziperski]

Contrast the cultural frenzy around structural mass unemployment and a coming “permanent underclass” with the way smart money is investing.

Thrive agreed to take a minority stake in a sports team. The AGI themes around scarcity, leisure, live entertainment, etc. are obvious. But this doesn’t strike me as a deal one makes if they expect mass unemployment in a post-AI world. Franchise values depend on lucrative TV deals, which depend on brand/advertiser willingness to pay, which is inherently a bet on strong American consumers, not ones reliant on meager UBI checks.

LLMH announced a take-private of a corporate travel management business. The opportunity to infuse AI and deliver better customer experiences at higher margins is exciting. This deal, too, seems bullish for labor in a post-AI world. Corporate travel management is not particularly valuable if you believe mass unemployment is coming and humans will be replaced by agents; our little French colleague Claude doesn’t need an EWR-SFO ticket and a room at the 1 Hotel.

[Rohan @RNidmarti]

Maybe I’m oversimplifying, but the whole “AI services companies are the future” thing doesn’t feel that complicated.

You don’t want to just sell a thin AI tool. You want to sell outcomes.

And to sell outcomes, you have to be deep inside a company’s actual workflows. That probably means product + proprietary architecture + people on the ground/FDEs helping embed it.

Feels less like a new revolution and more like the obvious way AI companies should be built

[Rohan @RNidmarti]

@bubbleboi Fair short-INR setup, but 2 offsets may stretch the timeline: (1) manufacturing is compounding: PMI 55.9, 9-mo high export orders, FY26 goods exports ~$442B (2) GCCs are scaling AI labor arbitrage: 2M+ jobs, $70B rev, $100B+ by 2030, 83% scaling GenAI. Does that push 2027–29 out?

[Rohan @RNidmarti]

honest question: what’s the real wedge for sovereign AI labs? Is the thesis geopolitical independence from the US model/compute stack, or something more specific: local data, language, regulatory trust, gov distribution? Especially in markets where OAI/Anthropic already have deep penetration?

[Rohan @RNidmarti]

Cursor is running the most expensive experiment in modern software history to prove that an IDE, layered on top of model suppliers who sell the same workflow directly, can still be a $50B enduring business.

Enterprise distribution and its own model stack (Composer) have flipped gross margins to slightly positive, but the lab below it is compounding faster and now competes heads on

[Jaya Gupta @JayaGup10]

Palantir FDEs are inspired by wait staff at French restaurants 😃

[Rohan @RNidmarti]

Selling chips to China is strategically wrong. Jensen’s case makes business sense, it does not make sovereignty sense. With China, dependence isn’t the end state; it’s a bridge. They absorb the tech, build domestic capacity, subsidize local players. Tesla didn’t create BYD, but Shanghai helped build the ecosystem BYD now dominates

[Steven Adler @sjgadler]

Dwarkesh: Why would we want to sell China the materials for a serious cyberweapon? It's like selling them nukes with a casing that says 'made by Boeing' and claiming that's good for the US

Jensen: Comparing AI to nukes is lunacy. Enriched uranium is a lousy analogy. It's an illogical analogy. What we have to recognize is that AI is a five-layered cake.

[Rohan @RNidmarti]

@aravind @aravind does pressure around Iran/Hormuz have any long-run relevance to Taiwan deterrence — not geographically, but by tightening US leverage over China’s energy as the Pacific front hardens?

[Dev Shah @0xDevShah]

every country that isn't the US or China is about to have an AGI sovereignty crisis. most of them just don't know it yet.

right now, governments in india, the Gulf states, Southeast Asia are in the "AI is exciting, let's promote it" phase. they're building AI ministries, hosting summits, announcing national strategies. vibes are good.

but the phase shift will come. the moment foundation models start touching critical infra like defense, healthcare, finances, these governments will wake up and realize they have zero sovereign capability. no domestic foundation models. no compute. no talent pipeline to build either. complete dependency on two countries, one of which they can't trust and one of which might restrict access at ny time.

that's when "let's promote AI" turns into "we need AI partnerships yesterday". that is when whoever has deep institutional relationships in these countries captures a decade of compounding leverage.

OpenAI and Anthropic are leaving an absurd amount on the table here. the GTM in these regions isn't PLG. it's government down. a minister talks to a sovereign wealth fund talks to the top 20 enterprises and suddenly you're the national AI partner. one relationship will unlock an entire economy.

labs will need to build squads who understand the institutional grammar as much as they understand the bay area tech scenes. someone who grew up in these systems AND understands what the lab actually offers at a technical level.

if you're early, you're a partner. late, you're a vendor competing on price against local alternatives that governments will fund out of national security panic whether they're good or not.

and your prize is that you will become the infrastructure layer for countries whose entire AI strategy will depend on you.