Today we're announcing over $9B in capital for a new family of funds — our largest raise in 25 years.
AI is rewriting the rules. We're backing the founders building what comes next.
One of the largest asset classes in the US doesn’t have a liquid index.
@Index_inds’ tech is powering a new investable index product for the US housing market. Co-founder and CEO @JReedRosenthal joined Lightspeed Partner @jmover on The Investment Memo to expand on what they’re building.
Index Industries’ first offering will be the U.S. Home Price Index (USHP Index), a proprietary benchmark for U.S. home prices. Calculated daily, it integrates data from the major housing indices into a single national measure, and will serve as a reference for the USHP token, which is issued by USHP Limited. USHP is a first-of-its-kind liquid index product backed by housing-related assets.
Josh explained why he feels USHP is so necessary in today’s market: Advanced blockchain capabilities, a more open regulatory environment, and a generation that has increasingly felt they couldn’t afford owning a home.
His goal is to broaden access to the housing market as an asset class. “Every home is a unique snowflake. You need deep expertise in specific markets, specific home types, and so on and so forth,” Josh says.
00:00 Meet Josh Rosenthal, CEO of Index Industries
01:45 From Investor to Co-Founder and CEO
03:29 The Ticker for the US Housing Market
05:19 On Traditional ETF Infrastructures
06:44 Blockchains as a Sandbox for Financial Innovation
10:17 The $300T Real Estate Asset Class
12:36 Tokenization Meets Real Estate
18:58 Building the Team
19:54 Five-Year Vision for US Housing
AI is going from answering questions to doing things for us. But what happens when an agent makes a mistake or gets tricked into sharing sensitive information?
We need to control what agents can access and what they can do with it. @1Password has been preparing for this, giving agents a way to access accounts without receiving the underlying passwords.
If we can’t trust agents with important tasks, there’s a limit to how useful they’ll become.
I sat down with David Faugno (@1PasswordCEO) on Cyber60 to discuss how cybersecurity can help us give agents more responsibility.
AI understands language, but can it master the art of conversation?
Some AI avatars today still operate like walkie-talkies. You speak, they process, then they respond. They can miss the subtle cues that make conversations feel human.
@nuance_ai is rethinking that problem from the ground up.
Co-founders @Fangchangma, @Kyzyx, and @KarrenYangz2 joined @whoisnnamdi on The Investment Memo to discuss their full-duplex foundation model, the science of emotional intelligence, and why the future of AI interaction extends beyond text.
“LLMs are trained on the task of next-token prediction… We’re doing almost a parallel task where we’re focusing on next-behavior prediction,” Fangchang explains.
We recently led their $50M Series A because we believe the future of AI interaction hinges on building systems that can better understand human communication.
Tune into the full episode below.
0:00 Why LLMs Fake Conversation And Introducing Nuance Labs
2:06 Why Audiovisual And The Limits Of Text
5:32 Cascaded Systems Latency And Broken Causality
10:04 The Full-Duplex Engine
14:24 Feeling Human And The Data Problem
18:04 Founder Origins, Team, Hiring, And Culture
29:40 Seattle Talent
31:44 Real Time IQ And EQ
38:09 Lessons From ElevenLabs Use Cases And Competition
45:10 Fundraising What The Capital Unlocks And The Vision
If we want to meet the demand for frontier tokens, we’re going to need a massive buildout of the underlying compute infrastructure.
Long-horizon tasks, heavy reasoning workloads, and subagents are all accelerating the need for new processors.
@goodwin_ml has brought together an incredible team, creating hardware to push AI’s frontier forward. Today, he and the team are building chips and systems that can deliver both speed and scale. Proud that we @Lightspeedvp are co-leading @fractile_ai’s Series C!
CC: @guruchahal, @jshen99
1Password’s push into AI met resistance inside the company.
David Faugno (@1PasswordCEO), CEO of @1Password, joined Lightspeed Partner @guruchahal on Cyber60 to discuss the company’s AI strategy.
He said some employees were skeptical when leadership committed to AI two years ago.
David helped connect the strategy to their existing mission: helping customers use emerging technologies safely.
That early work mattered when personal agents began gaining traction. Customers were reluctant to hand over their credentials.
1Password had already been building infrastructure to help agents access accounts while protecting those credentials.
As David puts it, “People want a trust layer” before letting agents act on their behalf.
Check out the full interview down below!
0:00 Welcome to Cyber60
1:29 Why 1Password Shifted to Enterprise
4:22 Scaling From Individual Users to Enterprise
7:37 How AI Is Transforming 1Password
11:28 Balancing Growth and Profitability
15:20 The Funnel Metrics in Cybersecurity
17:41 Building an Executive Team
20:39 Rapid-Fire Questions
The next leap in intelligence could depend on advances in compute.
We’re excited to co-lead @fractile_ai’s $720M Series C as they build an inference accelerator to support the next generation of models.
Reasoning and agentic workloads are expanding demand for inference, making the speed and cost of running frontier models increasingly important.
The team is building a chip-first frontier AI company, rethinking accelerator architecture from the ground up. Its systems are designed to run frontier models significantly faster and at a fraction of the cost.
Congratulations to the entire Fractile team!
CC: @guruchahal, @jonahcader, @jshen99
We’re thrilled to lead @Index_inds Industries’ $50M Seed round as they emerge from stealth.
Index Industries is building the financial infrastructure for a new era of real estate investing. Their technology supports USHP, the first liquid index product designed to track U.S. home prices.
Despite U.S. housing being one of the largest asset classes in the world, worth more than $55 trillion, there hasn't been a product that offers liquid exposure to broad U.S. home price performance. Co-founders @JReedRosenthal and Brian Hardecker are working to change that.
As property ownership is becoming increasingly difficult to reach, Index Industries' products aim to bring real estate the kind of liquid index access that already exists across equities, fixed income, and commodities.
Congratulations to Josh, Brian, and the entire team!
CC: @jmover
AI interactions will be measured not just by accuracy or speed, but by emotional authenticity. As increasingly more interfaces require natural human-AI interaction, emotional intelligence becomes a critical differentiator.
Congratulations @fangchangma, @Kyzyx, Karren, and team on two incredible launches.
The first AI persona you’ll actually want to meet face-to-face.
Most AI personas stare blankly while you talk. Emma reacts while you’re still speaking.
After 18 months of research at @nuance_ai, this is Emma, built on Nuplex, our full-duplex audiovisual foundation model.
.@meetgranola is teaming up with @GeminiApp for a GTM Hackathon at Granola HQ in London!
Attendees from marketing and GTM backgrounds will use Granola’s meeting context to build with Gemini and explore AI-powered workflows. No prior coding experience needed.
Apply to join the event here: https://t.co/5gA3s7S8Mc
How can AI help engineers build hardware we can rely on?
@brycestrauss, co-founder of @Nominal_io, joined @clairejyz on Lightwork to discuss how the team is approaching that question.
Nominal is an intelligence platform for hardware engineering, connecting hardware data with engineering context to help teams build, test, and operate complex machines.
For Bryce, the opportunity in physical AI is helping engineers build more ambitious systems, from faster aircraft to new energy technology.
Bringing those systems into everyday use means scaling production with confidence that the hardware will perform as intended.
Full episode below.
0:00 Welcome To Light Work
1:29 What Nominal Builds For Hardware Teams And Origin Story
5:38 Series C And The Analyst Agent
6:40 The Boat Example And Why Context Matters
10:58 Data Infrastructure And The Three Step Process
12:59 The Pitch To Aerospace And Defense Executives
15:58 Team And Hiring Philosophy
17:59 The Future Of Physical AI And Reindustrialization
23:54 The Next Decade And Thank You To Physical Engineers