Aaref Hilaly

First a Founder, then a CEO, now @BainCapVC focused on AI seed & Series A. Helping out at @cognition, @DecagonAI, @evenuplaw, @krea_ai, @simile_ai & others.

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

@ChristinaPhili5 @BainCapVC @joinadaptive Huge need - and a perfect area for services-to-software!

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

@sriramkri @CTurlica @BainCapVC @merritthummer 🤔

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

Love this guy! Totally low profile. Quietly went zero to $3.6b in cash in seven years - building a business with real recurring revenue + best in class metrics. @CTurlica is one of the best! @BainCapVC is lucky to work with him, thanks to my partner @merritthummer

[Bloomberg @business]

Engineering software maker Autodesk has agreed to buy MaintainX, a firm focused on maintenance tools https://t.co/GiH9jPVs8q

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

@MichaelElabd @trajectorylabs @rronak_ @QuantumArjun You guys are doing amazing work - so fun to support!

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

Fun night at @trajectorylabs. Congrats @rronak_, @MichaelElabd & @QuantumArjun on pulling off the covers! Just the beginning...

[Ronak Malde @rronak_]

Today, @MichaelElabd, @QuantumArjun, and I are excited to announce Trajectory.

We are a research lab and product company building the platform for Continual Learning.

Our platform unlocks the signal already sitting in product usage, so companies can continuously post-train large-scale agentic models that outperform the frontier. @trajectorylabs

We’ve raised $15M from @Conviction, @BessemerVP, @radicalvcfund, @jeffdean, @drfeifei and more.

We’re partnering with some of the best AI-native companies: @ClayRunHQ @Harvey, @DecagonAI, @mercor_ai, @RogoAI to power their agentic systems, some of which we are already in production with.

We’ve brought together a world class research team from DeepMind, OpenAI, Apple, Meta Superintelligence, Amazon AGI, Scale AI, and an elite product team from Stripe and Figma.

AI will never again start on day one. Every correction, every retry, every edit will make products smarter. This is Continual Learning.

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

More fuel in the tank!

Just awe-inspiring to support this team as they execute.

[Cognition @cognition]

1/ We’ve raised over $1B at a $26B valuation, led by @Lux_Capital, @generalcatalyst, and @8vc.

Our enterprise usage has grown >10x since the start of this year, and our run-rate revenue grew to $492 M.

We launched Devin two years ago as the first AI software engineer. Since then, cloud agents have gone from niche to mainstream, and today they are the fastest growing way to create software.

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

@cognition @Lux_Capital @generalcatalyst @8vc Huge congrats @ScottWu46, @russelljkaplan & Team Cog! Honored to support the journey

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

At this point, it would not even be a surprise

[Viv @Vtrivedy10]

Breaking: Pep Guardiola has joined Anthropic

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

Not everything goes to plan...but can still work out for the best

[Techmeme @Techmeme]

Sources: Google DeepMind has reached a ~$100M deal to hire 20+ researchers from Contextual AI, including CEO Douwe Kiela, and license its technology (Bloomberg)

(Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

@vassallo Amazing journey - huge congrats, Steve!

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

@ericvishria Huge congrats, Eric - what an incredible journey!

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

Seed/A is about team quality + latent demand that’s unlocked by the product. Moats come later.

[Bain Capital Ventures @BainCapVC]

“Moat” might be the most overused word in venture. @aaref thinks it might also be the most irrelevant, at least right now.

No one in AI has one. Models get distilled in weeks, yet the best companies continue to grow.

Our questions are shifting: Can this team build with enough speed to stay ahead? And is there genuine demand, not just interest?

In the current AI era, staying ahead matters more than keeping competitors out.

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

Delivering on AI’s promise — work completed, not just tools

[Ryan Daniels @ryanjdaniels]

📣 Update: we raised our $60m Series B from @Lux_Capital, @IndexVentures and @01Advisors, with participation from @sequoia, @eladgil and @BainCapVC .

When we came out of stealth 283 days ago, we had negotiated contracts worth $30m for our clients. As of last month, that number is over $1 billion.

We work with the most ambitious companies in the world, including @tryramp, @clay and @RogoAI. Today, we want you to hear from some of them directly.

Contracts are the rails of commerce. @crosbylegal is a hybrid AI law firm that gets them signed 80% faster. We’re announcing our Series B to keep scaling the dream law firm.

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

Hands-on investing with @slaterstich & @tonyzzhao

[Bain Capital Ventures @BainCapVC]

Memo is a robot that uses AI to perform household tasks effectively.

Today @sundayrobotics announced its Series B, and we’re proud to be investors.

Training robots for the home is hard — the environment is messy, dynamic, and full of edge cases. So Sunday is training robots directly on real households.

Founders @tonyzzhao and @chichengcc built a glove-based system that lets hundreds of contributors record everyday tasks in their own homes, creating high-fidelity demonstrations that feed directly into robot learning.

Home robotics will be defined by the companies that learn fastest from real homes. Sunday is building that loop.

More here: https://t.co/X5Ore2o1xY

@aaref @amandamhuang

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

@brainstub @BainCapVC @sundayrobotics @amandamhuang Love working with you guys! Such an inspiring team and mission

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

Beta coming this year!

[Tony Zhao @tonyzzhao]

We raised $165M at a $1.15B valuation to stop doing demos.

2026 is about 1) deployment and 2) research. We will start shipping Memo with our new frontier models in a few months.

Our series-B is led by Coatue, with Thomas Laffont joining the board. ->🧵

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

@tonyzzhao Psyched to be working with you, Tony!

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

Clear vision and unbridled ambition, coupled with deep humility and genuine empathy -- a rare combination. That’s @joon_s_pk and Team @simile_ai. Another perfect example of companies we back.

[Joon Sung Park @joon_s_pk]

Introducing Simile.

Simulating human behavior is one of the most consequential and technically difficult problems of our time.

We raised $100M from Index, Hanabi, A* BCV, @karpathy @drfeifei @adamdangelo @rauchg @scottbelsky among others.

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

@joon_s_pk @karpathy @drfeifei @adamdangelo @rauchg @scottbelsky Huge congrats, Joon and the entire @simile_ai team! Honored to support your journey

[Aaref Hilaly @aaref]

People ask what kind of companies we back…

[Cully Cavness @Electron_Cowboy]

Instead of a Series Seed pitch deck, we showed this video to @foundersfund @BainCapVC and @LongJourneyVC and they invested $4.5 million in us a few weeks later. This was the first data center that @ChaseLochmiller and I ever built way back in 2018 when we founded @CrusoeAI with a crazy dream to mine bitcoin with wasted gas across the oilfields of America. We’ve come a long way, but the roots of energy-first, vertically-integrated digital infrastructure started here in NE Wyoming with a <0.5MW deployment and geosynchronous satellite internet.