Aakash Thumaty

building prev. @stripe @jump_ | the roof is not my child but I will raise it like it is

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

I wrote this internal memo to convince @spenciefy to join us + articulate our right as a startup to exist in a world with Anthropic and OpenAI

(it also ended up being the "deck" we raised our seed round on)

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

https://t.co/UW2DQskHQ1

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

@ItzSuds let a boy dream

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

The human-in-the-loop harness is the wrong answer for anything that has to happen at the speed and scale of a customer-facing operation, where the agent has to be reachable by the outside world and accountable to an outcome.

Takeoff is a long horizon agent runtime, a harness for agents that operate like humans but scale like software.

Excited to share we've raised $15M to accelerate what we're building!

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

https://t.co/ntnDXJCaqL

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

@gerstenzang Couldn’t have happened without you, thank you so much for everything!

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

https://t.co/ntnDXJCaqL

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

@dcstalder Sharing an office with the handsomest VC in SV is the best part of the deal!

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

@rronak_ You’re an OG my man, the world will never know ;)

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

https://t.co/UW2DQskHQ1

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

@spenciefy What’s the equivalent comfort food joint in SF sir

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

Every time a customer asks us how to design their internal APIs around Takeoff agents, it validates one of the most important points of our thesis:

“Here's the part that I think matters most for the big labs. Just as Shopify's dominance in ecommerce meant that marketing solutions were increasingly evaluated in the context of ‘how well does this work with Shopify’ […], the dominant vertical AI platforms will become the context in which foundation models are evaluated.

Today, enterprises might evaluate foundation models on benchmarks like MMLU, HumanEval, and reasoning tests. Tomorrow, they'll evaluate foundation models based on which one works best inside the agent platform that originates their loans or which one works best inside the system that runs their healthcare operations. The vertical AI company becomes the source of truth while the foundation model becomes the interchangeable component.

This is the exact inversion of the current power dynamic and it's why the big labs will attempt to build true vertical solutions themselves”

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

I wrote this internal memo to convince @spenciefy to join us + articulate our right as a startup to exist in a world with Anthropic and OpenAI

(it also ended up being the "deck" we raised our seed round on)

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

There are 4 categorical reasons why people start companies:

1. You want to make a lot of money
2. You want to be HIM
3. You believe the world must look a certain way and need to mould it into that shape (or die trying)
4. To spend everyday of your life with your friends building something you're proud of ✅
@shubhangishr @spenciefy

[Spencer Yen @spenciefy]

will be sharing more about the agents we’ve built and deployed soon, but this essay finally convinced me to join Aakash and move to SF (👋 !)

it’s a bit long – here’s my selected tl;dr:

“Value accrues to the layer closest to the customer outcome

Shopify's success stemmed not from being a better SaaS product but from a revenue model perfectly aligned to its customers' outcomes […] they won by being the platform that made its merchants sell more stuff and then getting paid a percentage of every sale.

The AI companies that win won't just win by having the best model, they'll win by being the platform that replaces their customers' most expensive cost centers and getting paid a percentage of every dollar saved or every dollar earned.

Our growth so far is a direct consequence of value alignment. When your agents result in more loans originated than a human team, the customer doesn't need to be sold on expanding the contract, the results sell themselves.

The mortgage workflow doesn't care which LLM powers the income verification step, it cares whether the loan funds, and the healthcare coordination workflow doesn't care which model generates the phone call to the insurance company, it cares whether the prior authorization gets approved.

The model is an input. The outcome is the product.”

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

https://t.co/UW2DQskHQ1

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

Google had $440M in revenue in 2002, it was $86M in 2001 (5x y/y)

Anthropic did $1B in 2024, $9B in 2025, $30B by… March of 2026

This take is directionally correct (re: Anthropic) but wrong by an order of magnitude

[bubble boi @bubbleboi]

Anthropic is starting to look like Google in 2002 & OpenAI is starting to look like Yahoo in 2002.

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

@WHOOP should be embarrassed by their hypocrisy - @willahmed was an underdog, his whole story, the story of whoop, is about being relentless and beating the odds.

@greynguyen and @bevel_health are some of the best product thinkers and most earnest builders in the game. They didn’t get to where they are by ripping off features (evidently it was the other way around).

When a $10B company lawyers up instead of competing, you know the product is working.

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

@WHOOP should be embarrassed by their hypocrisy - @willahmed was an underdog, his whole story, the story of whoop, is about being relentless and beating the odds.

@greynguyen and @bevel_health are some of the best product thinkers and most earnest builders in the game. They didn’t get to where they are by ripping off features (evidently it was the other way around).

When a $10B company lawyers up instead of competing, you know the product is working.

[Grey @greynguyen]

@WHOOP just filed a lawsuit against us.

A $10B company with 800+ employees is scared of us, a 20-person team making health tracking accessible to all.

Rather than focusing on product and innovation, Whoop has decided to use its newly raised capital on lawfare.

In this video, I share our side of the story, explain why their claims are baseless, and why we believe fighting back is the right thing to do.

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

@industriaalist Huge congrats on the launch!

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

@BlasMoros @jsngr @wabi Duolingo for cats

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

Microsoft raised money twice throughout its entire history.

First funding round was when they had 17M in revenue (year 2 of the company) — they raised 1M at a 20M post from TVI.

Second funding round was the IPO, 5 years later.

@BillGates went macrohard

[Aakash Thumaty @letsleverup]

@michelleefang Incredible gift