Ben Cherry

Dad to Izzy, husband to @maggdominguez.

Head of Product at @LiveKit

(he/him/his)

[Josh Elman @joshelman]

I just want to echo this best invention of 2026 for the @aura_frames eink

It shows one picture a day. And sits on a ledge on the stairs since it doesn’t require a plug. Each day’s picture becomes a conversation in our home about the memory.

https://t.co/oQFGoAMgy3

[David Zhao @davidzh]

It's misleading to run a benchmark focused on noise, and then specifically turn off noise cancellation in stacks where you have control. (pretty sure Grok does not give you that level control)

livekit does a great job with noise/background voice when you allow it to. (and glad to see we are beating every other cascaded pipelines)

[Ben Cherry @bcherry]

@kimmonismus The name “BEL” is almost “AGI”, just a couple letters off.

[Ben Cherry @bcherry]

@MiguelriosEN @pidotdev @typesafeai Wow this actually sounds really useful!

[Ben Cherry @bcherry]

@joshelman Once it supports vision it’s going to unlock whole categories. Tons of consumer utility in fast and accurate image classification / decision-making

[Jun @jun_liang_sf]

We just raised $4M at @lightsagehq , led by @nexusvp , to build the growth stack for internet’s newest customer: AI agents.

Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other agents can already discover products, compare alternatives, read documentation, install SDKs, call APIs and start using software on behalf of humans. Soon, they’ll increasingly transact too and that changes how internet companies grow.

For decades, companies built growth infrastructure around humans. PLG helped humans adopt products. Now there’s a new journey to optimize: Can an AI agent discover you, choose you, successfully use you, and eventually pay for you?

We call this Agent-Led Growth.

Lightsage helps companies get discovered, recommended and used by agents
→ Agent Discovery - when and why agents recommend you vs. competitors
→ Agent Experience - whether agents can successfully use your APIs, SDKs, CLIs, MCP servers and agent skills
→ Agent Analytics - what real agents do when they reach your website, docs and product. and most recently agent-attributed traffic conversion.

Companies including @firecrawl , @reductoai , @daytonaio , @rimelabs , @Tiny_Fish and @insforge are already using Lightsage to build their agent-led growth strategy and improve their agent journey.

We’re incredibly grateful to have Nexus lead this round alongside these amazing founders and operators.
- Former Salesforce CTO Steven Tamm
- Postman CEO @a85
- Apollo CEO Matt Curl
- DocuSign President Robert Chatwani
- Former GitLab Head of Growth @HilaQu
- Resend CEO @zenorocha
- Firecrawl Co-founder @ericciarla
- Daytona CEO @ivanburazin
- Tinyfish COO @shuhao_friday
- Adam Frankl
and many more!

As agents increasingly discover, evaluate, use and pay for products on our behalf, we believe every company will need to understand and optimize for the agent channel.

That’s what we’re building Lightsage for.

Huge thank you to my co-founder Sean Er, customers, early investors @AlchemistAcc and everyone who believed in us early. Honoured to be featured in @Forbes .

We’re just getting started.
https://t.co/xPRSFz8UJD

[Ben Cherry @bcherry]

@ccarella Good way to think about it, totally agree. As a hacker I live in the now. As a builder I live in the future anyways, which to many of us has been clear for a while and it’s only coming into focus for others recently but changes little about strategy besides improved confidence

[Ben Cherry @bcherry]

@ccarella iphone fold but it folds into a watch

[LiveKit @livekit]

We built a patient intake agent with @spacexai that runs end to end on Grok voice models.

Grok STT → Grok 4.3 → Grok TTS, cascaded through LiveKit Inference. Three model strings in one AgentSession. No separate API key, no separate billing, ZDR on every hop.

Talk to it: https://t.co/hx4jvwaWLx

[Ben Cherry @bcherry]

@joshelman Gotta go with a more aspirational name like https://t.co/g6rYD7wSxP

[Ben Cherry @bcherry]

@joshelman Essentially resource acquisition is always pushed to the winning agent and is never pulled from an open pool.

[Ben Cherry @bcherry]

@joshelman Maybe an opportunity for someone to build an agent lottery as a service. Take any scarce resource and turn it into lottery-only access, with clean standardized access for agents to enroll in the lottery. Even cancellations etc go into pool for the next lottery.

[Ben Cherry @bcherry]

@pk_iv @kashgupta_ perhaps underrated is that marketing is actually about convincing humans to do things, whereas coding is about convincing computers to do things. and humans are way more complicated than computers

[Ben Cherry @bcherry]

@yishan It’s like how the first ChatGPT image model somehow left a yellow tint on every image it generated. No way to solve it!

Claude text is so smart! And yet also has a smudgy “yellow” to it that you can’t unsee and you can’t prevent.

[Ben Cherry @bcherry]

@joshelman @jacalulu There's an old PBS special called "In Search Of Excellence". They did a great segment on Disney World in 1984. Truly timeless advice about customer obsession. (The other segments are great too! but Disney is my favorite) https://t.co/IQvvNROHCr

[Ben Cherry @bcherry]

@tylr congrats!

[LiveKit @livekit]

Frontier models keep getting smarter…and slower. This is bad for voice agents, where every millisecond before the first word counts.

So we optimized for speed. Introducing Gemma 4 31B on LiveKit Inference:

🗣️ 381ms to first sentence — 2x+ faster than the next model
✅ 88% task completion (see the criteria in reply)
💰 $1.20 / 1M output tokens

Fast enough for real conversation, smart enough for effective agents.

[Ben Cherry @bcherry]

"With this release, we consider end-of-turn detection a solved problem for agents built on LiveKit."

🤯

Incredible work by the ML team at LiveKit

[LiveKit @livekit]

We shipped LiveKit Turn Detector v1.

Instead of reading transcripts, it listens to speech directly, combining semantic and acoustic cues into one end-of-turn prediction.

The result: high accuracy, low latency—the best model we tested across 14 languages.

Available on LiveKit Cloud.

[Ben Cherry @bcherry]

Constantly amazed at how realistic and clever @interaction’s Poke is. Really unlike anything else

[Ben Cherry @bcherry]

@tylr IT'S SO UGLY