Benchmark

Benchmark focuses on early-stage venture investing in consumer, marketplaces, open-source, AI, infrastructure, and enterprise software.

[Max Junestrand @MaxJunestrand]

Earlier this week, we announced our Series E. These are my thoughts on how we got here, and where we go next.

https://t.co/BR9vSNnnGl

[Sam Blond @samdblond]

Today Monaco is launching Agent Matrix.

Monaco unleashes countless agents working together, goal seeking, with one outcome in mind: accelerate revenue growth.

If you don’t have an army of agents working 24/7 to accelerate revenue growth, you’re living in the past.

Apply for early access now.

[Chetan Puttagunta @chetanp]

From Benchmark leading the seed to an $8.8B valuation in 2.5 years, the Legora team has led the industry by bringing the best products to lawyers around the world. Thrilled to be joined by our friends at Atreides, Baron Capital, Capital Group, Fidelity, JPM, and many others!

[Peter Fenton @peterfenton]

Real flywheel kicking in for @ExaAILabs seeing them compound their lead in all the critical areas

[Daksh Gupta @dakshgup]

series b

[Brody Franzen 🇺🇸 🚀 @brody_franzen]

We’ve been selected as one of 4 new vendors chosen to advance to a FY27 Fly Off for the Army’s IFPC Inc 2 interceptor program.

More at https://t.co/KL02u3kO5a

@BreakingDefense @USARMYPIT @Furientis

[Will Bryk @WilliamBryk]

Exa just passed $100m in annualized revenue.

We've grown almost exactly 10x per year for 3 years. We now handle 2 billion requests a month from 200k+ teams. And it’s still so early:

We predict agents will search 1000x more than humans by 2030.

Agents don't search like humans. They write long, complex queries and want all the world's data, not just the web. We've spent 5 years building a search engine designed for them.

We now serve personal agents, AI labs, coding agents, GTM agents, really any agent. Exa gives these agents access to 100s of billions of web documents and tons of proprietary data.

Our customers are increasingly noticing that information is the bottleneck to agent performance. While the world seems close to perfect intelligence with models like Fable and Astra, we are very far from perfect information.

To our small but legendary team, thank you for getting us here, from engineering to research to GTM to ops.

To our customers, it is an honor to serve you. We have some exciting releases coming soon and can't wait to share them 🫡

[Bret Taylor @btaylor]

On Tuesday, Sierra announced Personal Agent Protocol with Meta, Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe, and Walmart. The response has been incredible and today we’re publishing the first draft of the protocol at https://t.co/Qao9yEfzx4 and announcing 35 new design partners.

As personal agents take on more, our goal is simple: consumers have choice and control, and companies know when they’re dealing with an agent and who it represents.

This draft is a starting point. We’d love for companies, developers, and personal agent builders to read it, give feedback, and help us build an open standard together.

[Peter Fenton @peterfenton]

Such an inspiration to work with @moritz_stephan and the team @hone. They saw the gap between what AI can do and what organizations can put to work—and are closing it. The shift enables orgs to go from buying tokens to entrusting AI with meaningful, long-running work that delivers real value.

[Hone @hone]

Today Hone launches Engines: AI that owns business outcomes.

Chatbots give answers. Agents do tasks. Engines deliver outcomes, and we hold them responsible for creating real value, measured in actual dollars instead of tokens or vibes.

You point it at a business metric, and the Engine figures out the rest. It onboards itself, builds the necessary agents, skills, and memories, collaborates with the right people, and gets better with experience.

From AI leaders to global enterprises, our customers have already used Engines to:

• Uncover millions in procurement savings
• Optimize product funnels
• Manage credit risk
• Increase qualified pipeline in new territories
• Accelerate implementations and improve account management

To scale this impact across the economy, we’ve raised a $60M seed led by Benchmark and Index with participation from Elad Gil, Hanabi, Definition, Diffusion, Lux, SV Angel, and Align.

AI’s raw capabilities are far ahead of the value it creates in the real world, and Engines will help close the gap.

Here’s how they work…

[Everett Randle @EverettRandle]

Long-horizon Engines are a new & exciting step function in AI capabilities and usefulness in enterprise environments — we’re thrilled to partner with @moritz_stephan @oqbrady @CarloWillem and the Hone team as they push the frontiers of applied AI

[Bret Taylor @btaylor]

Today we’re announcing Personal Agent Protocol — an open standard @Meta and @SierraPlatform are developing along with industry partners at @Genesys, @instinct, @RocketOTD, @Shopify, @stripe, and @Walmart. It will help define how personal agents interact with businesses and is open for anyone to implement. You can read more here - and if anyone is interested in joining let me know! https://t.co/Yb90VEHMnn

[Chetan Puttagunta @chetanp]

Thrilled to announce Benchmark’s investment in Furientis! This is a remarkable team building incredible technology to produce scalable, low cost interceptors.

[Furientis @Furientis]

Today, we announced a $25M Seed round led by @benchmark, along with Furientis’ first funded @DeptofWar contract.

Sharing more below, but we are so grateful to everyone involved and looking forward to building the next generation of American defensive munitions.

[Brody Franzen 🇺🇸 🚀 @brody_franzen]

Excited to announce @Furientis @DeptofWar OTA contract for 100mi interceptor and $25M Seed raise led by @benchmark!

This couldn't have happened w/o our incredible engineering team testing at industry best pace. Join us- we're hiring across all disciplines!
https://t.co/ankNypRwAG

[Max Junestrand @MaxJunestrand]

I was in the Bloomberg studio in London this morning.

Q3 was the most hectic quarter in @WeareLegora's history. We added 800 new customers in three months and now work with more than 2,300 across 80+ countries. We also added more ARR this quarter than our total ARR at the end of 2025.

I was asked the jobs question, and my answer hasn't changed: our customers are hiring more lawyers.

Legal is supply constrained. If you could review every contract, you would. If you could run full diligence on every asset before it goes to investment committee, you would. Better tools mean more of that work gets done, and a lawyer still owns the judgment.

We talked about junior lawyers wondering whether they need to learn to code. With large language models, the programming language is English. I'm not especially good with words. Lawyers are, and they turn out to be some of the best drivers of our product.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I think this is the best time in history to be a lawyer.

Thanks @TomMackenzieTV for having me on The Opening Trade. Full interview below.

[Cognition @cognition]

Cognition has crossed $1B in annualized revenue run rate.

This milestone belongs to our customers. Here's how a few of them are building with Devin.

[Chetan Puttagunta @chetanp]

Numeral is solving the complexity of sales tax for thousands of businesses around the world with AI. The growth and execution from this remarkable team has been terrific. Thrilled to have invested in every round since we led the Series A.

[Chetan Puttagunta @chetanp]

Legora has gone $1M to $200M ARR in less than 24 months continuing to set a speed record for the fastest ever to do it with a direct sales motion. With the best product, this remarkable team continues to define AI for legal teams. Thrilled to have backed them from the seed round.

[Brendan (can/do) @BrendanFoody]

People often ask me what books and podcasts I recommend for learning about AI.

The truth is, I learn most about the future of AI and the data market through conversations with leading AI researchers.

I want to make more of those conversations available to everyone, so I’m starting a podcast interviewing the people shaping the frontier of AI.

More soon 👀