Conviction

a early-stage venture capital firm purpose-built for Software 3.0 🔧, stan account for the revolutionaries

[Dan Robinson @danlovesproofs]

If you are worried about getting hacked, we can help. We will scan your code intensively, we will resolve issues for you, we will work closely with your eng team. DM me.

[HeyGen @HeyGen]

HeyGen Video 1 went up against today's leading video models in a blind test on @ArtificialAnlys.

Our first general-purpose video model ranked #1 in text to video.

Try it: https://t.co/yYsdqgTlEu

[Kevin Weil 🇺🇸 @kevinweil]

💥 Introducing Warp Sciences, a new company applying AI and robotics to help the world develop new medicines faster.

We’ve raised a $215M Series A led by @lightspeedvp to bring frontier AI out of the browser and into the lab, and build scientific capacity here in America.

I co-founded Warp with my long-time friend @dpatil, FAIR co-founder @manohar_paluri, and drug hunter Sol Reisberg. The early team is full of incredible people like @bkspears9, who helped achieve Q>1 fusion at LLNL.

[Conviction @conviction]

@Jennywang @ForerunnerVC Congrats Jenny!

[Conviction @conviction]

great team and great mission 🧪

[Kevin Weil 🇺🇸 @kevinweil]

💥 Introducing Warp Sciences, a new company applying AI and robotics to help the world develop new medicines faster.

We’ve raised a $215M Series A led by @lightspeedvp to bring frontier AI out of the browser and into the lab, and build scientific capacity here in America.

I co-founded Warp with my long-time friend @dpatil, FAIR co-founder @manohar_paluri, and drug hunter Sol Reisberg. The early team is full of incredible people like @bkspears9, who helped achieve Q>1 fusion at LLNL.

[OpenEvidence @OpenEvidence]

Over 85% of oncologists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center use OpenEvidence.

Together, @MSKCancerCenter and OpenEvidence have built OncoKB, MSK’s expert interpretation of a tumor’s genetics, directly into OpenEvidence, putting it in the hands of oncologists across the United States.

As Dr. Anaeze Offodile puts it: “Our mission is to end cancer for life.” As of today, we are widening OncoKB’s reach so that patients everywhere benefit from the same rigor as patients at MSK. Watch the story.

[Mike Vernal @mvernal]

Feel like it's a good day for friends! First @trajectorylabs then @baseten now @KeenableAI. Let's go!

[Ara @arafatkatze]

Baseten cooked so hard with this Mammoth model its unreal. I have been trying to find very cheap and fast Jev alternatives for my code understanding pipelines to filter traces. Getting a cheap decision algorithm to work at a massive scale has been a challenge especially with jev's small context window.

In my internal eval test set of 2891 consensus fields mammoth beat Jev by a lead of 15% and that's amazing for a fully free open weights model. The only deciding factor now would be if this model could also compete on pricing. If the hosted offering of this model turns out of be cheaper than Jev then I will fully switch to this. Right now, its free and open weights but I am not sure my sparks can handle 300 concurrent threads and high throughput for a 27 B model.

[Conviction @conviction]

#1 Baseten

[Shai Goldman @shaig]

Fastest growing startups per Brex data

[Base Labs @baselabs]

Today we release mammoth-1 and elephant-1!

We post-trained mammoth-1, the #1 ranked best decision model in the world, and elephant-1, which is the best model under 15B (and beats Jev).

We're open-sourcing all model weights and provide a technical report detailing all our training and data methods.

[sarah guo @saranormous]

1/ 6 weeks into the Iran war, the US had fired ~50% of its Patriot interceptors & THAADs. Every one fired over the Gulf can't be in the Pacific. We co-led Watchtower’s $35M seed: the decision layer for a finite military

Thrilled to back @AkhilIyer1 and team, alongside @ShieldCapVC @foundersfund.

[Akhil Iyer @AkhilIyer1]

Excited to share what I’ve been building for the past 18 months.

Today I can officially announce my role as cofounder and CEO of Watchtower Labs, and our $35M raised led by Raj Shah @ShieldCapVC and @saranormous at @conviction, with @foundersfund and IQT.

[Ronak Malde @rronak_]

@JensenHuang at GTC:

"Here's Trajectory and Harvey using Nemotron, post-trained it and created their own frontier-level capability."

"With customization and with partners in the ecosystem that we work with, you could turn these models into the frontier.

And a result, turn your proprietary data into sovereign intelligence"

It's great to be doing work with such amazing companies like @harvey and @nvidia over here at @trajectorylabs!

[Alex Konrad @alexrkonrad]

Exclusive: new defense startup Watchtower Labs is launching from stealth with $35M to help solve the U.S. military's logistics mess.

I spoke with CEO and U.S. Marines veteran Akhil Iyer (@AkhilIyer1) about the company and mission to bring logistics into the AI era. Link below.

[Mike Vernal @mvernal]

Negotiation is not a competition. https://t.co/sm3cqUB1f1

[sarah guo @saranormous]

Why join Ithaca:

@GuptaRK22 & @johnwhegeman are taking Bumble private, and we led the round behind it. It’s our largest single round investment by a lot.

John is the only CRO of a company with $200B in annual revenue I've met who is an engineer's engineer. He ran engineering across News Feed and Monetization before becoming Meta's CRO. I tried to recruit Ravi years ago and he had the best references I've ever gotten on a leader. My partner @mvernal introduced them to each other. He'd worked with both. We are full conviction in these people, to the point where we rethought our own business model in order to be able to back them, and it wasn’t a hard decision.

Consumer internet companies at scale are some of the most fun to be had, and a tiny crack team has never been better set up to run them. This team is fast, knows scale and business quality, and is extremely AI-pilled — with full ownership they can rebuild whole companies around it. This is just the beginning. I'm glad they're out being pirates at @Ithaca_Holdings, and jealous of the people who get to work with them.

Make America Date Again!

[Ravi Gupta @GuptaRK22]

Today we announced an agreement to acquire Bumble.

Over the past six months, we’ve looked at hundreds of companies, asking which businesses would become more valuable as AI advances. 

Bumble stood out. 

As intelligence becomes more abundant, we believe connecting with the right person and forming meaningful relationships will become even more precious. And frontier technology can help more people find and build those relationships.

Our purpose at Ithaca is to apply frontier technology to things that matter. We acquire enduring businesses, transform them with technology, and hold for the long term. We focus on businesses not only for their financial potential but their ability to enrich lives.

Whitney and her team have built something extraordinary. Millions of relationships began on Bumble, and we’re honored to help take it into its next era. Together we intend to build the best company in the world for helping people find each other.

Let’s get to work.

[Mike Vernal @mvernal]

Ravi (@GuptaRK22), John (@johnwhegeman) and the team at @Ithaca_Holdings are insanely good. We are proud to have led their last round and even happier to call them friends.

**If you are a young, ambitious, AGI-pilled builder – you should absolutely be trying to join this company. This is going to be one of the most talent-dense teams in tech.**

[Noah Shinn @noahrshinn]

I agree with this take. Over the next year, I think we’ll see an adjustment in internet behavior where everything that was once too hard to do/high friction for most people, is now accessible.

You can send something to Instinct like “find all of the unwanted subscriptions that I’m paying for, refunds that I’m missing, unsubmitted expenses, expiring airline credits, property tax dispute opportunities, medical insurance warranty claims, and other opportunities that are falling through the cracks” to see what you’re missing out on.

[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.