Steven Woods

Partner / CTO at Inovia. PhD Investing in great founders. "Verified Account" when it meant something. 🇨🇦.

[Nick Frosst @nickfrosst]

If tech is going to deliver on the promise of empowerment, it needs to be fully under the control of those who use it.

Today, we announced that Cohere and Aleph Alpha are uniting to build a global AI champion that does exactly that. We are putting control of AI back in the hands of the governments, companies and people who use it.

The future of AI is sovereign.

[Alex Konrad @alexrkonrad]

News: Canada-based AI company Cohere is combining with German AI co Aleph Alpha at a reported $20B valuation.

Last week on The Upstarts Podcast, @Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez (@aidangomez) said Cohere wants to take a "friends with everyone" approach that means he turned down early investment offers from hyperscalers like Amazon, Google or Microsoft.

"Even before all this geopolitical stuff, one of the core value props of Cohere was independence," he says.

"If you're a large enterprise, you don't want to be completely locked into your cloud provider, one ecosystem, because they're just going to keep squeezing you."

[Steven Woods @sgwoods]

I've been lucky to know some sharp people. Occasionally, I get to put them in a room together.

A few weeks ago I did exactly that with Mo Cheppudira and Todd Underwood, two old friends from my time at Google who have seen frontier AI development from basically every angle.

[Inovia Capital @inovia]

Our colleague @sgwoods sat down with two old Google friends who've seen AI history from the inside. Mo Cheppudira (ex-OpenAI) and @tmu (ex-OpenAI, ex-Anthropic). Six-part series.
#AI
🔗 Full playlist in comments.

[Steven Woods @sgwoods]

These people are so lost in their rhetoric and religious fervour that its hard to fathom
. https://t.co/PSYADShoCQ

[Ilya Sutskever @ilyasut]

It’s extremely good that Anthropic has not backed down, and it’s siginficant that OpenAI has taken a similar stance.

In the future, there will be much more challenging situations of this nature, and it will be critical for the relevant leaders to rise up to the occasion, for fierce competitors to put their differences aside. Good to see that happen today.

[Steven Woods @sgwoods]

Maybe he is bombing Anthropic instead - Trump ‘not happy’ with the Iran nuclear talks but indicates he’ll give them more time https://t.co/AQ7dnd6IHs

[Mark MacLeod @markmacleod_]

Your seed round buys you runway.

Your Sleep Score buys you exits.

[Ali Asaria @aliasaria]

The wait is over. This is our big announcement. 🔥

I'm thrilled to announce the public beta of Transformer Lab for Teams—the open-source OS for modern AI research. No more fragmented workflows or legacy scripts. We’ve built the unified engine for the next generation of AI breakthroughs.

The future of research is open. Join the beta! 👇

[Steven Woods @sgwoods]

Olympic facts: Matthew Tkachuck is without a doubt the most annoying, ignorant, dirty and repulsive player in hockey today. #GoGermany #Stutzle

[Robert Youssef @rryssf]

a company just admitted on r/analytics that their ai agent has been inventing metrics for 3 months straight

their VP of sales made territory decisions on fabricated data. their CFO showed the board a deck full of numbers that never existed.

nobody noticed because the outputs looked right. confident summaries. clean percentages. decisive recommendations.

they only caught it by accident when someone asked to double-check one number.

this is the problem nobody in the ai agent space wants to talk about 👇

[Steven Woods @sgwoods]

Uh. Loony Toons https://t.co/pJcLoClZni

[𝙇𝙪𝙘𝙖𝙨 𝙂𝙖𝙡𝙤𝙧𝙚 ⛲️🌊 @FluidLucas]

Bad Bunny is killing it and this all happening at sunset there really sets the mood 😫❤️‍🔥 #SuperBowl

[Honey, Honey 🍯… @Glitterandspit]

Oh this is a beautiful show! Yes Bad Bunny !!!👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽 #SuperBowlHalftime

[Daniel Lockyer @DanielLockyer]

malware found in the top downloaded skill on clawhub

and so it begins

[Steven Woods @sgwoods]

This is just plain dumb. https://t.co/VJx4walEDg

[Josh Domingues @JoshLDomingues]

I have a $25k angel check for a Canadian founder building something cool in AI, let's see if this works.. dm's are open

[Steven Woods @sgwoods]

Seriously. Just lunacy.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔 Moltbook, the "social media for AI agents" that went viral this week, left its entire database exposed. Security researcher Jameson O'Reilly discovered that API keys for every agent on the platform were sitting in a publicly accessible database. Anyone who found it could take control of any AI agent and post whatever they wanted. OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy has an agent on the platform. His API key was exposed like everyone else's.

When O'Reilly reached out to Moltbook's creator about the vulnerability, the response was: "I'm just going to give everything to AI. So send me whatever you have."
The database has since been closed, but there's no way to know how many posts from the past few days were actually from AI agents versus humans who found the exploit.

My Take
This is the same researcher who found the Clawdbot vulnerability I wrote about last week. Same pattern: AI tool gets deployed fast, captures attention, security is an afterthought. "Ship fast, capture attention, figure out security later. Except later sometimes means after 1.49 million records are already exposed."

The New York Post worried about AI agents plotting humanity's downfall. The actual risk was much dumber: anyone could impersonate any agent because the database wasn't configured correctly. Two SQL statements would have fixed it. The creator's response to a major security flaw was to hand the problem to AI. That tells you everything about how this stuff is being built. Vibe coding plus hype plus zero security review. The agents weren't autonomously evolving. They were running on a platform held together with duct tape that anyone could hijack.

Hedgie🤗

[Steven Woods @sgwoods]

Love it from @GaryMarcus - "not everything interesting is a good idea" https://t.co/NRy6O74ogs

[jae @jaegpark]

Today, I’m excited to announce that @sentra_app has raised a $5M Seed.

This round is led by a16z @speedrun and @scaletogether, with participation from @parable_vc, @ekaurghar, @PrecursorVC, @inovia, @BackwardsCapVC, and @AntigravitySF. We also have some of the best founders and operators backing us - @gokulr, @blader, Prasad Chintamaneni, @cailen, @KaitlynKnopp and more.

@ashwingop @AndreyStarenky @alrey_ and I are tackling the unavoidable problem every growing company struggles with: context decay.

When you're 3 founders, everyone knows everything. But scale to 50 or 100 people over a few months, and it gets hard to even know everyone's names, let alone stay in sync.

People stop knowing why decisions were made. Or worse, people stop knowing what was decided at all. Context all too often stays in people's heads, never written down.

At large companies, it gets very expensive. One leader told us their engineering team wasted a month building support for a feature that another team had already deprecated–nobody told them.

Today, we try to prevent it with more documentation, more meetings, or more tools. But none of those really work. You drown in bureaucracy while tracking everything about what happened and nothing about why.

Sentra does something that wasn't possible until now: it builds a living memory of your company as work happens. Not just what was decided, but why, what alternatives were considered, and how decisions connect across teams and time.

What does that actually mean? Leaders get a weekly synthesis of where teams are drifting and what needs attention. New hires ramp in days instead of weeks because "who do I ask about X?" has an answer. Status updates and decision logs are automated–no more chasing people.

Today, Sentra’s been deployed in dozens of companies all the way from Seed stage to Global Fortune 500 enterprises.

Finally, a massive thank you to our early believers - @anneleeskates, @ekaurghar, Chuck Dietrich, Alex Yang, @tllshankar - to name a few, for their support and guidance from the earliest of days.

If you want to see what Sentra can do for your company, book a demo below.