Roelof Botha

Investor. Formerly at @Sequoia and @PayPal. Board member at @SpaceX @nateragenetics @MongoDB @Square @Unity3D and @Ethos. Invested in @YouTube and @Instagram.

[Squawk Box @SquawkCNBC]

.@roelofbotha, who was CFO for PayPal through its IPO and sale to eBay, on why he's betting on the AI start-up @Rillet: "ERP is one of the most important categories of software — changing your ERP or accounting system is like open heart surgery." https://t.co/sKqux1tQhb

[Roelof Botha @roelofbotha]

Congratulations @nicckopp! This is a testament to the customers you are serving.

[Nicolas Kopp @nicckopp]

Today we're announcing our $100M Series C at a $1B valuation, led by @ICONIQCapital. It's our third round in 14 months and brings our total funding to over $200m

The round came together in less than 48 hours.

We weren't planning to raise. Then new ARR doubled last quarter and we crossed 600+ customers including public companies and enterprises with $2B in revenue. Rillet AI agent usage is growing 70% each month and CFOs are replacing Oracle Fusion, SAP and Workday to run their companies on Rillet.

We also announced our alliance with EY and officially partnered with more than half of the top 20 CPA firms.

@RilletHQ is creating an entirely new category of finance infrastructure. With Rillet, the ERP becomes the harness for the modern finance organization, where people and agents share the same financial data, apply the same accounting policies and controls, and work from a single, continuously updated view of the business. Agents perform increasingly complex financial work, while finance teams retain visibility, approval authority and a complete audit trail.

Thank you to our customers for believing in the mission and building the future of finance with us. We could not do this without you.

Thank you to the Rillet team. As I say often, building Rillet is our own version of sending rockets to Mars. It is incredibly difficult. You make it look easy.

Finally, thank you to our investors. To ICONIQ for leading the round and to our existing and new investors for building with us. @sequoia , @a16z, Sequoia Global Equities, @BainCapVC, @oakhcft, @BatteryVentures, @FirstMarkCap, @scalevp, and @creandum.

Back to work :)

[Roelof Botha @roelofbotha]

@bot is simple, powerful, intelligent, and fast. It has replaced my use of Claude in less than a day! And it's just getting started.

[Roelof Botha @roelofbotha]

At Outside Lands enjoying the @RufusDuSol headliner

[Roelof Botha @roelofbotha]

Good morning, Tokyo!

[Roelof Botha @roelofbotha]

At Lord's to watch the ODI between England and India. 🏏

[Roelof Botha @roelofbotha]

Game on!

[Andrew Milich @milichab]

Grok 4.5 brings frontier performance across coding and knowledge work

[Roelof Botha @roelofbotha]

Science fiction -> science fact

[Matt Krisiloff @mattkrisiloff]

I’m so excited to share this update on @Conception –

We’ve generated the first early human eggs derived from stem cells.

This is a big deal -- the potential to redefine fertility is real.

[Roelof Botha @roelofbotha]

Thanks to @parisingh and his team at @buildonfloweng. hardware development teams can now enjoy the same benefits as software teams from AI-driven development acceleration

[Flow Engineering @flowenghq]

100 Million+ Requirements are already managed in Flow across thousands of engineers building the next generation of aerospace, defense, robotics, energy, and autonomous systems.

Over the last year, we've worked alongside the world's most ambitious hardware teams to build a new way of engineering.

Agents have reached hardware.

Flow Agents continuously connect requirements, design, CAD, simulation, code, and testing, helping teams surface conflicts early, propagate changes automatically, and accelerate iteration without lowering the bar.

We're excited to share what we've been building.

Learn more here: https://t.co/D4sIuzYMB2

[jack @jack]

pay by magic

[Roelof Botha @roelofbotha]

In this era of iterative software development, the database underneath cannot be a straightjacket. @MongoDB 's flexible schema is uniquely well suited to meet the demands of AI-driven application development.

[Roelof Botha @roelofbotha]

"Vibe coding" has become a slur in many circles. It shouldn't be — many disruptive technologies arrive bottoms-up. I prefer "prompt-driven" development.

[Roelof Botha @roelofbotha]

Use AI as a sparring partner, not as a substitute https://t.co/WWEACQdNbv

[Roelof Botha @roelofbotha]

Thank you @jack and @bhalligan for the conversation to unpack how @blocks is embracing AI to fundamentally rewire organizational design. Intelligence will replace hierarchy.

[Brian Halligan @bhalligan]

NEW EPISODE: @jack & @roelofbotha unpack @blocks 40% staff cut and rebuilding the entire company as a mini-AGI.

This isn’t “use AI to make people more productive.” It’s making the company itself the intelligence.

If you’re a founder or operator wondering what work looks like in the next 5 years… this is the episode.

The evolution looks like:

• Manager mode = Pyramid 🔺 (command & control)
• Founder mode = Flat ➖(founders decide fast)
• Dorsey mode = Circle 🔵 w/ AI at the center, humans at the edge, and decisions flow from customer inputs → AI → humans steering it

I’ve tried killing org charts before. Brutally hard. But we never had these tools.

This is rewriting the CEO playbook for the AI era.

Buckle up.

00:00 Existential Dread & Hope
02:56 AI Replaces Hierarchy
07:22 Block’s New Three Roles
26:47 Flattening the Company, Fast
35:23 Getting the Board to Buy-In, Fast
36:50 Building a Great Board
41:29 Founder CEO Lessons
48:18 Second Acts & Conviction
56:22 Timeless CEO Traits

[Roelof Botha @roelofbotha]

This is a fascinating window into the future of the legal profession and shows how @harvey is leading the way. For companies that want to move from hierarchy to intelligence (https://t.co/tGwONAfKi8), this is a key insight: enable machine-readable loops throughout your organization.

[Roelof Botha @roelofbotha]

@blocks https://t.co/yqsHXzRpfp

[Roelof Botha @roelofbotha]

.@blocks is building what we think is the first real alternative to hierarchical coordination. For 2,000 years, humans have organized themselves in roughly the same way.

AI changes what’s possible: Not a flatter org chart, but a fundamentally different information architecture, organized around a world model rather than a reporting structure.

@jack and I wrote about what this looks like in practice, why it's different from past experiments, and why it may reshape how companies of all kinds organize in the coming decade.

[jack @jack]

https://t.co/jgZkBvYOPt

[jack @jack]

our lead independent director @roelofbotha and i wrote about the history of organizational structures, and our intent to rebuild block as a mini-AGI. https://t.co/emGicpn9xr

[Matthew Bromberg @MBromberg]

Folks. Can I explain something about world models? Seems like today might be a good day for that.

Advances in large-scale “world models” — whether developed by partners like Google or others — materially expand the frontier of interactive content creation. These models can generate high-quality, interactive, video-like experiences from natural language or minimal input.

Today, they are primarily editable through prompting, which limits the level of determinism and precision required for production-grade game mechanics. As a result, their outputs remain probabilistic and non-deterministic, making them unsuitable on their own for games that require consistent, repeatable player experiences.

Rather than viewing this as a risk, we see it as a powerful accelerator. Video-based generation is exactly the type of input our Agentic AI workflows are designed to leverage—translating rich visual output into initial game scenes that can then be refined with the deterministic systems Unity developers use today. Our agents already generate high-quality scenes from static video. Interactive, camera-controllable video from world models would further enhance this pipeline and materially improve the fidelity and speed of early-stage content creation. We believe this represents a meaningful step forward for AI-driven development across the industry.

Unity’s role is to operationalize these advances. Outputs from world models are ingested into Unity’s real-time engine, where they are converted into structured, deterministic, and fully controllable simulations. Within Unity, creators define physics, gameplay logic, networking, monetization, and live-operations systems to ensure consistent behavior across devices and sessions.

This combination enables developers to move faster from concept to scalable product: AI accelerates environment and asset generation, while Unity provides the execution layer that transforms generated content into reliable, monetizable experiences.

As a result, world models expand content supply and reduce development friction, while Unity remains the system of record for runtime, distribution, and long-term operations. This dynamic broadens Unity’s addressable market and reinforces its central role in the interactive ecosystem.

[Roelof Botha @roelofbotha]

Many of the most significant companies of the last two decades share a common DNA: they applied technology to essential services that had stubbornly remained offline.

From banking to transportation, the infusion of software fundamentally reshaped our daily lives. When we first met Peter Colis and Lingke Wang at the seed stage in 2017, they identified an industry overdue for this transformation: life insurance.

Despite 84% of Americans recognizing the need for coverage, the effort involved—blood draws, reams of paperwork, and month-long wait times—left millions unserved. Peter and Lingke’s vision was to make life insurance instant and frictionless, breathing technology into a massive, stagnant category.

Challenging the norms of an industry this established is a daunting task. It requires a rare level of grit. Over the last nine years, the @get_Ethos team has stayed true to that original insight, providing financial security to hundreds of thousands of families who previously lacked it.

Congratulations to Peter, Lingke, and the entire Ethos team on today’s IPO. It has been a privilege to partner with you from the beginning. Your journey is a powerful reminder of what happens when you combine a clear vision with relentless execution. $LIFE