Jonathan Shriftman

Partner @ExpandingCap (growth investor in Databricks, Canva, ClickHouse, Skydio). Co-founded @Humin (acq by Tinder). Can't believe this app is free.

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

@DavidGeorge83 @anduriltech 🇺🇸🫡

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

We're making drugs in space.
Congrats @zebulgar & @VardaSpace

[delian @zebulgar]

Today's Varda news is that we're making space drugs with United Therapeutics ($25b in market cap)

First time a public company has dedicated their balance sheet to making a physical product in space

Ba-boom

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

Congrats to @Gedmark and the entire @Astranis Space Technologies team. Astranis just closed a $450M Series E — we're so excited to be an investor at Expanding Capital.

Astranis builds advanced satellites for high orbits — providing dedicated, secure connectivity to the world's most sophisticated customers: large enterprises, sovereign governments, and the US military.

Astranis invented MicroGEO, which is a smaller, faster-to-build satellite that gives a single customer (a country, a telco, an oil company) their own dedicated network.

Just like chip fabs, rare earth supply chains, and renewed US manufacturing — satellite infrastructure is also re-nationalizing.

Taiwan bought an Astranis satellite after Chinese vessels cut their undersea cables, Oman just signed, the US Space Force selected Astranis as a prime contractor on multiple Programs of Record.

Fewer than 20 nations currently operate sovereign satellites. I suspect every major government will announce sovereign space plans soon. And they will all use Astranis. Really excited to be onboard.

And a personal thank you to @Gaurab for the warm reconnection that made this happen.

[Astranis Space Technologies @Astranis]

It’s time for scale: Astranis adds $450 million in new capital to meet surging demand for advanced high-orbit spacecraft.

Dedicated communications infrastructure is no longer optional. Demand is spiking from countries and governments that are moving away from aging, shared GEO communications satellites. They require dedicated satellites and networks they control, which is something that can only be provided from GEO.

This capital enhances our ability to meet demand from our commercial customer base around the world, and importantly we are now spooling up to support multiple US Government programs of record simultaneously.

We’ve now been selected as Prime for the initial phase of 3 separate Programs of Record— PTS-G, Resilient GPS, and RG-XX/Andromeda.

And we’re just getting started. More in the comments.

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

@2112Power @macbohannon @Tyler_Plummer @HadrianInc @MilkenInstitute Machining Hyperscaler… 10/10 analogy

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

Last week, @SkydioHQ announced its Series F at a $4.4B valuation. I caught up with Skydio's CEO @adampbry & CMO Macario Namie about where the business is headed next.

My biggest takeaway from the conversation:
Skydio is America's Drone Prime 🇺🇸

Skydio has built a dominant position across commercial, public safety, and defense drone markets — with 4,000+ customers, 60,000+ units shipped, and 10M first-responder calls processed through its DFR (that means, drone as first responder) Command platform.

On the defense side, Skydio just landed a $52M Army order (the largest single-vendor tactical drone order in Army history) and Skydio earned a spot on am elite $151B U.S. military approved vendor list, alongside the other top defense primes.

Now, with $3.5B committed to U.S. manufacturing, Skydio is positioning itself as America's Drone Prime.

As AI eats software, Skydio's flying AI robot infrastructure operates in the physical world, where is long-term subscription contracts (often 10 years) that compound like critical infrastructure, not SaaS.

Excited to be a small investor here. Deep dive below...

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

https://t.co/prjhOcSVgv

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

https://t.co/prjhOcSVgv

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

@tbragin @ClickHouseDB Thank you! SO excited and bullish on all things Clickhouse!

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla, Cloudflare, Meta, Canva, Shopify, Harvey, & Ramp all have in common? They're all built on @ClickHouseDB.

Here's the simplest way I can explain what ClickHouse does: imagine asking a question about every transaction your company has ever processed and getting the answer before you finish reading this sentence. That's ClickHouse.

I sat down with CEO @ceo_clickhouse and VP of Product @tbragin to tell the ClickHouse story... because once you understand what they've built, the opportunity becomes impossible to ignore. I believe this is a generational company that will (continue to) power the leading AI businesses.

My biggest takeaway from my conversation w/ Aaron & Tanya:

Every company in the world is rearchitecting around AI. But ClickHouse is what AI is architecting around.

As Aaron put it: "Most infrastructure companies were designed before the emergence of agentic systems. These legacy platforms simply weren't designed to meet the volume, concurrency, and dynamic load these AI workloads demand. ClickHouse was designed for this moment."

I've been an investor since the Series C, and I wanted to write a piece that explains the massive opportunity ahead — and what they've actually built — in plain English.

In this piece, I'll cover how:
→ ClickHouse built the world's fastest analytical database — milliseconds where it used to take hours, at 50-70% lower cost than the tools it replaces.
→ ClickHouse is consolidating the entire data stack — replacing five or more separate vendors: Snowflake, Datadog, Elasticsearch, Pinecone, and Postgres.
→ ClickHouse has built the "Agentic Data Stack" — connecting AI agents directly to real-time data so teams can query, reason, and act instantly.
→ ClickHouse has a credible path to $100Billion+ — with a trillion-dollar addressable market and a consumption model that scales with every agent deployed. There's a reason ARR has grown 250% YoY with no SDRs, and enterprise customers have grown from 3,000 to 4,000 in just three months 🤯

Thanks for letting me tell this story, Aaron & Tanya.

Let's Click into it…

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

https://t.co/Ld79lbsQTI

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

@DrTomsLens Love this analogy

[Dr. Tomislav Marinovic @DrTomsLens]

$NBIS' ClickHouse platform is starting to look like the CUDA of data analytics, a foundational infrastructure layer that more and more data-heavy AI businesses rely on – including OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla and Meta.

"Every company in the world is rearchitecting around AI. But ClickHouse is what AI is architecting around."

[Protector of the Realm @RealmProtector2]

Amazing write up about Clickhouse one of the stakes in Nebius Group (~25%).
When I started investing in Nebius Jan25 I saw clickhouse as the most promising subsidiary. Since that moment I can’t wait for an IPO of Clickhouse and feel like 2027 will be the year. Long Nebius🚀

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

@RealmProtector2 @ClickHouseDB Thank you for the kind words

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

https://t.co/Ld79lbsQTI

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

@horwitzben This is so good.

Its the all lowercase that does it for me.

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

I sat down with @cliffobrecht, Canva's Co-Founder & COO, for a sneak preview of what they're launching at Canva Create this week.

As an investor in @canva, I've never been more excited about where this company is going.

$4B in ARR. 265M monthly active users. 95% of the Fortune 500. Enterprise revenue growing 100% YoY. AI tools used 27 billion times — tripling year over year.

And today, for the first time, I'm sharing an exclusive: Canva's newest business tier has hit $350M ARR in just five months 🤯

Cliff put the strategic shift simply:

"People don't wake up saying 'I want to create a presentation.' They wake up saying 'I want to grow my business.'"

That's the whole game. Canva is moving from helping you create assets to helping you achieve outcomes.

Watching him demo unreleased products, one frame kept coming back to me:

Canva is becoming your CMO.

But its more than that. It's also your graphic designer, your copywriter, your media buyer, your brand strategist, your performance marketer, your email marketing manager, your market researcher, and your campaign analyst.
One platform. Starting at $10 a month.

In this interview, I go deep into Canva's proprietary AI models, their full productivity suite, agentic tools & evolving business model.

So excited for Canva Create this week!

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

https://t.co/dqKjrdWdhV

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

https://t.co/dqKjrdWdhV

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

@cameronpriest Love this. Which companies specifically are you tracking that fit this bill?

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

https://t.co/rPrE7DwZC6

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

@tanayj @Wing_VC @sequoia @a16z @BessemerVP @lightspeedvp Such good research from you all. Thoughts on this?

The simplest heuristic to predict the next Giga!?

Infrastructure company + high rank + back-to-back appearances + advancing stages = durable.

Application company + low rank + hot category + single appearance = tourist.

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

Every year since 2019, @Wing_VC has surveyed ~100 of the top venture capitalists in enterprise tech... partners at firms like @sequoia, @a16z, @BessemerVP, @lightspeedvp etc…. and asked them to rank the most promising private companies.

The result is the Enterprise Tech 30 broken into Early, Mid (as in the category, not the Gen-Z insult though the name choice is funny), Late, and Giga stages by capital raised. It's one of the few institutional, peer-reviewed snapshots of what the best investors actually believe at any given moment. I always love this list and it’s amazing they put this together for the tech ecosystem.

The 2026 edition dropped last week (link in post)

Time flies in the AI era and I was curious: What does this list look like over time? How has the composition shifted since 2019? What happened in the last 2-3 years as AI rewrote everything? Which companies stuck, which vanished. Maybe most importantly, can I use this to predict future outsized returns?

So I pulled every ET30 report going back to the first edition, built a database of every company across all 8 years (Thank you Claude), and tracked every appearance, stage transition, and disappearance.

At the end of this research, I highlight a framework to pick the companies that have the highest chance to become Giga.

TY for this incredible research @EricNewcomer, @peter_wagner, @rajeevchand, @chriszeoli, @tanayj!

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

https://t.co/0buRw0JRyw

[Jonathan Shriftman @Shriftman]

https://t.co/0buRw0JRyw