Lohit

Building

[Claire Zau @clairejyz]

BREAKING: ANDE COMES OUT OF STEALTH WITH $52M

@keepingittlo (CEO & Co-founder of @weareande) joined us Lightwork to break down the corporate entertainment network he spent the last two and a half years building in stealth.

📈 60 enterprises, 1,600+ hospitality groups, and 93,000+ venues
🍽️ Why he believes corporate entertainment never got a Concur/Navan-style solution
⚡ Ande’s “10x cheaper, 10x faster” approach through AI-native ops
🤝 Why Ande keeps humans in the loop for negotiations

Full episode linked below 👇
@Lightspeed

[Josh Machiz @Machiz]

corporate entertainment is about bringing people together, but the systems behind it are surprisingly scattered.

lohit built @weareande to bring it all into one place and reduce headaches for the teams involved

@keepingittlo and i go way back, and i’ve had a front row seat to the way he builds

he cares deeply about the human side of hospitality. early on, he went door-to-door meeting with hospitality groups while building ande

this week, we talked about how ande is using AI to remove logistical frictions without automating the humanity that makes hospitality work.

[Lightspeed @lightspeedvp]

We're excited to have co-led @weareande's Seed and Series A financing rounds as they emerge from stealth.

Ande is building the AI-native network for corporate entertainment, connecting the enterprises that book experiences with the vendors that serve them to make corporate entertainment feel effortless.

By bringing booking, approvals, contracts, payments, and reporting into one network, Ande is adding structure to a category — corporate entertainment — that has stayed scattered and largely invisible, the way travel was before it became a managed spend category.

The company is AI-native internally, too. Founder Lohit Sarma says 95% of Ande’s code is now written by AI.

Congratulations to @keepingittlo and the team on the raise and the public launch!

Cc: Venture Partner @arifj

[Lightspeed @lightspeedvp]

While corporate travel has been centralized for decades, corporate entertainment is still comparatively scattered.

On Lightwork, Lohit Sarma shared how he approached that problem at @weareande: start with supply.

He spent the last two and a half years building the network from that side first, including going door to door with hospitality groups before scaling the enterprise side.

Corporate entertainment still runs on relationships. AI can handle things like availability, pricing, and multi-player workflows, but Lohit draws the line at negotiation.

As he puts it, “one bad event is one lost relationship that they can’t recover from.”

Tune into the full episode below!

Chapters:
0:00 Ande Comes Out Of Stealth
2:17 Why Corporate Entertainment Has Stayed Fragmented
4:51 Lohit Sarma's Background (Lifion by ADP)
9:51 What CFOs Revealed About Fraud And Offshore Teams
10:47 Building The Supply Side First
16:44 Ande's Enterprise Customers And Rollout Strategy
18:40 How AI Is Built Into Ande's Ethos
22:58 The Future Of Ande
26:11 Hiring A Team To Build A Category
29:38 What Can Break At Ten Times The Size
31:50 Celebrating The Launch And Where To Find Ande

@keepingittlo @clairejyz @machiz

[Lohit @keepingittlo]

lol @OpenAI well done… nicely handled a question around rate limiting.

[Lohit @keepingittlo]

@Rajiv1841 I think this squad lost all credibility with parag in there. Open with jaiswal and Abhishek, Sky , Iyyer, hardik, Axar, jitesh/Kl, dube/sundar, bumrah, Varun, Arshdeep/Kuldeep

[Dinda Academy @academy_dinda]

What is so special about Virat Kohli and Test Cricket? 🗣

This-

[Shaun Maguire @shaunmmaguire]

This is so tragic. Extremism should have no place in this world

Sending love to India ❤️🇮🇳

[Sweet Meteor O'Death @smod4real]

1: Tariffs are paused, says Bloomberg
2: Bloomberg, the news service?
1: No, some guy named Walter Bloomberg
2: What’s his source?
1: Reuters
2: The news service?
1: No, his friend Johnny Reuters

[Lohit @keepingittlo]

Never leaving this app … 🍿

[Bethany S. Mandel @bethanyshondark]

I strongly recommend having a baby daddy who lives in your house, so that you don’t have to tweet him.

[Lohit @keepingittlo]

https://t.co/9iSzktNCLI
@naval is always so insightful and most of the time he’s spot on in his assessment.

[Kyla Scanlon @kylascan]

What's really interesting about the Boomers is they had a pretty simple wealth formula with a traditional path of career progression + home appreciation + retirement savings (compounded by company loyalty) + accessible opportunities if you had education/skills. The wealth of the younger generations seems more concentrated in FAANG, finance, etc where there is more winner-take-all dynamics and it's harder to build wealth via the boomer formula. Boomers aren't demonic (it is interesting that the younger gens are passing on more) they are simply products of their circumstances of the post-WWII economy, strong labor unions, stable careers, and affordable housing with a lot of social mobility. They benefited from change, whereas change seems more a vaccuum of wealth now, concentrating wealth rather than distributing it.

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

Absolutely true. Dogs possess all of the noble traits to which we aspire and none of our flaws. They are divine.

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

wow, found a rare interview of a DeepSeek co-founder talking about his first AI startup exit a few years ago

[Aravind Srinivas @AravSrinivas]

We've shipped many things in Perplexity, but integrating DeepSeek R1 with search is truly a phenomenal experience, seeing the model think out loud like an intelligent person, reading hundreds of sources, with sleek UX. Yes, the limits suck right now, but as I promised, we will increase them every day.

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

Everyone freaking out about DeepSeek being a Chinese company collecting your data (including @BillAckman) don’t understand OpenSource. @huggingface says it’s already been respun 500+ times. You can run it today on @perplexity_ai (see below).

[Lohit @keepingittlo]

@karpathy had this up a month ago .. Wall Street and the rest of the world are just realizing it now lol

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

DeepSeek (Chinese AI co) making it look easy today with an open weights release of a frontier-grade LLM trained on a joke of a budget (2048 GPUs for 2 months, $6M).

For reference, this level of capability is supposed to require clusters of closer to 16K GPUs, the ones being brought up today are more around 100K GPUs. E.g. Llama 3 405B used 30.8M GPU-hours, while DeepSeek-V3 looks to be a stronger model at only 2.8M GPU-hours (~11X less compute). If the model also passes vibe checks (e.g. LLM arena rankings are ongoing, my few quick tests went well so far) it will be a highly impressive display of research and engineering under resource constraints.

Does this mean you don't need large GPU clusters for frontier LLMs? No but you have to ensure that you're not wasteful with what you have, and this looks like a nice demonstration that there's still a lot to get through with both data and algorithms.

Very nice & detailed tech report too, reading through.

[Lohit @keepingittlo]

@shmediumgambler Similar experience at the CT shoreline.. (Madison)

[Lohit @keepingittlo]

@Duderichy At some point folks will come to the hard realization.. everyone is replaceable.
A company has only one responsibility- shareholder return.. anything else is just noise and a fad/trend.. the quicker people realize and accept this fact the lesser the friction between the two.

[Lohit @keepingittlo]

@TCNetwork @megynkelly I hope we can return to the days where a person does not have to be vilified for choosing to vote for a candidate of their choice irrespective of what side they chose. That is what true democracy is supposed to be and going back to having a normal civil discourse would be nice.