Natalie Luu

Advisor to startups / Stanford engineering alum / San Francisco native

[Natalie Luu @natluu]

Hope that the City & County of San Francisco and the teachers’ union can come to an agreement soon - they are the foundation of SF’s public school system.

I still keep in touch with a few of my high school teachers, and they were my earliest mentors and supporters. Growing up in the SFUSD system, we all dealt with incredibly limited resources, but they made do.

[Natalie Luu @natluu]

Congrats to the @fal team on this incredible milestone! Truly is a rocket ship 🚀

[fal @fal]

Today, we're excited to share that we have raised a $140M Series D, welcoming new investors @sequoia, @kleinerperkins and @nvidia alongside the continued support of our existing partners!

[Natalie Luu @natluu]

Prediction: 10x, 10x, 5x, 5x, 5x is the new “triple, triple, double, double, double” in the AI era.

[Natalie Luu @natluu]

Congrats @evelegalai on the $103M Series B! I’m super grateful to have helped with the fundraise and to be part of this team full of veterans.

It’s a meaningful milestone for Eve to put AI in the hands of lawyers who protect consumers. Onwards 🚀

[TBPN @tbpn]

"Law firms will basically transform into software companies." –@jayanthmadhesw1 (Founder, Eve Legal).

He says AI will learn a firm's unique internal workflows, turning their legal expertise into a scalable "product."

[Natalie Luu @natluu]

@BPIV400 How about success rates (or 0 or very low failure rates) of transactions? Or low gas fees?

[Natalie Luu @natluu]

Congratulations to the @fal team on the Series C announcement! 🦄

From MLops to becoming the backbone for accelerating GenAI inference, the journey has been remarkable. This team ships fast and works around the clock for their customers.

So proud and lucky to have been an angel investor and a supporter since the beginning. 🤝

[fal @fal]

Today, we're thrilled to announce our $125M Series C funding round at a $1.5B valuation, led by Meritech Capital, marking our third successful raise in just 12 months!

fal’s Generative Media Cloud now powers tens of thousands of applications, supporting over two million developers and more than 300 enterprise customers. From initial prototypes to fully scaled production, we've become the essential infrastructure enabling some of the most innovative and creative work in the industry.

Over the past year alone, we've experienced extraordinary growth—averaging 40% month-over-month, consistently exceeding our own ambitious projections. Each month, hundreds of thousands of new developers and thousands of fresh applications join our platform, unlocking entirely new use cases previously thought impossible.

With this latest round of funding, we're significantly scaling our engineering, support, sales, and marketing teams to keep pace with the accelerating demand and enthusiasm from our community.

Our vision has always been clear: build a generative media platform that effortlessly creates dynamic, real-time content across video, audio, image, and 3D. Thanks to our incredible team, dedicated partners, and visionary customers, that's precisely what fal delivers today—empowering creativity at unprecedented scale.

[Natalie Luu @natluu]

I used Airalo during my trip to South Korea this year - can’t believe I traveled internationally without Airalo before. It saved me so much from my carrier’s $10/day data plan. Congrats @airalocom!

[Arfur Rock @ArfurRock]

Airalo — the leading global eSIM provider.

Download the app -> purchase an eSIM -> 4G+ data in over 200 regions.

2024:
$331M Net Revenue
$123M Gross Profit
$52M EBITDA
~100%+ YoY

Closed unannounced Series C at $1B led by @CVC_Capital.

Congrats!

[Natalie Luu @natluu]

I have the utmost respect for the @SkipProtocol, now @Cosmos, team. They're a strong team from first principles: 10x engineers, strong product sense, and high integrity. If anyone can build a top 5 chain, it's them. Excited to see them tackle stablecoin on-chain finance!

[magmar 🇺🇸 @0xMagmar]

The last time we had 15% USD yield in Cosmos, we created the 3rd largest chain in history, surpassing Solana.

But this time, it’s fully collateralized.

To all ex-Terra builders - it’s time to come back.

This time, we’re doing it right, and doing it on the Hub itself.

$ATOM

[Natalie Luu @natluu]

Love seeing benchmarks like this from platforms who use multiple AI models 🧠

[vincent sunn chen @vincentsunnchen]

We launched our new frontier AI leaderboard, with new benchmarks focused on real-world, agentic tasks— all powered by @SnorkelAI's technology & human expert network!
- SnorkelFinance: Q&A over financial documents requiring agentic tool-calling and reasoning
- SnorkelUnderwrite: Agentic insurance tasks requiring industry-specific reasoning and tool use
- SnorkelSequences: Mathematical tasks requiring compositional multi-step reasoning

[Natalie Luu @natluu]

Congrats to @StevenL for launching @SevenStars_VC! If you've ever met Steven, you know he's an absolute hustler and great human being. Love that his immigrant parents' small business inspired the namesake of the fund!

https://t.co/cNhijwuAkS

[Natalie Luu @natluu]

Interesting stats from @SignalFire on employee retention and movement between AI giants. @AnthropicAI and @GoogleDeepMind lead the pack with ~80% retention after two years, well above the peer group.

[Deedy @deedydas]

Meta is currently offering $2M+/yr in offers for AI talent and still losing them to OpenAI and Anthropic. Heard ~3 such cases this week.

The AI talent wars are absolutely ridiculous.

Today, Anthropic has the highest ~80% retention 2 years in and is the #1 (large) company top AI researchers wants to go.

[Natalie Luu @natluu]

A credit card powered by stablecoins that you can actually use - awesome work by @raincards and talk by @cnaut!

[Charles Yoo-Naut (🌧️,🌧️) @cnaut]

I enjoyed getting to share some of the early inspiration for Rain that eventually led us to powering the @TheAvaxCard

[Natalie Luu @natluu]

Working with competing AI models is a game of leverage. It’s going to be interesting how this plays out. Will a new deal be arranged and then they regain access to Claude?

[Varun Mohan @_mohansolo]

With less than five days of notice, Anthropic decided to cut off nearly all of our first-party capacity to all Claude 3.x models. Given the short notice, we may see some short-term Claude 3.x model availability issues as we have very quickly ramped up capacity on other inference providers, but we believe we have now secured sufficient near term capacity. We have been very clear to Anthropic that this is not our desire - we wanted to pay them for the full capacity. We are disappointed by this decision and short notice.

Gemini 2.5 Pro (now very high quality on Windsurf, new 0.75x promo rate), GPT 4.1, and more are all unaffected. We look forward to our continued partnership with all model providers.

[Natalie Luu @natluu]

Looks like @AnthropicAI is joining the multi-modal race. With @reedhastings from @netflix also joining their board, it’s a perfect opportunity to get into generative video…

[Rowan Cheung @rowancheung]

AI NEWS: Anthropic is finally joining the voice movement — giving Claude the ability to talk!

Plus, more news from Mistral, Google, SpAItial, Tencent, and Salesforce.

Here's everything you need to know:

[Natalie Luu @natluu]

@burkaygur This looks cooler than I imagined!

[Natalie Luu @natluu]

Imagine animated movies like @netflix @lovedeathrobots powered by AI video models like @GoogleDeepMind Veo3. High-quality video + lip-sync = next-level animation production.

[Google DeepMind @GoogleDeepMind]

Video, meet audio. 🎥🤝🔊

With Veo 3, our new state-of-the-art generative video model, you can add soundtracks to clips you make.

Create talking characters, include sound effects, and more while developing videos in a range of cinematic styles. 🧵

[Natalie Luu @natluu]

I’ve tried several AI note-taking apps over the years, and @meetgranola is my favorite so far! 📝

[TechCrunch @TechCrunch]

AI note-taking app Granola raises $43M at $250M valuation, launches collaborative features | TechCrunch https://t.co/F5CJY1rExB

[Natalie Luu @natluu]

Data showing the most popular models by volume by modality from @Quora @poe_platform👇

[Nick Huber @nhuber]

One of my favorite parts of my job is these reports! So much alpha there for investing types, and so proud to work at a company that feels “just publish the data” is the best play: https://t.co/XFvOIGFErQ

[Natalie Luu @natluu]

I would wager that 20+ unicorns could be created this way. Apps with delightful UI/UX can create significant market value.

@GoogleDeepMind and @OpenAI built multi-modal infra building blocks because they see a $1T+ opportunity in building with generative AI models.

[Tom Dörr @tom_doerr]

I bet at least 10 unicorns will be built by creating a wrapper around multimodal LLM capabilities