Laude Ventures

We invest in deeply technical entrepreneurs with research roots. // @andykonwinski @psonsini @k_tighe @bradenjhancock // @LaudeInstitute

[Laude Ventures @LaudeVentures]

Pete Sonsini's Distinguished Alumni Service Award from Kellogg recognizes a quarter-century of backing founders when it matters most; believing in the team, stepping up, and seeing it through. The same principles guide Laude's approach to research and researchers. Congrats Pete!

@psonsini @alighodsi @RaghuRaghuram @andykonwinski

https://t.co/QdjmNbPK1f

[Dawn Song @dawnsongtweets]

10/15 Fireside Chat: Ali Ghodsi × Andy Konwinski
Every computing revolution has been defined by its infrastructure. Agentic AI will be no different.

Join Ali Ghodsi @alighodsi, Co-Founder and CEO @databricks, and Andy Konwinski @andykonwinski, Co-Founder @databricks and @perplexity_ai and Founder @LaudeVentures, on the platforms, data infrastructure, and open ecosystems that will shape the next decade of Agentic AI.
👇 Help shape the conversation in this session: What questions would you like the speakers to tackle? What topics would you like to see covered? Reply below to help guide the discussion!

[Braden Hancock @bradenjhancock]

Thanks for having me, @akashpasricha! Evals define the frontier -- everything else is just hill-climbing.

[Andy Konwinski @andykonwinski]

there are many options for distributing compute. if you or your agent are already using harbor, then `harbor exec` is a no-brainer!

[Andy Konwinski @andykonwinski]

https://t.co/9CPlzLzhs8

[Laude Ventures @LaudeVentures]

@arena incredible work by an incredible team. congratulations!

[Anastasios Nikolas Angelopoulos @ml_angelopoulos]

Arena has crossed $100M in annualized revenue run rate, eight months after launching our evaluation product.

With our recent release of Agent Mode, millions of users on Arena are doing real work with agents, from coding to document analysis, in long-running, multi-turn sessions with hundreds of tool calls. Arena now evaluates objective criteria like task completion rates, hallucination rates, and more, far beyond our original human preference voting model. This expansion has taken us from a student project at Berkeley to one of the fastest growing companies in history. Go Bears! 🐻

Our core thesis is simple: to align AI with human values, we must directly measure its impact on people in the real world. Today's milestone is proof that Arena’s platform is the de-facto standard for post-deployment evaluation of AI.

[Braden Hancock @bradenjhancock]

https://t.co/kKXUS9jsm8

[Laude Ventures @LaudeVentures]

Incredible projects in our 3rd batch of Laude Slingshots. Congrats to the researchers and the whole @LaudeInstitute team. 👏👏👏

[Laude Institute @LaudeInstitute]

Introducing Slingshots // THREE: 13 projects from the top researchers and top institutions in US and Canada. Alt architectures, world models, continual learning, hard sciences, HCI, and more. Let's meet the batch 🧵

[Andy Konwinski @andykonwinski]

So glad Scientific American ran this. For the last decade we've steadily been expanding the academic value system to place more weight on shipping research as OSS and startup product. An accolade like SciAm featuring Alex is another sign of this shift in values. And it's great.

[Laude Ventures @LaudeVentures]

Congratulations to Alex @TheMostlyGreat Salazar, @SamPartee, and the Arcade team on their $60M Series A. We backed Arcade early on their bet that the action and control layer had to be solved before enterprise agents could ship. An incredible milestone for this team.

[Arcade.dev | The Actions Runtime @TryArcade]

We saw the action and control layer coming. Now we're going to own it.

Everyone focused on the models. We focused on what happens when the agent actually does something.

@WSJ covered our $60M Series A today: https://t.co/kn5SGEIyQr

[Andy Konwinski @andykonwinski]

From the guys who wrote the MCP authorization spec Anthropic adopted. figuring out how to safely give agents access to production systems is a big problem. glad i invested!

[Inferact @inferact]

10x 🫡🚀

Eagle3 draft model here: https://t.co/5DMWVgM7Du

[Andy Konwinski @andykonwinski]

cool to see this work on effectively getting agents to use other agents

[Andy Konwinski @andykonwinski]

Thanks @LauraBratton5 for digging into what's going on with open AI research (not to be confused with OpenAI research which is closed AI research)

[Inferact @inferact]

Honored to be on this list! 🎉

Cheers to AI infrastructure, @vllm_project, and building the future of inference 🚀

[Tensormesh @tensormesh]

🎙️Tensormesh: From Research to $20M Round

Our CEO & Co-Founder @JunchenJiang sat down with TechBeats pod to talk KV cache, the "Big Data of AI," and how Tensormesh became the first caching-accelerated inference platform for enterprises across the GPU ecosystem.

Watch Full interview👇
https://t.co/NEoNMaudVL

#LLMInference #KVCache #AIInfrastructure

[Laude Ventures @LaudeVentures]

Congrats to our very own Pete Sonsini @psonsini on another year on the Midas List. Here he is in his element at NeurIPS last year.

https://t.co/L7FIgjDhEx

[CSGE @berkeley_csge]

We hosted our signature event, the annual Computer Science Graduate Entrepreneurs Spring Mixer in San Francisco! Sharing more moments in the thread 👇

[Inferact @inferact]

We're onto Inferact's second office this year! Yesterday, we finally broke it in with an office warming.

It's amazing to see how far we've come. The vLLM ecosystem has been growing at lightning pace, and we've been lucky to scale alongside it: helping teams serve inference faster, cheaper, and at scale.

Thank you to everyone who made it out yesterday — customers, partners, friends, and the whole Inferact team. It meant a lot to celebrate this milestone together.

We're hiring across all teams. If you want to join one of the fastest-growing AI infra companies and power the next generation of AI, check out our careers page or DM us.

Excited for many more office warmings to come!