Ideas from our partners,
founders, and industry experts

Show Filters

B2BaCEO

Enterprise

AI

Company Building

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Taking stock of the SaaSpocalypse

Ashu unpacks what this month’s software selloff is pricing in, and who stands to win as the seat model breaks.

Crypto

AI

Fintech

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

,

Gracie Zaro

The quiet crypto integration 

If you’re building in fintech and don’t consider implementing blockchain infrastructure somewhere in the stack, you’re missing out. 

B2BaCEO

Enterprise

AI

Company Building

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

The case for context graphs: With Aaron Levie (Co-founder & CEO, Box)

Aaron Levie has been on the podcast twice before. After we published our context graphs thesis, he wrote a response, so we invited him on to continue the conversation.

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Context graphs, one month in

A month ago, Jaya and I published our p.o.v. on context graphs. Since then, it’s become one of the most-discussed – and, in our opinion, most important – ideas in AI this year.

AI

Enterprise

Funding

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Jaya Gupta

Building the context graph for insurance: Why we’re doubling down on Fulcrum

Fulcrum has raised $25M to transform the insurance industry. Foundation led their seed round two years ago. Today, CRV is leading their Series A, and we’re thrilled to double down on a company that embodies everything we believe about the $4.6T services-as-software opportunity.

AI

Enterprise

News

The Information

Inside the craze around context graphs

Company Building

AI

Fintech

Crypto

Enterprise

News

Venture Capital Journal

How Foundation Capital has distributed $3bn since 2020

Crypto

Perspectives

Alejandra Martinez

,

Rodolfo Gonzalez

The era of opinionated L1s is here and Solana will win it on mobile

High performance used to be a differentiator for L1s. Now it's table stakes. The chains that win will compete on apps, users, and opinionated design.

B2BaCEO

Enterprise

AI

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

Why context graphs are the missing layer for AI

As agents move into production, the bottleneck isn't intelligence: it's context. A conversation on context graphs, decision traces, and where value will accrue.

Crypto

News

Venture Capital Journal

Venture Capital's 2026 Rising Stars

Enterprise

B2BaCEO

AI

Cyber

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Where AI is headed in 2026

Enterprise AI finally hits production. Decision traces become the new moat. An AI lab goes public. Eight predictions for AI and tech in the year ahead.

AI

Company Building

Enterprise

Funding

News

Crunchbase

What We Learned This Year From 6 Active AI Investors Backing Startups Across The Stack

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Jaya Gupta

,

Ashu Garg

AI’s trillion-dollar opportunity: Context graphs

By building context graphs from decision traces, AI agent startups are capturing the "why" behind the "what"—and gaining a structural advantage in shaping what comes next.

Company Building

Enterprise

Perspectives

Alyssa Spagnolo

Foundation Capital's Build Accelerator

For more than 30 years, Foundation Capital has backed founders at inception, long before the rest of the world believed in them. Our Build Accelerator programs extend that tradition.

Crypto

Fintech

Funding

Company Building

News

CoinDesk

YO Labs Raises $10M to Scale Cross-Chain Crypto Yield Optimization Protocol

B2BaCEO

AI

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Narrative power in the AI era

I’ve been working in AI since 2006. Back then, we were using it to build ad recommendation and speech recognition systems. Today, no one thinks of those things as AI anymore. They’re just... software.

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Great founders don’t search for markets – they manifest them

We invest in "zero billion dollar" markets: opportunities that don't exist until a founder steps in and creates them. Here's what that thesis looks like in practice.

Design

State of AI in Design

AI

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

The Future of Design in an AI World: Insights from SXSW 2025

Steve sits down with Katie Dill, head of design at Stripe, to discuss what changes when AI enters design and what skills matter most.

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

When model providers eat everything: A survival guide for Service-as-Software startups

OpenAI and Anthropic are moving up the stack fast. How do you build an enduring app-layer startup when your platform might become your competitor?

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

What it takes to build AI agents that actually work

There’s a narrative in some corners of Silicon Valley that engineering skills have suddenly become less important now that AI can write code. I believe the opposite is true: engineering knowledge matters more than ever.

Enterprise

AI

Company Building

Funding

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Announcing our investment in Viven: A personalized AI for every employee

I've known Ashutosh Garg for nearly two decades. We share the same name (he goes by Ashu) - a coincidence that's led to more than a few confused introductions over the years.

AI

Crypto

Enterprise

Company Building

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

,

Alejandra Martinez

,

Steve Vassallo

DoubleZero: Scaling distributed systems through new internet rails

Compute and storage have scaled exponentially. Network performance hasn't. DoubleZero is building new internet rails to close the gap.

Fintech

AI

Funding

Company Building

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

Building the always-on finance team: Our investment in Maximor

Finance leaders are at the heart of their business’s strategic conversations, tasked with forecasting the future, advising the CEO, and shaping major business decisions. Yet behind the scenes, their teams are trapped in a mess of manual processes and outdated tools. 

AI

Fintech

Funding

Company Building

News

Fintech Global

Maximor raises $9m to expand AI finance automation

B2BaCEO

AI

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

The new rules for startup CEOs

Startup CEOs today are caught between two realities. On the one hand, investor expectations for AI startups are sky high.

AI

Funding

Company Building

Crypto

Enterprise

Fintech

News

Crunchbase

'Zero Billion-Dollar Markets': Inside Foundation Capital’s Strategy To Back Ideas Before They’re Industries

B2BaCEO

AI

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Build Artificial Superintelligence

With Jonathan Siddharth, Co-founder and CEO, Turing

Cyber

Funding

Company Building

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Sid Trivedi

Our Investment in AegisAI: The overdue email security breakthrough

Today, AegisAI emerged from stealth to announce its next-generation email security platform and the $13M seed round Foundation Capital co-led alongside Accel.

AI

Fintech

Funding

Company Building

News

Business Insider

A second-time founder graduated from Y Combinator with a new AI financial services startup. Read her pitch deck.

AI

Company Building

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Leo Lu

The decade of centicorns: why scaling to $100B is the new normal

When intelligence becomes abundant, we won't use less of it: we'll find exponentially more things to do with it. Welcome to the age of $100B startups.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Joanne Chen

What robots can (and can’t) do in 2025

Ken Goldberg is a professor of engineering at UC Berkeley and the co-founder of Ambi Robotics, a company applying AI-enabled robotics to the logistics industry. Ken has spent over four decades working on one of the hardest problems in robotics: how machines perceive and manipulate the physical world. We spoke about why tasks that seem effortless to humans - like picking up a glass or folding laundry - are still incredibly difficult for robots.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Purpose is a verb: The case for living your purpose, not just pondering it

Every summer, I set aside time for self-reflection and reading. This summer, I've been thinking a lot about the idea of purpose. 

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Leo Lu

How AI agents will redefine market research

What if research wasn't a quarterly project but an always-on network? AI is closing the gap between "what we learned" and "what we do."

Fintech

AI

Perspectives

Nico Stainfeld

,

Zach Noorani

A new blueprint for fintech: Goodbye human data transfer, hello AI agents as human APIs

Last year, one of our portfolio founders casually mentioned what might be the most illuminating observation we’ve heard about fintech in years. "You know what I finally figured out?" he said. "Banks don't actually run on software. They run on humans pretending to be software."

Enterprise

Funding

Company Building

AI

Perspectives

Jaya Gupta

,

Ashu Garg

Leading PlayerZero’s 
Series A

The best technical founders don’t build for obvious trends: they build infrastructure for the problems those trends will create. When we led PlayerZero‘s $15M Series A, we recognized a pattern that’s defined our most successful investments: a founder who sees what’s coming before everyone else.

Company Building

Funding

Enterprise

AI

News

TechCrunch

PlayerZero raises $15M to prevent AI agents from shipping buggy code

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Reasoning + RL: A new recipe for AI apps

I explore why forward-looking AI builders have moved from RAG to reasoning + RL and share the roadmap they’re charting for others.

AI

Enterprise

Funding

Company Building

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Celebrating the launch of dltHub: AI-powered data pipelines for the software 3.0 era

The story of software is one of layered recursions. First, we wrote explicit code: line-by-line instructions for computers (software 1.0). Next, with the rise of deep learning, we trained neural networks to learn how to achieve objectives directly from data (software 2.0).

Company Building

Crypto

Enterprise

Fintech

Events

Christine Hendrickson

2025 CEO Summit

Our largest CEO gathering of the year where we brought together leaders from across Foundation’s 30-year history, from IPO veterans and serial entrepreneurs to our newest pre-seed founders.

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

The $4.6T Services-as-Software opportunity: Lessons from the first year

The real prize isn't the $200B SaaS market: it's the $4.6T enterprises spend on salaries and services. What we've learned a year into the services as software era.

Crypto

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

,

Gracie Zaro

Rewriting the way money moves with stablecoins

Moving money can now cost fractions of a penny and settle in under a second. What that means for financial services at scale.

AI

Enterprise

News

Forbes

Can Gen Z Fix Construction’s Labor Crisis? This Startup Is Betting Yes

AI

Enterprise

Funding

Company Building

News

TechCrunch

Tiny AI ERP startup Campfire is winning so many startups from NetSuite, Accel led a $35M Series A

B2BaCEO

AI

Company Building

Ashu Garg

Meta’s bet on Scale & the new AI data paradigm

I explore how the data needed to advance AI has changed, and what it will take to push AI to the next frontier.

B2BaCEO

Company Building

AI

Enterprise

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

Ion Stoica, co-founder and executive chairman of Databricks, on how to turn research into real companies

In this episode, I sit down with Ion Stoica, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and the co-founder of Conviva, Databricks, and Anyscale. Over the last two decades, Ion’s research labs - the AMP Lab, the RISE Lab, and now the Sky Computing Lab - have seeded a generation of category-defining companies.

Crypto

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

,

Nico Stainfeld

,

Steve Vassallo

3 reasons crypto will win in America

The regulatory winds have shifted. There's never been a better time to build for and with crypto in the U.S.

B2BaCEO

Company Building

AI

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

Ramesh Srinivasan, senior partner at McKinsey, shares how great leaders build empathy, resilience, and purpose

Ramesh Srinivasan, senior partner at McKinsey, shares how great leaders build empathy, resilience, and purpose

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

AI's next frontier is the agentic web

A year ago, nearly all the focus in AI circles was on the models themselves: how large they'd grown, which benchmarks they were saturating, and whether their impressive leaps in reasoning capability could continue scaling.

Design

State of AI in Design

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

The State of AI in Design: What we learned from 400+ designers

Startups are adopting AI twice as fast as large companies. What we learned from surveying 400+ designers on AI in their workflows.

Cyber

AI

Enterprise

Company Building

Events

Sid Trivedi

IT + Security RSA 2025 Happy Hour

At Foundation Capital’s 7th annual RSAC Happy Hour, we had a record-breaking turnout for an engaging fireside chat featuring Subra Kumaraswamy (CISO at Visa), Mike Elmore (CISO at G

Crypto

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

Solana at SXSW: Lessons from crypto’s fastest-growing ecosystem

Bear markets create perfect conditions for building. Raj Gokal on Solana's rise, going direct to users, and how crisis forces focus.

Design

State of AI in Design

AI

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

The tech & tools designers need to thrive in an AI world

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Three months after DeepSeek, what’s changed for AI founders?

In January, DeepSeek surprised the tech industry by releasing a model - R1 - that matched GPT-4-level performance at a fraction of the cost. The initial reaction was loud, but for anyone paying close attention, it shouldn’t have been.

Company Building

Fintech

Crypto

Perspectives

Alyssa Spagnolo

Fintech AI founders: The revolution is here - we’ll help you build it 

We've backed Lending Club, Stripe, and Solana. Now we're launching an accelerator for the next generation of AI-native fintech founders.

AI

AI in the Real World

Enterprise

Podcasts

Jaya Gupta

The promise of State Space Models - Karan Goel (Co-founder & CEO of Cartesia)

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Jaya Gupta sits down with Karan Goel, co-founder and CEO of Cartesia, a company pioneering the use of state space models (SSMs) for AI applications.

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

NVIDIA’s "AI Factory" Bet

I break down NVIDIA’s push to own the full AI stack - from silicon to software - and explore what it means for startups building in the era of agentic AI.

Crypto

Funding

News

Fortune

How Jump and Solana vets are building a hyper fast internet for blockchains

B2BaCEO

Company Building

AI

Cyber

Enterprise

Fintech

Crypto

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Thirty years of betting on day zero

I reflect on Foundation's three decades of conviction-based investing, and why our Fund 11 marks our deepest commitment yet to early-stage founders.

Funding

Company Building

Fintech

Enterprise

Crypto

Cyber

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Announcing our Fund 11: A new $600M fund in support of our enduring commitment to founders

We share a legacy of constant reinvention, of standing alongside singular individuals who pull the future into the present. As a 30-year-old firm, we've lived through - and helped shape - the Valley's most important inflection points: the dot-com era, social media's rise, cloud computing, mobile, crypto, and AI.

Funding

Company Building

Crypto

Cyber

Enterprise

Fintech

AI

News

TechCrunch

Foundation Capital, an early backer of Solana and Cerebras, raises $600M fund

AI

Enterprise

Funding

News

TechCrunch

Regie.ai injects sales enablement with AI, but keeps humans in the loop

Fintech

AI

Perspectives

Nico Stainfeld

AI-Driven Innovation: Opportunities for Startups in Financial Compliance and Risk Management 

AI is changing how financial institutions handle risk and compliance. We talked to execs across the industry to map where startups can win.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Jaya Gupta

Building the next generation of AI models: Rohan Taori | Researcher at Anthropic & Alpaca co-creator

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Jaya Gupta sits down with Rohan Taori, a researcher on Anthropic's multimodal pre-training team.

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

DeepSeek shows that AI’s future turns on ingenuity, not just scale

The shift from brute-force AI spending to smart, systems-level design is here.

Company Building

Enterprise

Fintech

Crypto

Funding

Design

AI

News

Sand Hill Road

Why does Steve Vassallo of Foundation Capital choose to invest early?

AI

AI in the Real World

Cyber

Podcasts

Sid Trivedi

Securing AI systems against adversarial attacks - Chris 'Tito' Sestito (Co-founder, CEO HiddenLayer)

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Sid Trivedi speaks to Chris "Tito" Sestito, the co-founder and CEO of HiddenLayer.

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

The paradox of self-building agents: teaching AI to teach itself

BabyAGI creator Yohei Nakajima on the opportunities and challenges of self-building agents, and why developing them is a lot like managing an intern.

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Company Building

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Solve AI-Powered Search (Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean)

In this episode, I spoke to Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean. After helping build Google's search infrastructure and co-founding Rubrik (which recently hit $1B in revenue), Arvind launched Glean to solve the problem of enterprise search and help employees enhance their work with AI agents.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Ten predictions for tech and AI in 2025

I reflect on tech's 2024 milestones and chart what lies ahead in 2025.

News

Charles Moldow

Celebrating a Remarkable Milestone: EvolutionIQ has been acquired by CCC Intelligent Solutions for $730 million

I am thrilled to announce the successful sale of Foundation Capital Fund 9 and Leadership Fund 3 portfolio company EvolutionIQ. This is a huge moment for co-founders Mike Saltzman, Jonathan Lewin, Tomas Vykruta, and the exceptional team at EvolutionIQ, and we’re proud to have played a part in their journey. 

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Joanne Chen

How generative AI changes software development - Melody Meckfessel, CTO, Jasper

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital General Partner Joanne Chen speaks with Melody Meckfessel, the CTO of Jasper.

Events

Joanne Chen

,

Jaya Gupta

5 takeaways from the AI Unconference

Exactly two years after ChatGPT’s launch, AI is reshaping every industry.

News

Christine Hendrickson

2024 AI Unconference

More than 100 researchers, founders, and builders gathered for small-group discussions about the biggest ideas in AI.

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

How Systems of Agents will collapse the enterprise stack

SAP, Oracle, and Salesforce, beware. Systems of agents are eating four decades' worth of enterprise tech.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Has AI scaling hit a limit?

On the eve of ChatGPT’s second birthday, I examine the fault lines in one of the field's most powerful assumptions.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Leo Lu

Marketing's self-driving moment: Systems of Agents will put an industry on autopilot

Today, AI is marketing's copilot. In the future, two interacting agent systems—one for content creation, one for distribution—will put marketing on autopilot.

News

Nico Stainfeld

Banking's New Tech Stack: A market map of generative AI in financial services

Over the past few weeks, we've explored how generative AI is transforming every stage of the banking lifecycle. We began with customer acquisition and onboarding, examining how AI is helping banks convert and serve new customers more efficiently. We then turned to customer engagement and collections, where AI is deepening digital relationships and making traditionally costly processes into opportunities for relationship recovery.

Perspectives

Nico Stainfeld

From Transactions to Trust: How generative AI helps banks build deeper customer relationships

The digital profitability gap is one of banks' most pressing challenges. AI offers a path from shallow transactions to deeper trust.

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to rewrite the rules of ‘Founder Mode’

Frank Slootman, former Snowflake CEO, shakes up the ‘Founder Mode’ debate

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

Frank Slootman rewrites the rules of ‘Founder Mode’

With Frank Slootman, former CEO of Snowflake

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Nico Stainfeld

Winning the First Impression: How generative AI can improve acquisition, onboarding, and underwriting

80% of banking data is unstructured and sitting idle. AI can now unlock it for richer customer profiles and personalized experiences at scale.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Jaya Gupta

A System of Agents brings service as software to life

Software is no longer a tool for organizing work: it's becoming the worker itself. How builders can tap into the $4.6T services as software opportunity.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Nico Stainfeld

Banking Reimagined: How generative AI reshapes the customer banking journey

Banks today struggle with two seemingly incompatible realities: stubbornly low customer satisfaction and high service costs. They've invested massive amounts of time and capital in technology to help. Has it worked? Will it?

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Why OpenAI's $157B valuation misreads AI's future

I break down the logic behind the company's towering price tag and why I think the most valuable AI companies have yet to be built.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Steve Vassallo

The Path Forward for Multimodal AI with Darius Lam, Founder and CEO of NEX

Welcome to AI in the Real World! I'm Andrew Han, a partner at Foundation Capital, and I'll be your host today. I work closely with technical founders who are building software to solve hard, valuable problems.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Adapt and Win in Enterprise Software

Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, has guided the cloud content management platform from a dorm room project into a publicly traded company with over $1B in annual revenue. In his second appearance on B2BaCEO, Aaron reflects on his founder journey, sharing how Box capitalized on cloud computing and their recent push to integrate generative AI.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Leo Lu

,

Jaya Gupta

Overhauling logistics with AI: a $79 billion opportunity

LLMs and computer vision will knock out manual logistics tasks, from price quoting to packing automation. 

News

Sid Trivedi

Our Investment in Prime Security: Turbocharging Product Security Teams

Today, Prime Security emerged from stealth to introduce the public beta of its Prime Product Security Platform and the $6M seed round led by Foundation Capital. We were the first investor in Prime Security, and I’ve personally been on the board of directors since inception, working closely with the founders for several months before incubating the company at the beginning of this year.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

Founding-Employee fit: know who to hire when 

I recently wrote about founder-market fit—where a founder must authentically understand themselves, their company, and the market conditions in which they’re building. Success here comes from knowing yourself and how you want to (and need to!) run your business given the situation your company is in. 

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

To scale to $100M ARR, "Owner Mode" beats "Founder Mode"

I weigh in on the recent debate and outline a third path - “owner mode” - that allows startups to scale without losing what makes them special.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

Founder-Market fit: knowing yourself leads to success 

Recently, I was listening to a podcast from the Yale admissions office where the hosts discussed the importance of students expressing their authentic selves in applications. In many essays, students try to represent themselves as what they think the admissions office wants—but application reviewers are able to sniff this out pretty clearly, and that can lead to an unsuccessful outcome. 

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

Shock-proofing supply chain with AI: a $62 billion opportunity

With core segments of the supply chain technologically underserved, we see massive potential in three areas.

News

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

A battle-tested founder tackles security for AI

Foundation Capital’s investment in Acuvity combines two of the firm’s most deeply-held convictions.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

The AI Hype: $600B question or $4.6T+ opportunity?

As summer draws to a close, a familiar debate has reignited with renewed intensity. Are we witnessing the dawn of a new technological era? Or are we caught in yet another tech bubble?

News

Ashu Garg

Leading NEX’s $3.5M seed round: Next-generation visual foundation models

I met Darius Lam for the first time over ramen in Mountain View. Within minutes of meeting him, it was clear that he was a razor sharp technologist and had an endlessly enthusiastic, infectious energy about him. 

Perspectives

Jaya Gupta

,

Ashu Garg

The Observability Crisis

We've inadvertently created a maze of complexity and cost in observability. How did this happen?

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

Goodbye AIOps: welcome AgentSREs—the next $100B opportunity

 We've seen countless buzzwords come and go. "AIOps" is the latest in a long line of catchy but ultimately misguided terms that fail to capture the true potential of AI  in the world of IT ops and observability.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Steve Vassallo

Building the World's Fastest AI Chip with Cerebras Systems' Co-founder and CTO Sean Lie

Welcome to "AI in the Real World." I'm Steve Vassallo, a General Partner at Foundation Capital. In this series, we talk with leading AI researchers about their groundbreaking work and how it's being applied in real businesses today.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Reflections on 16 years in venture capital

Goodbye AIOps: welcome AgentSREs—the next $100B opportunity

Enterprise

Perspectives

Jaya Gupta

Docket: from idea to investment in 20 days 

A serendipitous meeting with a serial entrepreneur led to a bet on Docket, one of Foundation's speediest investments to date.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Joanne Chen

What's Next After Transformers

I talk with Recursal AI founder Eugene Cheah about RWKV, a new architecture for AI.

News

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

A Silver Age of AI innovation

AI advances have converged with a massive global demographic shift to lift senior health tech.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

3 breakthroughs driving AI forward, from Regie.ai founder Srinath Sridhar

3 breakthroughs driving AI forward, from Regie.ai founder Srinath Sridhar

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Databricks vs. Snowflake: What their rivalry reveals about AI's future

I explore the competition between these two data powerhouses and what it says about where enterprise AI is headed.

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

Beyond LLMs: Building magic

These 3 innovations will drive the next wave of AI.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Build a Multi-Billion-Dollar Software Business

With Mohit Aron, Founder of Cohesity

Enterprise

News

Sid Trivedi

Our investment in AirMDR: Closing the cyber inequity gap

A product and GTM strategy discussion with Kumar Saurabh and Foundation Capital Partner Sid Trivedi in Palo Alto.

Perspectives

Foundation Capital

Call for applications: AI startups ready to boost developer productivity

We’re partnering with Turing to look for startups that can truly enhance engineering productivity with AI—not theoretically, but today. 

News

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Cerebras lands on the TIME100 Most Influential Companies list 

Andrew Feldman explains an extremely difficult problem in relatively simple terms. He’s the Co-Founder and CEO of Cerebras, which develops specialized hardware and software systems to advance AI workloads. 

Enterprise

Perspectives

Sid Trivedi

Our investment in Stacklet: building cloud that scales

Foundation Capital Partner Sid Trivedi, with Travis Stanfield and Kapil Thangavelu on their first Stacklet trip to San Francisco in July 2021.

B2BaCEO

News

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Graduating from Series A: How to get to $10M ARR

I unpack the second phase of startup growth: scaling from $1M to $10M ARR. I break down its two main steps: evolving from founder to founder-CEO and transforming GTM into a well-oiled machine.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Joanne Chen

The Promise of Multi-Agent AI

In this post, I share learnings from my conversation with Chi Wang, a principal researcher at Microsoft and the creator of AutoGen.

Events

Sid Trivedi

IT + Security RSA 2024 Happy Hour

San Francisco felt more like NYC as over 50,000 attendees descended downtown for the RSA Conference.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

Samsara's Co-Founder Sanjit Biswas on How to Grow from Ph.D. to Two-Time Startup CEO

Sanjit and I discuss his journey from grad student researcher to the founder of two major startup successes: Samsara, which recently hit $1B in ARR, and Meraki, acquired by Cisco for $1.2B.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Where AI is Headed in 2025: A Builder’s Guide

It’s no longer just about training bigger and bigger models. I chart the growing shifts toward inference and compound AI systems and explain what they mean for founders.

Enterprise

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Jaya Gupta

AI leads a service as software paradigm shift

AI's push into the services market represents a $4.6 trillion opportunity.

News

Ashu Garg

Anvilogic's breakout moment: A founder's tenacity pays off

Cybersecurity startup Anvilogic faced plenty of hurdles. Thanks to a tenacious founder and pointers from Foundation Capital, the company is set to break out, announcing a momentous $45 million in Series C funding.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Nico Stainfeld

The New Fintech Frontier

​Financial services businesses are particularly sensitive to the macro environment—when the raw material is capital, the engine can shut off in a flash. In 2023, interest rates rose, inflation increased, and general economic uncertainty led to a correction of valuations and a general feeling of caution by most investors. 

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

How to go from $0 to $1M ARR

Bringing a startup idea to life is rarely a linear journey. Instead, it’s an iterative process of discovery, validation, and refinement—less like following a neat roadmap and more like trying to find your way to the center of a tornado. 

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Win Your First Enterprise Customer

My guest today is Doug Winter, the founder and CEO of Seismic, a leading enterprise sales enablement platform. Today, Seismic has a team of 1,500 people and nearly $400 million in recurring revenue.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Jaya Gupta

Beyond RPA: How LLMs are ushering in a new era of intelligent process automation

At its core, every business is a collection of processes. From lead generation and customer acquisition to financial planning and procurement, these processes are interconnected, with the outputs of one providing the inputs for another. As a business grows, so does its number of processes, creating an intricate network of data flows and dependencies.

News

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

Leading Tennr’s $3.25M Seed Round: An Investment in Founders

Foundation Capital invests in amazing founders. Over the course of eight months, we watched Tennr’s founders iterate, learn, and execute—resulting in us leading the company’s $3.25M seed round.

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

$100M in ARR is the best north star for startup success. Here's how founders can get there.

I revisit the storied "unicorn" status, now a decade old. I propose a more rigorous benchmark for startup success, $100M in ARR, and outline the concrete steps that founders can take to reach it.

Perspectives

Foundation Capital

Why 2024 Will Be the Year of Inference

If 2023 was the year of large language model (LLM) training, we believe 2024 will be all about LLM inference — developers taking models and putting them into production for real-world applications.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Joanne Chen

The Future of Generative AI Agents

In the coming months, I’ll be hosting a series of in-depth conversations with leading AI researchers where we’ll explore how state-of-the-art models are being applied in the real world.

News

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Cohesity: winning the $40B+ data security & management market

Cohesity announced its intent to merge with the data protection business from secure, multi-cloud data management platform Veritas—giving enterprises a unified platform to manage and extract insights from data using AI.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Gracie Zaro

Where is All the Differentiation in Fintech x AI?

With large sums of venture money pouring into anything “AI” (just check out YC’s winter 2024 batch), we have a growing number of copilots, agents, APIs and foundational models serving any given vertical. Name the point solution and you’ll likely find a swath of options promising to improve efficiency and insight.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Nico Stainfeld

From Idea to Integration: Four Steps for Founders Integrating AI

Advances in Generative AI have unlocked an explosion of AI use-cases, making shiny-object syndrome a real concern for founders. This challenges founders to filter through a mountain of ideas to identify the use-cases that align with business goals and constraints.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Ten AI Insights from Databricks, Anyscale, and Microsoft

I journey through the B2BaCEO archive and surface ten AI learnings from some of my most influential guests.

Perspectives

Sid Trivedi

Our Investment in Neurelo: Making Databases Easy Again

Today, Neurelo emerged from stealth to announce the general availability of its cloud data API platform and the $5M seed round that we led.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Nico Stainfeld

A Framework for Identifying High-Impact AI Use Cases with Tennr

At our Fintech x AI PortCo Summit, Trey Holterman, co-founder and CEO of Tennr, shared a practical framework for thinking through exactly these types of challenges. Drawing on the team at Tennr's expertise in leveraging AI to automate complex tasks, Trey's framework empowers founders to evaluate and select high-value AI use cases.

Enterprise

News

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Investing in Infield: Dependency Management on Autopilot 

Today, we are excited to announce Infield’s $3M seed funding, and the general availability of its dependency management platform across Javascript, Python, Typescript, and Ruby (with Java coming soon)! Infield is solving a complex and growing (but often overlooked) problem for software engineers — and we're thrilled to lead its seed round and share Infield with the world today.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Decoding AGI

I explain why we need to understand this technology before we rush to regulate it. I share insights from my conversation with AI pioneer Naveen Rao on the path to achieving it.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Shape the Future of AI

My guest this month is Naveen Rao, the co-founder of MosaicML and current head of generative AI at Databricks.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

A technical history of blockchain design, innovation, and narratives: Part III

In the previous installment of our three-part history of blockchain innovation, we explored how Ethereum introduced programmability, Proof of Stake, and a flurry of new energy to blockchain. In the last part of the series, we’ll discuss Solana’s origins, accomplishments, and our expectations for it as the leading next-generation chain. We’ll then wrap up the series by weighing Solana versus Ethereum and reflecting on the space as a whole.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

A technical history of blockchain design, innovation, and narratives: Part II

In the first part of this three-part series on blockchain’s evolution across networks, we dove into what influences these evolutions, what technical innovations led to Bitcoin’s broader market adoption and dominance as a store-of-value L1, and what Bitcoin’s hallmarks mean for its future. In this part, we’ll do the same for Ethereum. Specifically, what distinguishes it from Bitcoin, the trade-offs to its technological leaps, and the implications this has for builders in its ecosystem.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

A technical history of blockchain design, innovation, and narratives: Part I

This historical analysis helps new founders decide where to build by exploring each network’s technical innovations in their historical context. Foundation Capital has been investing in — and rooting for — this space for ten years. Our deep, long-term involvement means we’ve developed a time-tested view of how major L1s have achieved their current dominance and how their initial technical accomplishments will define them going forward.

Perspectives

Jaya Gupta

,

Ashu Garg

Year One of Generative AI: Six Key Trends

Just over one year has passed since the release of ChatGPT. In the intervening twelve-odd months, it’s become abundantly clear that generative AI represents a fundamental platform shift.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

Celebrating Rover's Acquisition by Blackstone

Today we celebrate Rover's acquisition by Blackstone for a remarkable $2.3 billion. It is not just a victory for employees and shareholders but a testament to the vision and resilience of an outstanding management team combined with the power of a high-functioning marketplace.

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Is OpenAI the Next Netscape?

This weekend was one to remember for those actively invested in the future of AI. In this special edition of B2BaCEO, I’ll summarize what unfolded (as of Monday, November 20 at 5 pm PT).

Steve Vassallo

A New “Golden Age” for Alternative Lending

As the market tentatively rebounds from rate hikes and inflationary pressures, a major opportunity is emerging in LendingTech—a field that many of you, our readers and partners, have been journeying with us. Lenders today face a new reality—one where innovation isn't just a buzzword but a survival kit. 

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Incumbents vs. Startups: The Showdown Over Generative AI

I explore the debate over who benefits most from generative AI—incumbents or startups—and share where I think startups have an edge. I then dive deeper with a leading AI founder, Robert Nishihara.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Power the AI Boom

In this episode of B2BaCEO, I speak with Robert Nishihara, co-founder and CEO of Anyscale. Anyscale’s aspiration is to build the fastest, most cost-efficient infrastructure for running LLMs and AI workloads. When it is successful, Anyscale will be to the AI era what Microsoft was for the PC era: the underlying operating system on which all AI applications are developed and run.

Perspectives

Foundation Capital

The Data Hub and Spoke: Data Infrastructure “3.0” for the Age of Generative AI

Over the past decade, the term “modern data stack” has come into prominence with the rise of cloud-native software and an increasingly smart, connected world.

AI

News

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

Beyond Doomsday: Why AI Promises a Brighter Future

This fall, I had the honor of speaking at TEDx about the immense promise I see in artificial intelligence.

AI

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Why Generative AI Needs Design

Mention generative AI in a crowded room, and reactions fall somewhere on a spectrum from worry to wonder. Venture capitalists—particularly those like me who work with founders at the very first stages of company creation—are fond of saying that we’re still in the “early days” of a technology’s life cycle.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

A Founder's Guide to 2024 Planning

I advise founders on planning for 2024 amid intensely troubling world events. I recap my discussion with Matei Zaharia of Databricks at our Enterprise CEO Dinner. I spotlight our NY Tech Week event.

Fintech

AI

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Nico Stainfeld

Fintech x AI: Practical Lessons for Founders

Since the start of the year, a common question has come up in our conversations with portfolio companies: “I know that I should be using AI, but how do I get started, and where should I focus my efforts?” To address this, we organized our first “Fintech x AI Portco summit” this summer.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Build, Scale, and Sell a Startup

My guest this month is Tracy Young, the co-founder and former CEO of PlanGrid, a productivity tool for construction companies. From going through YC and losing a cofounder to cancer, to being acquired by Autodesk for $875 million, Tracy has picked up many valuable lessons that other founders and CEOs can learn from.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

My Reflections on My Summer in India's Silicon Valley

I explain why the enterprise software industry will revolve around two poles—Silicon Valley and Bangalore—by 2030. I podcast with Tracy Young, co-founder of TigerEye and PlanGrid. And more!

AI

Fintech

Christine Hendrickson

Fintech x AI PortCo Summit

On June 28th, 2023, we hosted our Fintech x AI PortCo Summit to help executives across the Foundation Capital Portfolio answer the question “What should I be doing about AI?”

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

How Perplexity.ai Is Pioneering The Future Of Search

For the past two decades, search engines like Google and Bing have been our primary gateways to the internet. Yet, over time, their signature “10 blue links” have been increasingly buried by advertisements and algorithm-optimized content. Driven by ad-based revenue models, these sites often feel more like auctioneers of users’ attention than trustworthy guides to the World Wide Web.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

B2BaCEO: August 2023 Newsletter

I share anecdotal learnings and unpack three industry reports on the state of generative AI adoption. I plug my latest post on the enterprise LLM workflow. I introduce our new EIR, Mahmoud Arram.

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

The Momento Moment: Bringing Next-Gen Auto Insurance to Mexico

Today we’re announcing our investment in Momento Seguros, a new full-stack auto-insurance carrier for Mexico. Memento is bringing the digital-first offering that consumers in other emerging markets already enjoy and expect across verticals. 

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

The Mexican Auto Insurance Market

We’ve announced our investment in Momento Seguros, a new fullstack auto carrier for Mexico. Here, we share more about our investment thesis on the market landscape for others considering building / investing in this exciting space.

AI

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

Applying Generative AI to Enterprise Use Cases: A Step-by-Step Guide

When it comes to generative AI, the only thing that’s constant is the speed at which this technology is changing. Over the past few months, we’ve spoken in-depth with a diverse range of builders and technologists who are exploring generative AI.

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Faster, Better, More: An Open Letter to the Federal Reserve

Dear Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Congratulations on your recent launch of the FedNow System for instant payments! Government support has been an important component to the success of faster payments across the world, including India’s United Payments Interface (UPI), Brazil’s PIX, and the UK’s Faster Payment System. But merely lending your support is insufficient. 

Events

Foundation Capital

Super-Secret Fintech Dinners

Sign up here to request an invitation to our hush-hush fintech dinner series. Each month — at different, cool locations in SF or NYC — we’ll be hosting a small, curated gathering of founders and operators who are redefining financial innovation.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

B2BaCEO: July 2023 Newsletter

I weigh in on the contest between Databricks and Snowflake, as each vies to own the end-to-end enterprise AI workflow. In short: It’s data all the way down.

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

,

Alejandra Martinez

Clivi: Managing Chronic Diseases in Latin America

Our strategy for investing in LatAm is defined by two core ideas: (1) backing the most ambitious founders, and (2) backing projects leveraging the rapid penetration of Internet-connected smartphones to build massive user bases via tech-driven business models.

AI

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

Top Takeaways from Our Generative AI “Unconference”

In early May, we hosted our inaugural, invite-only Generative AI “Unconference” in San Francisco. The event convened over eighty of the top (human!) minds in AI, including founders, researchers, and industry experts, for an energizing afternoon of group discussions about building successful AI companies

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

AI x Blockchain: The Next Level

Blockchain and artificial intelligence: the two most era-defining technologies of our time. Each has been a mighty, groundshifting force in its own right, like Godzilla and King Kong in their respective domains. But from time to time, Kong and Godzilla have teamed up when facing a monster that neither could take down on their own.

B2BaCEO

AI

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

B2BaCEO Newsletter: June 2023

I share takeaways from FC's inaugural Generative AI "Unconference." I announce our Generative AI 25 list! I share my latest pod with AI pioneer Matei Zaharia. I debrief our event at AGI House.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Deploy AI in Your Company

If you’re not hardcore about AI, then stop the podcast now — because this episode for real technology nerds. Ashu’s guest is Matei Zaharia, CTO and cofounder of Databricks, and a professor of computer science at Stanford University.

Perspectives

Nico Stainfeld

,

Charles Moldow

The Emperor Has No Tech: Why the Insurance Industry Desperately Needs Startups

When Lloyd's of London faced the unique challenge of insuring a million-pound reward offered by a Scottish whisky firm for the capture of the Loch Ness Monster or protecting the precious legs of 1940s starlet Betty Grable, they turned to their underwriters to assess the risk and determine an appropriate premium to charge.

Events

Foundation Capital

Generative AI Unconference

On May 10th, 2023, we hosted our inaugural, invite-only Generative AI “Unconference” in San Francisco. The event convened over eighty of the top (human!) minds in AI, including founders, researchers, and industry experts, for an energizing afternoon of small, group discussions about building successful AI companies.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

The State of Enterprise AI Adoption

I explore two major AI reports and weigh in on a leaked Google memo. I offer three takeaways from this year’s RSA conference. I share my conversation with Microsoft’s Chief Strategy Officer.

Events

Christine Hendrickson

AI Unconference

On May 10th, 2023, we hosted our inaugural, invite-only Generative AI “Unconference” in San Francisco.

Events

Sid Trivedi

IT + Security RSA 2023 Happy Hour

This year, RSA, the world’s leading cybersecurity conference, was back with a bang. Over 40,000 people attended: a more than 50% increase from last year.

Perspectives

Foundation Capital

Collaboration as Competitive Strategy

What the heck is this in my inbox, you might be asking, yet another piece of content marketing? Why yes! This is the first installment of Foundation Capital’s new quarterly fintech newsletter. Our aim is for this mass mailer to be roughly 19% more nutritious and to the point than the usual flotsam. 

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Capture the AI Moment

As everyone listening to this podcast knows, the release of ChatGPT last November ushered in a new age of AI and catalyzed a wave of AI startups. For this episode of B2BaCEO, Ashu goes deep on AI with Bobby Yerramilli-Rao, former serial entrepreneur and investor, and current Chief Strategy Officer at Microsoft.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Software ate the world. Now AI is coming for software.

Software ate the world. Now AI is coming for software. I chart three implications of this paradigm shift. I give a primer on large graphical models (LGMs). And I recap my partner Sid’s SXSW discussion with cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch.

Events

Sid Trivedi

Digital Warfare with One of the World's Greatest Hackers

Last month, amid the chaos of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, my friend Dmitri Alperovitch and I found ourselves preparing to take the stage at SXSW. Our topic was another mounting, yet rarely discussed, threat: digital warfare. 

Perspectives

Foundation Capital

Passion, Purpose, and Conviction: Why I’m Joining Foundation Capital

One of my childhood heroes, the legendary Gordon Moore, passed away at the end of March. Moore, who co-founded Intel and developed the eponymous law on microchip innovation, was among the most influential builders and thinkers in Silicon Valley. His contributions to semiconductor technology helped give the Valley its name. In many ways, I have him to thank for where I am now. 

Perspectives

Foundation Capital

Cash Management for Startups

The events of March 2023 will change the way many startup companies think about managing their cash. Our recommendations are simple, and they are not unique.

Fintech

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

A Local’s Guide to Fintech Investing

Over the past five years, everyone could—and did!—make money in fintech investing. When valuations are skyrocketing, and seed to Series A graduation rates are approaching 100%, even the greenest investor can look like a genius.

Perspectives

Jaya Gupta

,

Ashu Garg

Foundation Model Ops: Powering the Next Wave of Generative AI Apps

Late last year, we published our framework for the enterprise AI stack and gestured toward the potential of foundation models to advance innovation at each of its layers, from AI-optimized hardware, compute, and cloud on up.

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Internet HQ

In 2019, only six percent of workers in the U.S. worked from home, and 75 percent had never done so. By fall 2020, around 54 percent of employed Americans were remote at least some of the time.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

FC's Generative AI Challenge

At Foundation Capital, we’ve long had conviction that AI will be one of the defining technologies of our time: the catalyst for a new generation of software and, with it, a new generation of businesses.

Perspectives

Sid Trivedi

Our Investment in DevZero: Taking Developers to Cloud Nine

Having been on DevZero’s board of directors since day one, I wanted to offer a few thoughts on their product, why we invested, how we partnered, and the road ahead.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

B2BaCEO: Newsletter, January 2023

I share AI predictions from CEOs of AI companies. I interview the one and only Frank Slootman. I introduce you to my partner Angus, a born entrepreneur. And I lay out Foundation Capital’s new enterprise AI stack.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Grow in a Bear Market

Beerud Sheth is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gupshup, a leading platform for cloud messaging. Prior to that he was the cofounder of what is now Upwork, a pioneer of online freelancing and remote work. Beerud took the slow and steady pace to winning the race, building two unicorns over 25 years.

News

LA Venture

LA Venture: Zach Noorani

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

The Realm of Venture c. 2014

2015 is already off to a rip roaring start whether it’s holograms or drones or virtual reality, the trade winds of tech continue to blow at high speed.

B2BaCEO

Enterprise

AI

Company Building

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Taking stock of the SaaSpocalypse

Ashu unpacks what this month’s software selloff is pricing in, and who stands to win as the seat model breaks.

Crypto

AI

Fintech

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

,

Gracie Zaro

The quiet crypto integration 

If you’re building in fintech and don’t consider implementing blockchain infrastructure somewhere in the stack, you’re missing out. 

B2BaCEO

Enterprise

AI

Company Building

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

The case for context graphs: With Aaron Levie (Co-founder & CEO, Box)

Aaron Levie has been on the podcast twice before. After we published our context graphs thesis, he wrote a response, so we invited him on to continue the conversation.

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Context graphs, one month in

A month ago, Jaya and I published our p.o.v. on context graphs. Since then, it’s become one of the most-discussed – and, in our opinion, most important – ideas in AI this year.

AI

Enterprise

Funding

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Jaya Gupta

Building the context graph for insurance: Why we’re doubling down on Fulcrum

Fulcrum has raised $25M to transform the insurance industry. Foundation led their seed round two years ago. Today, CRV is leading their Series A, and we’re thrilled to double down on a company that embodies everything we believe about the $4.6T services-as-software opportunity.

AI

Enterprise

News

The Information

Inside the craze around context graphs

Company Building

AI

Fintech

Crypto

Enterprise

News

Venture Capital Journal

How Foundation Capital has distributed $3bn since 2020

Crypto

Perspectives

Alejandra Martinez

,

Rodolfo Gonzalez

The era of opinionated L1s is here and Solana will win it on mobile

High performance used to be a differentiator for L1s. Now it's table stakes. The chains that win will compete on apps, users, and opinionated design.

B2BaCEO

Enterprise

AI

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

Why context graphs are the missing layer for AI

As agents move into production, the bottleneck isn't intelligence: it's context. A conversation on context graphs, decision traces, and where value will accrue.

Crypto

News

Venture Capital Journal

Venture Capital's 2026 Rising Stars

Enterprise

B2BaCEO

AI

Cyber

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Where AI is headed in 2026

Enterprise AI finally hits production. Decision traces become the new moat. An AI lab goes public. Eight predictions for AI and tech in the year ahead.

AI

Company Building

Enterprise

Funding

News

Crunchbase

What We Learned This Year From 6 Active AI Investors Backing Startups Across The Stack

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Jaya Gupta

,

Ashu Garg

AI’s trillion-dollar opportunity: Context graphs

By building context graphs from decision traces, AI agent startups are capturing the "why" behind the "what"—and gaining a structural advantage in shaping what comes next.

Company Building

Enterprise

Perspectives

Alyssa Spagnolo

Foundation Capital's Build Accelerator

For more than 30 years, Foundation Capital has backed founders at inception, long before the rest of the world believed in them. Our Build Accelerator programs extend that tradition.

Crypto

Fintech

Funding

Company Building

News

CoinDesk

YO Labs Raises $10M to Scale Cross-Chain Crypto Yield Optimization Protocol

B2BaCEO

AI

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Narrative power in the AI era

I’ve been working in AI since 2006. Back then, we were using it to build ad recommendation and speech recognition systems. Today, no one thinks of those things as AI anymore. They’re just... software.

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Great founders don’t search for markets – they manifest them

We invest in "zero billion dollar" markets: opportunities that don't exist until a founder steps in and creates them. Here's what that thesis looks like in practice.

Design

State of AI in Design

AI

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

The Future of Design in an AI World: Insights from SXSW 2025

Steve sits down with Katie Dill, head of design at Stripe, to discuss what changes when AI enters design and what skills matter most.

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

When model providers eat everything: A survival guide for Service-as-Software startups

OpenAI and Anthropic are moving up the stack fast. How do you build an enduring app-layer startup when your platform might become your competitor?

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

What it takes to build AI agents that actually work

There’s a narrative in some corners of Silicon Valley that engineering skills have suddenly become less important now that AI can write code. I believe the opposite is true: engineering knowledge matters more than ever.

Enterprise

AI

Company Building

Funding

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Announcing our investment in Viven: A personalized AI for every employee

I've known Ashutosh Garg for nearly two decades. We share the same name (he goes by Ashu) - a coincidence that's led to more than a few confused introductions over the years.

AI

Crypto

Enterprise

Company Building

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

,

Alejandra Martinez

,

Steve Vassallo

DoubleZero: Scaling distributed systems through new internet rails

Compute and storage have scaled exponentially. Network performance hasn't. DoubleZero is building new internet rails to close the gap.

Fintech

AI

Funding

Company Building

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

Building the always-on finance team: Our investment in Maximor

Finance leaders are at the heart of their business’s strategic conversations, tasked with forecasting the future, advising the CEO, and shaping major business decisions. Yet behind the scenes, their teams are trapped in a mess of manual processes and outdated tools. 

AI

Fintech

Funding

Company Building

News

Fintech Global

Maximor raises $9m to expand AI finance automation

B2BaCEO

AI

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

The new rules for startup CEOs

Startup CEOs today are caught between two realities. On the one hand, investor expectations for AI startups are sky high.

AI

Funding

Company Building

Crypto

Enterprise

Fintech

News

Crunchbase

'Zero Billion-Dollar Markets': Inside Foundation Capital’s Strategy To Back Ideas Before They’re Industries

B2BaCEO

AI

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Build Artificial Superintelligence

With Jonathan Siddharth, Co-founder and CEO, Turing

Cyber

Funding

Company Building

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Sid Trivedi

Our Investment in AegisAI: The overdue email security breakthrough

Today, AegisAI emerged from stealth to announce its next-generation email security platform and the $13M seed round Foundation Capital co-led alongside Accel.

AI

Fintech

Funding

Company Building

News

Business Insider

A second-time founder graduated from Y Combinator with a new AI financial services startup. Read her pitch deck.

AI

Company Building

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Leo Lu

The decade of centicorns: why scaling to $100B is the new normal

When intelligence becomes abundant, we won't use less of it: we'll find exponentially more things to do with it. Welcome to the age of $100B startups.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Joanne Chen

What robots can (and can’t) do in 2025

Ken Goldberg is a professor of engineering at UC Berkeley and the co-founder of Ambi Robotics, a company applying AI-enabled robotics to the logistics industry. Ken has spent over four decades working on one of the hardest problems in robotics: how machines perceive and manipulate the physical world. We spoke about why tasks that seem effortless to humans - like picking up a glass or folding laundry - are still incredibly difficult for robots.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Purpose is a verb: The case for living your purpose, not just pondering it

Every summer, I set aside time for self-reflection and reading. This summer, I've been thinking a lot about the idea of purpose. 

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Leo Lu

How AI agents will redefine market research

What if research wasn't a quarterly project but an always-on network? AI is closing the gap between "what we learned" and "what we do."

Fintech

AI

Perspectives

Nico Stainfeld

,

Zach Noorani

A new blueprint for fintech: Goodbye human data transfer, hello AI agents as human APIs

Last year, one of our portfolio founders casually mentioned what might be the most illuminating observation we’ve heard about fintech in years. "You know what I finally figured out?" he said. "Banks don't actually run on software. They run on humans pretending to be software."

Enterprise

Funding

Company Building

AI

Perspectives

Jaya Gupta

,

Ashu Garg

Leading PlayerZero’s 
Series A

The best technical founders don’t build for obvious trends: they build infrastructure for the problems those trends will create. When we led PlayerZero‘s $15M Series A, we recognized a pattern that’s defined our most successful investments: a founder who sees what’s coming before everyone else.

Company Building

Funding

Enterprise

AI

News

TechCrunch

PlayerZero raises $15M to prevent AI agents from shipping buggy code

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Reasoning + RL: A new recipe for AI apps

I explore why forward-looking AI builders have moved from RAG to reasoning + RL and share the roadmap they’re charting for others.

AI

Enterprise

Funding

Company Building

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Celebrating the launch of dltHub: AI-powered data pipelines for the software 3.0 era

The story of software is one of layered recursions. First, we wrote explicit code: line-by-line instructions for computers (software 1.0). Next, with the rise of deep learning, we trained neural networks to learn how to achieve objectives directly from data (software 2.0).

Company Building

Crypto

Enterprise

Fintech

Events

Christine Hendrickson

2025 CEO Summit

Our largest CEO gathering of the year where we brought together leaders from across Foundation’s 30-year history, from IPO veterans and serial entrepreneurs to our newest pre-seed founders.

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

The $4.6T Services-as-Software opportunity: Lessons from the first year

The real prize isn't the $200B SaaS market: it's the $4.6T enterprises spend on salaries and services. What we've learned a year into the services as software era.

Crypto

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

,

Gracie Zaro

Rewriting the way money moves with stablecoins

Moving money can now cost fractions of a penny and settle in under a second. What that means for financial services at scale.

AI

Enterprise

News

Forbes

Can Gen Z Fix Construction’s Labor Crisis? This Startup Is Betting Yes

AI

Enterprise

Funding

Company Building

News

TechCrunch

Tiny AI ERP startup Campfire is winning so many startups from NetSuite, Accel led a $35M Series A

B2BaCEO

AI

Company Building

Ashu Garg

Meta’s bet on Scale & the new AI data paradigm

I explore how the data needed to advance AI has changed, and what it will take to push AI to the next frontier.

B2BaCEO

Company Building

AI

Enterprise

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

Ion Stoica, co-founder and executive chairman of Databricks, on how to turn research into real companies

In this episode, I sit down with Ion Stoica, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and the co-founder of Conviva, Databricks, and Anyscale. Over the last two decades, Ion’s research labs - the AMP Lab, the RISE Lab, and now the Sky Computing Lab - have seeded a generation of category-defining companies.

Crypto

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

,

Nico Stainfeld

,

Steve Vassallo

3 reasons crypto will win in America

The regulatory winds have shifted. There's never been a better time to build for and with crypto in the U.S.

B2BaCEO

Company Building

AI

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

Ramesh Srinivasan, senior partner at McKinsey, shares how great leaders build empathy, resilience, and purpose

Ramesh Srinivasan, senior partner at McKinsey, shares how great leaders build empathy, resilience, and purpose

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

AI's next frontier is the agentic web

A year ago, nearly all the focus in AI circles was on the models themselves: how large they'd grown, which benchmarks they were saturating, and whether their impressive leaps in reasoning capability could continue scaling.

Design

State of AI in Design

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

The State of AI in Design: What we learned from 400+ designers

Startups are adopting AI twice as fast as large companies. What we learned from surveying 400+ designers on AI in their workflows.

Cyber

AI

Enterprise

Company Building

Events

Sid Trivedi

IT + Security RSA 2025 Happy Hour

At Foundation Capital’s 7th annual RSAC Happy Hour, we had a record-breaking turnout for an engaging fireside chat featuring Subra Kumaraswamy (CISO at Visa), Mike Elmore (CISO at G

Crypto

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

Solana at SXSW: Lessons from crypto’s fastest-growing ecosystem

Bear markets create perfect conditions for building. Raj Gokal on Solana's rise, going direct to users, and how crisis forces focus.

Design

State of AI in Design

AI

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

The tech & tools designers need to thrive in an AI world

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Three months after DeepSeek, what’s changed for AI founders?

In January, DeepSeek surprised the tech industry by releasing a model - R1 - that matched GPT-4-level performance at a fraction of the cost. The initial reaction was loud, but for anyone paying close attention, it shouldn’t have been.

Company Building

Fintech

Crypto

Perspectives

Alyssa Spagnolo

Fintech AI founders: The revolution is here - we’ll help you build it 

We've backed Lending Club, Stripe, and Solana. Now we're launching an accelerator for the next generation of AI-native fintech founders.

AI

AI in the Real World

Enterprise

Podcasts

Jaya Gupta

The promise of State Space Models - Karan Goel (Co-founder & CEO of Cartesia)

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Jaya Gupta sits down with Karan Goel, co-founder and CEO of Cartesia, a company pioneering the use of state space models (SSMs) for AI applications.

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

NVIDIA’s "AI Factory" Bet

I break down NVIDIA’s push to own the full AI stack - from silicon to software - and explore what it means for startups building in the era of agentic AI.

Crypto

Funding

News

Fortune

How Jump and Solana vets are building a hyper fast internet for blockchains

B2BaCEO

Company Building

AI

Cyber

Enterprise

Fintech

Crypto

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Thirty years of betting on day zero

I reflect on Foundation's three decades of conviction-based investing, and why our Fund 11 marks our deepest commitment yet to early-stage founders.

Funding

Company Building

Fintech

Enterprise

Crypto

Cyber

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Announcing our Fund 11: A new $600M fund in support of our enduring commitment to founders

We share a legacy of constant reinvention, of standing alongside singular individuals who pull the future into the present. As a 30-year-old firm, we've lived through - and helped shape - the Valley's most important inflection points: the dot-com era, social media's rise, cloud computing, mobile, crypto, and AI.

Funding

Company Building

Crypto

Cyber

Enterprise

Fintech

AI

News

TechCrunch

Foundation Capital, an early backer of Solana and Cerebras, raises $600M fund

AI

Enterprise

Funding

News

TechCrunch

Regie.ai injects sales enablement with AI, but keeps humans in the loop

Fintech

AI

Perspectives

Nico Stainfeld

AI-Driven Innovation: Opportunities for Startups in Financial Compliance and Risk Management 

AI is changing how financial institutions handle risk and compliance. We talked to execs across the industry to map where startups can win.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Jaya Gupta

Building the next generation of AI models: Rohan Taori | Researcher at Anthropic & Alpaca co-creator

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Jaya Gupta sits down with Rohan Taori, a researcher on Anthropic's multimodal pre-training team.

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

DeepSeek shows that AI’s future turns on ingenuity, not just scale

The shift from brute-force AI spending to smart, systems-level design is here.

Company Building

Enterprise

Fintech

Crypto

Funding

Design

AI

News

Sand Hill Road

Why does Steve Vassallo of Foundation Capital choose to invest early?

AI

AI in the Real World

Cyber

Podcasts

Sid Trivedi

Securing AI systems against adversarial attacks - Chris 'Tito' Sestito (Co-founder, CEO HiddenLayer)

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Sid Trivedi speaks to Chris "Tito" Sestito, the co-founder and CEO of HiddenLayer.

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

The paradox of self-building agents: teaching AI to teach itself

BabyAGI creator Yohei Nakajima on the opportunities and challenges of self-building agents, and why developing them is a lot like managing an intern.

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Company Building

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Solve AI-Powered Search (Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean)

In this episode, I spoke to Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean. After helping build Google's search infrastructure and co-founding Rubrik (which recently hit $1B in revenue), Arvind launched Glean to solve the problem of enterprise search and help employees enhance their work with AI agents.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Ten predictions for tech and AI in 2025

I reflect on tech's 2024 milestones and chart what lies ahead in 2025.

News

Charles Moldow

Celebrating a Remarkable Milestone: EvolutionIQ has been acquired by CCC Intelligent Solutions for $730 million

I am thrilled to announce the successful sale of Foundation Capital Fund 9 and Leadership Fund 3 portfolio company EvolutionIQ. This is a huge moment for co-founders Mike Saltzman, Jonathan Lewin, Tomas Vykruta, and the exceptional team at EvolutionIQ, and we’re proud to have played a part in their journey. 

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Joanne Chen

How generative AI changes software development - Melody Meckfessel, CTO, Jasper

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital General Partner Joanne Chen speaks with Melody Meckfessel, the CTO of Jasper.

Events

Joanne Chen

,

Jaya Gupta

5 takeaways from the AI Unconference

Exactly two years after ChatGPT’s launch, AI is reshaping every industry.

News

Christine Hendrickson

2024 AI Unconference

More than 100 researchers, founders, and builders gathered for small-group discussions about the biggest ideas in AI.

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

How Systems of Agents will collapse the enterprise stack

SAP, Oracle, and Salesforce, beware. Systems of agents are eating four decades' worth of enterprise tech.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Has AI scaling hit a limit?

On the eve of ChatGPT’s second birthday, I examine the fault lines in one of the field's most powerful assumptions.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Leo Lu

Marketing's self-driving moment: Systems of Agents will put an industry on autopilot

Today, AI is marketing's copilot. In the future, two interacting agent systems—one for content creation, one for distribution—will put marketing on autopilot.

News

Nico Stainfeld

Banking's New Tech Stack: A market map of generative AI in financial services

Over the past few weeks, we've explored how generative AI is transforming every stage of the banking lifecycle. We began with customer acquisition and onboarding, examining how AI is helping banks convert and serve new customers more efficiently. We then turned to customer engagement and collections, where AI is deepening digital relationships and making traditionally costly processes into opportunities for relationship recovery.

Perspectives

Nico Stainfeld

From Transactions to Trust: How generative AI helps banks build deeper customer relationships

The digital profitability gap is one of banks' most pressing challenges. AI offers a path from shallow transactions to deeper trust.

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to rewrite the rules of ‘Founder Mode’

Frank Slootman, former Snowflake CEO, shakes up the ‘Founder Mode’ debate

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

Frank Slootman rewrites the rules of ‘Founder Mode’

With Frank Slootman, former CEO of Snowflake

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Nico Stainfeld

Winning the First Impression: How generative AI can improve acquisition, onboarding, and underwriting

80% of banking data is unstructured and sitting idle. AI can now unlock it for richer customer profiles and personalized experiences at scale.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Jaya Gupta

A System of Agents brings service as software to life

Software is no longer a tool for organizing work: it's becoming the worker itself. How builders can tap into the $4.6T services as software opportunity.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Nico Stainfeld

Banking Reimagined: How generative AI reshapes the customer banking journey

Banks today struggle with two seemingly incompatible realities: stubbornly low customer satisfaction and high service costs. They've invested massive amounts of time and capital in technology to help. Has it worked? Will it?

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Why OpenAI's $157B valuation misreads AI's future

I break down the logic behind the company's towering price tag and why I think the most valuable AI companies have yet to be built.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Steve Vassallo

The Path Forward for Multimodal AI with Darius Lam, Founder and CEO of NEX

Welcome to AI in the Real World! I'm Andrew Han, a partner at Foundation Capital, and I'll be your host today. I work closely with technical founders who are building software to solve hard, valuable problems.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Adapt and Win in Enterprise Software

Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, has guided the cloud content management platform from a dorm room project into a publicly traded company with over $1B in annual revenue. In his second appearance on B2BaCEO, Aaron reflects on his founder journey, sharing how Box capitalized on cloud computing and their recent push to integrate generative AI.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Leo Lu

,

Jaya Gupta

Overhauling logistics with AI: a $79 billion opportunity

LLMs and computer vision will knock out manual logistics tasks, from price quoting to packing automation. 

News

Sid Trivedi

Our Investment in Prime Security: Turbocharging Product Security Teams

Today, Prime Security emerged from stealth to introduce the public beta of its Prime Product Security Platform and the $6M seed round led by Foundation Capital. We were the first investor in Prime Security, and I’ve personally been on the board of directors since inception, working closely with the founders for several months before incubating the company at the beginning of this year.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

Founding-Employee fit: know who to hire when 

I recently wrote about founder-market fit—where a founder must authentically understand themselves, their company, and the market conditions in which they’re building. Success here comes from knowing yourself and how you want to (and need to!) run your business given the situation your company is in. 

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

To scale to $100M ARR, "Owner Mode" beats "Founder Mode"

I weigh in on the recent debate and outline a third path - “owner mode” - that allows startups to scale without losing what makes them special.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

Founder-Market fit: knowing yourself leads to success 

Recently, I was listening to a podcast from the Yale admissions office where the hosts discussed the importance of students expressing their authentic selves in applications. In many essays, students try to represent themselves as what they think the admissions office wants—but application reviewers are able to sniff this out pretty clearly, and that can lead to an unsuccessful outcome. 

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

Shock-proofing supply chain with AI: a $62 billion opportunity

With core segments of the supply chain technologically underserved, we see massive potential in three areas.

News

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

A battle-tested founder tackles security for AI

Foundation Capital’s investment in Acuvity combines two of the firm’s most deeply-held convictions.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

The AI Hype: $600B question or $4.6T+ opportunity?

As summer draws to a close, a familiar debate has reignited with renewed intensity. Are we witnessing the dawn of a new technological era? Or are we caught in yet another tech bubble?

News

Ashu Garg

Leading NEX’s $3.5M seed round: Next-generation visual foundation models

I met Darius Lam for the first time over ramen in Mountain View. Within minutes of meeting him, it was clear that he was a razor sharp technologist and had an endlessly enthusiastic, infectious energy about him. 

Perspectives

Jaya Gupta

,

Ashu Garg

The Observability Crisis

We've inadvertently created a maze of complexity and cost in observability. How did this happen?

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

Goodbye AIOps: welcome AgentSREs—the next $100B opportunity

 We've seen countless buzzwords come and go. "AIOps" is the latest in a long line of catchy but ultimately misguided terms that fail to capture the true potential of AI  in the world of IT ops and observability.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Steve Vassallo

Building the World's Fastest AI Chip with Cerebras Systems' Co-founder and CTO Sean Lie

Welcome to "AI in the Real World." I'm Steve Vassallo, a General Partner at Foundation Capital. In this series, we talk with leading AI researchers about their groundbreaking work and how it's being applied in real businesses today.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Reflections on 16 years in venture capital

Goodbye AIOps: welcome AgentSREs—the next $100B opportunity

Enterprise

Perspectives

Jaya Gupta

Docket: from idea to investment in 20 days 

A serendipitous meeting with a serial entrepreneur led to a bet on Docket, one of Foundation's speediest investments to date.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Joanne Chen

What's Next After Transformers

I talk with Recursal AI founder Eugene Cheah about RWKV, a new architecture for AI.

News

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

A Silver Age of AI innovation

AI advances have converged with a massive global demographic shift to lift senior health tech.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

3 breakthroughs driving AI forward, from Regie.ai founder Srinath Sridhar

3 breakthroughs driving AI forward, from Regie.ai founder Srinath Sridhar

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Databricks vs. Snowflake: What their rivalry reveals about AI's future

I explore the competition between these two data powerhouses and what it says about where enterprise AI is headed.

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

Beyond LLMs: Building magic

These 3 innovations will drive the next wave of AI.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Build a Multi-Billion-Dollar Software Business

With Mohit Aron, Founder of Cohesity

Enterprise

News

Sid Trivedi

Our investment in AirMDR: Closing the cyber inequity gap

A product and GTM strategy discussion with Kumar Saurabh and Foundation Capital Partner Sid Trivedi in Palo Alto.

Perspectives

Foundation Capital

Call for applications: AI startups ready to boost developer productivity

We’re partnering with Turing to look for startups that can truly enhance engineering productivity with AI—not theoretically, but today. 

News

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Cerebras lands on the TIME100 Most Influential Companies list 

Andrew Feldman explains an extremely difficult problem in relatively simple terms. He’s the Co-Founder and CEO of Cerebras, which develops specialized hardware and software systems to advance AI workloads. 

Enterprise

Perspectives

Sid Trivedi

Our investment in Stacklet: building cloud that scales

Foundation Capital Partner Sid Trivedi, with Travis Stanfield and Kapil Thangavelu on their first Stacklet trip to San Francisco in July 2021.

B2BaCEO

News

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Graduating from Series A: How to get to $10M ARR

I unpack the second phase of startup growth: scaling from $1M to $10M ARR. I break down its two main steps: evolving from founder to founder-CEO and transforming GTM into a well-oiled machine.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Joanne Chen

The Promise of Multi-Agent AI

In this post, I share learnings from my conversation with Chi Wang, a principal researcher at Microsoft and the creator of AutoGen.

Events

Sid Trivedi

IT + Security RSA 2024 Happy Hour

San Francisco felt more like NYC as over 50,000 attendees descended downtown for the RSA Conference.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

Samsara's Co-Founder Sanjit Biswas on How to Grow from Ph.D. to Two-Time Startup CEO

Sanjit and I discuss his journey from grad student researcher to the founder of two major startup successes: Samsara, which recently hit $1B in ARR, and Meraki, acquired by Cisco for $1.2B.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Where AI is Headed in 2025: A Builder’s Guide

It’s no longer just about training bigger and bigger models. I chart the growing shifts toward inference and compound AI systems and explain what they mean for founders.

Enterprise

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Jaya Gupta

AI leads a service as software paradigm shift

AI's push into the services market represents a $4.6 trillion opportunity.

News

Ashu Garg

Anvilogic's breakout moment: A founder's tenacity pays off

Cybersecurity startup Anvilogic faced plenty of hurdles. Thanks to a tenacious founder and pointers from Foundation Capital, the company is set to break out, announcing a momentous $45 million in Series C funding.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Nico Stainfeld

The New Fintech Frontier

​Financial services businesses are particularly sensitive to the macro environment—when the raw material is capital, the engine can shut off in a flash. In 2023, interest rates rose, inflation increased, and general economic uncertainty led to a correction of valuations and a general feeling of caution by most investors. 

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

How to go from $0 to $1M ARR

Bringing a startup idea to life is rarely a linear journey. Instead, it’s an iterative process of discovery, validation, and refinement—less like following a neat roadmap and more like trying to find your way to the center of a tornado. 

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Win Your First Enterprise Customer

My guest today is Doug Winter, the founder and CEO of Seismic, a leading enterprise sales enablement platform. Today, Seismic has a team of 1,500 people and nearly $400 million in recurring revenue.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Jaya Gupta

Beyond RPA: How LLMs are ushering in a new era of intelligent process automation

At its core, every business is a collection of processes. From lead generation and customer acquisition to financial planning and procurement, these processes are interconnected, with the outputs of one providing the inputs for another. As a business grows, so does its number of processes, creating an intricate network of data flows and dependencies.

News

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

Leading Tennr’s $3.25M Seed Round: An Investment in Founders

Foundation Capital invests in amazing founders. Over the course of eight months, we watched Tennr’s founders iterate, learn, and execute—resulting in us leading the company’s $3.25M seed round.

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

$100M in ARR is the best north star for startup success. Here's how founders can get there.

I revisit the storied "unicorn" status, now a decade old. I propose a more rigorous benchmark for startup success, $100M in ARR, and outline the concrete steps that founders can take to reach it.

Perspectives

Foundation Capital

Why 2024 Will Be the Year of Inference

If 2023 was the year of large language model (LLM) training, we believe 2024 will be all about LLM inference — developers taking models and putting them into production for real-world applications.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Joanne Chen

The Future of Generative AI Agents

In the coming months, I’ll be hosting a series of in-depth conversations with leading AI researchers where we’ll explore how state-of-the-art models are being applied in the real world.

News

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Cohesity: winning the $40B+ data security & management market

Cohesity announced its intent to merge with the data protection business from secure, multi-cloud data management platform Veritas—giving enterprises a unified platform to manage and extract insights from data using AI.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Gracie Zaro

Where is All the Differentiation in Fintech x AI?

With large sums of venture money pouring into anything “AI” (just check out YC’s winter 2024 batch), we have a growing number of copilots, agents, APIs and foundational models serving any given vertical. Name the point solution and you’ll likely find a swath of options promising to improve efficiency and insight.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Nico Stainfeld

From Idea to Integration: Four Steps for Founders Integrating AI

Advances in Generative AI have unlocked an explosion of AI use-cases, making shiny-object syndrome a real concern for founders. This challenges founders to filter through a mountain of ideas to identify the use-cases that align with business goals and constraints.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Ten AI Insights from Databricks, Anyscale, and Microsoft

I journey through the B2BaCEO archive and surface ten AI learnings from some of my most influential guests.

Perspectives

Sid Trivedi

Our Investment in Neurelo: Making Databases Easy Again

Today, Neurelo emerged from stealth to announce the general availability of its cloud data API platform and the $5M seed round that we led.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Nico Stainfeld

A Framework for Identifying High-Impact AI Use Cases with Tennr

At our Fintech x AI PortCo Summit, Trey Holterman, co-founder and CEO of Tennr, shared a practical framework for thinking through exactly these types of challenges. Drawing on the team at Tennr's expertise in leveraging AI to automate complex tasks, Trey's framework empowers founders to evaluate and select high-value AI use cases.

Enterprise

News

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Investing in Infield: Dependency Management on Autopilot 

Today, we are excited to announce Infield’s $3M seed funding, and the general availability of its dependency management platform across Javascript, Python, Typescript, and Ruby (with Java coming soon)! Infield is solving a complex and growing (but often overlooked) problem for software engineers — and we're thrilled to lead its seed round and share Infield with the world today.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Decoding AGI

I explain why we need to understand this technology before we rush to regulate it. I share insights from my conversation with AI pioneer Naveen Rao on the path to achieving it.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Shape the Future of AI

My guest this month is Naveen Rao, the co-founder of MosaicML and current head of generative AI at Databricks.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

A technical history of blockchain design, innovation, and narratives: Part III

In the previous installment of our three-part history of blockchain innovation, we explored how Ethereum introduced programmability, Proof of Stake, and a flurry of new energy to blockchain. In the last part of the series, we’ll discuss Solana’s origins, accomplishments, and our expectations for it as the leading next-generation chain. We’ll then wrap up the series by weighing Solana versus Ethereum and reflecting on the space as a whole.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

A technical history of blockchain design, innovation, and narratives: Part II

In the first part of this three-part series on blockchain’s evolution across networks, we dove into what influences these evolutions, what technical innovations led to Bitcoin’s broader market adoption and dominance as a store-of-value L1, and what Bitcoin’s hallmarks mean for its future. In this part, we’ll do the same for Ethereum. Specifically, what distinguishes it from Bitcoin, the trade-offs to its technological leaps, and the implications this has for builders in its ecosystem.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

A technical history of blockchain design, innovation, and narratives: Part I

This historical analysis helps new founders decide where to build by exploring each network’s technical innovations in their historical context. Foundation Capital has been investing in — and rooting for — this space for ten years. Our deep, long-term involvement means we’ve developed a time-tested view of how major L1s have achieved their current dominance and how their initial technical accomplishments will define them going forward.

Perspectives

Jaya Gupta

,

Ashu Garg

Year One of Generative AI: Six Key Trends

Just over one year has passed since the release of ChatGPT. In the intervening twelve-odd months, it’s become abundantly clear that generative AI represents a fundamental platform shift.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

Celebrating Rover's Acquisition by Blackstone

Today we celebrate Rover's acquisition by Blackstone for a remarkable $2.3 billion. It is not just a victory for employees and shareholders but a testament to the vision and resilience of an outstanding management team combined with the power of a high-functioning marketplace.

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Is OpenAI the Next Netscape?

This weekend was one to remember for those actively invested in the future of AI. In this special edition of B2BaCEO, I’ll summarize what unfolded (as of Monday, November 20 at 5 pm PT).

Steve Vassallo

A New “Golden Age” for Alternative Lending

As the market tentatively rebounds from rate hikes and inflationary pressures, a major opportunity is emerging in LendingTech—a field that many of you, our readers and partners, have been journeying with us. Lenders today face a new reality—one where innovation isn't just a buzzword but a survival kit. 

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Incumbents vs. Startups: The Showdown Over Generative AI

I explore the debate over who benefits most from generative AI—incumbents or startups—and share where I think startups have an edge. I then dive deeper with a leading AI founder, Robert Nishihara.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Power the AI Boom

In this episode of B2BaCEO, I speak with Robert Nishihara, co-founder and CEO of Anyscale. Anyscale’s aspiration is to build the fastest, most cost-efficient infrastructure for running LLMs and AI workloads. When it is successful, Anyscale will be to the AI era what Microsoft was for the PC era: the underlying operating system on which all AI applications are developed and run.

Perspectives

Foundation Capital

The Data Hub and Spoke: Data Infrastructure “3.0” for the Age of Generative AI

Over the past decade, the term “modern data stack” has come into prominence with the rise of cloud-native software and an increasingly smart, connected world.

AI

News

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

Beyond Doomsday: Why AI Promises a Brighter Future

This fall, I had the honor of speaking at TEDx about the immense promise I see in artificial intelligence.

AI

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Why Generative AI Needs Design

Mention generative AI in a crowded room, and reactions fall somewhere on a spectrum from worry to wonder. Venture capitalists—particularly those like me who work with founders at the very first stages of company creation—are fond of saying that we’re still in the “early days” of a technology’s life cycle.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

A Founder's Guide to 2024 Planning

I advise founders on planning for 2024 amid intensely troubling world events. I recap my discussion with Matei Zaharia of Databricks at our Enterprise CEO Dinner. I spotlight our NY Tech Week event.

Fintech

AI

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Nico Stainfeld

Fintech x AI: Practical Lessons for Founders

Since the start of the year, a common question has come up in our conversations with portfolio companies: “I know that I should be using AI, but how do I get started, and where should I focus my efforts?” To address this, we organized our first “Fintech x AI Portco summit” this summer.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Build, Scale, and Sell a Startup

My guest this month is Tracy Young, the co-founder and former CEO of PlanGrid, a productivity tool for construction companies. From going through YC and losing a cofounder to cancer, to being acquired by Autodesk for $875 million, Tracy has picked up many valuable lessons that other founders and CEOs can learn from.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

My Reflections on My Summer in India's Silicon Valley

I explain why the enterprise software industry will revolve around two poles—Silicon Valley and Bangalore—by 2030. I podcast with Tracy Young, co-founder of TigerEye and PlanGrid. And more!

AI

Fintech

Christine Hendrickson

Fintech x AI PortCo Summit

On June 28th, 2023, we hosted our Fintech x AI PortCo Summit to help executives across the Foundation Capital Portfolio answer the question “What should I be doing about AI?”

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

How Perplexity.ai Is Pioneering The Future Of Search

For the past two decades, search engines like Google and Bing have been our primary gateways to the internet. Yet, over time, their signature “10 blue links” have been increasingly buried by advertisements and algorithm-optimized content. Driven by ad-based revenue models, these sites often feel more like auctioneers of users’ attention than trustworthy guides to the World Wide Web.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

B2BaCEO: August 2023 Newsletter

I share anecdotal learnings and unpack three industry reports on the state of generative AI adoption. I plug my latest post on the enterprise LLM workflow. I introduce our new EIR, Mahmoud Arram.

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

The Momento Moment: Bringing Next-Gen Auto Insurance to Mexico

Today we’re announcing our investment in Momento Seguros, a new full-stack auto-insurance carrier for Mexico. Memento is bringing the digital-first offering that consumers in other emerging markets already enjoy and expect across verticals. 

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

The Mexican Auto Insurance Market

We’ve announced our investment in Momento Seguros, a new fullstack auto carrier for Mexico. Here, we share more about our investment thesis on the market landscape for others considering building / investing in this exciting space.

AI

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

Applying Generative AI to Enterprise Use Cases: A Step-by-Step Guide

When it comes to generative AI, the only thing that’s constant is the speed at which this technology is changing. Over the past few months, we’ve spoken in-depth with a diverse range of builders and technologists who are exploring generative AI.

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Faster, Better, More: An Open Letter to the Federal Reserve

Dear Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Congratulations on your recent launch of the FedNow System for instant payments! Government support has been an important component to the success of faster payments across the world, including India’s United Payments Interface (UPI), Brazil’s PIX, and the UK’s Faster Payment System. But merely lending your support is insufficient. 

Events

Foundation Capital

Super-Secret Fintech Dinners

Sign up here to request an invitation to our hush-hush fintech dinner series. Each month — at different, cool locations in SF or NYC — we’ll be hosting a small, curated gathering of founders and operators who are redefining financial innovation.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

B2BaCEO: July 2023 Newsletter

I weigh in on the contest between Databricks and Snowflake, as each vies to own the end-to-end enterprise AI workflow. In short: It’s data all the way down.

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

,

Alejandra Martinez

Clivi: Managing Chronic Diseases in Latin America

Our strategy for investing in LatAm is defined by two core ideas: (1) backing the most ambitious founders, and (2) backing projects leveraging the rapid penetration of Internet-connected smartphones to build massive user bases via tech-driven business models.

AI

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

Top Takeaways from Our Generative AI “Unconference”

In early May, we hosted our inaugural, invite-only Generative AI “Unconference” in San Francisco. The event convened over eighty of the top (human!) minds in AI, including founders, researchers, and industry experts, for an energizing afternoon of group discussions about building successful AI companies

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

AI x Blockchain: The Next Level

Blockchain and artificial intelligence: the two most era-defining technologies of our time. Each has been a mighty, groundshifting force in its own right, like Godzilla and King Kong in their respective domains. But from time to time, Kong and Godzilla have teamed up when facing a monster that neither could take down on their own.

B2BaCEO

AI

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

B2BaCEO Newsletter: June 2023

I share takeaways from FC's inaugural Generative AI "Unconference." I announce our Generative AI 25 list! I share my latest pod with AI pioneer Matei Zaharia. I debrief our event at AGI House.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Deploy AI in Your Company

If you’re not hardcore about AI, then stop the podcast now — because this episode for real technology nerds. Ashu’s guest is Matei Zaharia, CTO and cofounder of Databricks, and a professor of computer science at Stanford University.

Perspectives

Nico Stainfeld

,

Charles Moldow

The Emperor Has No Tech: Why the Insurance Industry Desperately Needs Startups

When Lloyd's of London faced the unique challenge of insuring a million-pound reward offered by a Scottish whisky firm for the capture of the Loch Ness Monster or protecting the precious legs of 1940s starlet Betty Grable, they turned to their underwriters to assess the risk and determine an appropriate premium to charge.

Events

Foundation Capital

Generative AI Unconference

On May 10th, 2023, we hosted our inaugural, invite-only Generative AI “Unconference” in San Francisco. The event convened over eighty of the top (human!) minds in AI, including founders, researchers, and industry experts, for an energizing afternoon of small, group discussions about building successful AI companies.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

The State of Enterprise AI Adoption

I explore two major AI reports and weigh in on a leaked Google memo. I offer three takeaways from this year’s RSA conference. I share my conversation with Microsoft’s Chief Strategy Officer.

Events

Christine Hendrickson

AI Unconference

On May 10th, 2023, we hosted our inaugural, invite-only Generative AI “Unconference” in San Francisco.

Events

Sid Trivedi

IT + Security RSA 2023 Happy Hour

This year, RSA, the world’s leading cybersecurity conference, was back with a bang. Over 40,000 people attended: a more than 50% increase from last year.

Perspectives

Foundation Capital

Collaboration as Competitive Strategy

What the heck is this in my inbox, you might be asking, yet another piece of content marketing? Why yes! This is the first installment of Foundation Capital’s new quarterly fintech newsletter. Our aim is for this mass mailer to be roughly 19% more nutritious and to the point than the usual flotsam. 

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Capture the AI Moment

As everyone listening to this podcast knows, the release of ChatGPT last November ushered in a new age of AI and catalyzed a wave of AI startups. For this episode of B2BaCEO, Ashu goes deep on AI with Bobby Yerramilli-Rao, former serial entrepreneur and investor, and current Chief Strategy Officer at Microsoft.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Software ate the world. Now AI is coming for software.

Software ate the world. Now AI is coming for software. I chart three implications of this paradigm shift. I give a primer on large graphical models (LGMs). And I recap my partner Sid’s SXSW discussion with cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch.

Events

Sid Trivedi

Digital Warfare with One of the World's Greatest Hackers

Last month, amid the chaos of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, my friend Dmitri Alperovitch and I found ourselves preparing to take the stage at SXSW. Our topic was another mounting, yet rarely discussed, threat: digital warfare. 

Perspectives

Foundation Capital

Passion, Purpose, and Conviction: Why I’m Joining Foundation Capital

One of my childhood heroes, the legendary Gordon Moore, passed away at the end of March. Moore, who co-founded Intel and developed the eponymous law on microchip innovation, was among the most influential builders and thinkers in Silicon Valley. His contributions to semiconductor technology helped give the Valley its name. In many ways, I have him to thank for where I am now. 

Perspectives

Foundation Capital

Cash Management for Startups

The events of March 2023 will change the way many startup companies think about managing their cash. Our recommendations are simple, and they are not unique.

Fintech

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

A Local’s Guide to Fintech Investing

Over the past five years, everyone could—and did!—make money in fintech investing. When valuations are skyrocketing, and seed to Series A graduation rates are approaching 100%, even the greenest investor can look like a genius.

Perspectives

Jaya Gupta

,

Ashu Garg

Foundation Model Ops: Powering the Next Wave of Generative AI Apps

Late last year, we published our framework for the enterprise AI stack and gestured toward the potential of foundation models to advance innovation at each of its layers, from AI-optimized hardware, compute, and cloud on up.

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Internet HQ

In 2019, only six percent of workers in the U.S. worked from home, and 75 percent had never done so. By fall 2020, around 54 percent of employed Americans were remote at least some of the time.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

FC's Generative AI Challenge

At Foundation Capital, we’ve long had conviction that AI will be one of the defining technologies of our time: the catalyst for a new generation of software and, with it, a new generation of businesses.

Perspectives

Sid Trivedi

Our Investment in DevZero: Taking Developers to Cloud Nine

Having been on DevZero’s board of directors since day one, I wanted to offer a few thoughts on their product, why we invested, how we partnered, and the road ahead.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

B2BaCEO: Newsletter, January 2023

I share AI predictions from CEOs of AI companies. I interview the one and only Frank Slootman. I introduce you to my partner Angus, a born entrepreneur. And I lay out Foundation Capital’s new enterprise AI stack.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Grow in a Bear Market

Beerud Sheth is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gupshup, a leading platform for cloud messaging. Prior to that he was the cofounder of what is now Upwork, a pioneer of online freelancing and remote work. Beerud took the slow and steady pace to winning the race, building two unicorns over 25 years.

News

LA Venture

LA Venture: Zach Noorani

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

The Realm of Venture c. 2014

2015 is already off to a rip roaring start whether it’s holograms or drones or virtual reality, the trade winds of tech continue to blow at high speed.

B2BaCEO

Enterprise

AI

Company Building

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Taking stock of the SaaSpocalypse

Ashu unpacks what this month’s software selloff is pricing in, and who stands to win as the seat model breaks.

Crypto

AI

Fintech

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

,

Gracie Zaro

The quiet crypto integration 

If you’re building in fintech and don’t consider implementing blockchain infrastructure somewhere in the stack, you’re missing out. 

B2BaCEO

Enterprise

AI

Company Building

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

The case for context graphs: With Aaron Levie (Co-founder & CEO, Box)

Aaron Levie has been on the podcast twice before. After we published our context graphs thesis, he wrote a response, so we invited him on to continue the conversation.

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Context graphs, one month in

A month ago, Jaya and I published our p.o.v. on context graphs. Since then, it’s become one of the most-discussed – and, in our opinion, most important – ideas in AI this year.

AI

Enterprise

Funding

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Jaya Gupta

Building the context graph for insurance: Why we’re doubling down on Fulcrum

Fulcrum has raised $25M to transform the insurance industry. Foundation led their seed round two years ago. Today, CRV is leading their Series A, and we’re thrilled to double down on a company that embodies everything we believe about the $4.6T services-as-software opportunity.

AI

Enterprise

News

The Information

Inside the craze around context graphs

Company Building

AI

Fintech

Crypto

Enterprise

News

Venture Capital Journal

How Foundation Capital has distributed $3bn since 2020

Crypto

Perspectives

Alejandra Martinez

,

Rodolfo Gonzalez

The era of opinionated L1s is here and Solana will win it on mobile

High performance used to be a differentiator for L1s. Now it's table stakes. The chains that win will compete on apps, users, and opinionated design.

B2BaCEO

Enterprise

AI

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

Why context graphs are the missing layer for AI

As agents move into production, the bottleneck isn't intelligence: it's context. A conversation on context graphs, decision traces, and where value will accrue.

Crypto

News

Venture Capital Journal

Venture Capital's 2026 Rising Stars

Enterprise

B2BaCEO

AI

Cyber

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Where AI is headed in 2026

Enterprise AI finally hits production. Decision traces become the new moat. An AI lab goes public. Eight predictions for AI and tech in the year ahead.

AI

Company Building

Enterprise

Funding

News

Crunchbase

What We Learned This Year From 6 Active AI Investors Backing Startups Across The Stack

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Jaya Gupta

,

Ashu Garg

AI’s trillion-dollar opportunity: Context graphs

By building context graphs from decision traces, AI agent startups are capturing the "why" behind the "what"—and gaining a structural advantage in shaping what comes next.

Company Building

Enterprise

Perspectives

Alyssa Spagnolo

Foundation Capital's Build Accelerator

For more than 30 years, Foundation Capital has backed founders at inception, long before the rest of the world believed in them. Our Build Accelerator programs extend that tradition.

Crypto

Fintech

Funding

Company Building

News

CoinDesk

YO Labs Raises $10M to Scale Cross-Chain Crypto Yield Optimization Protocol

B2BaCEO

AI

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Narrative power in the AI era

I’ve been working in AI since 2006. Back then, we were using it to build ad recommendation and speech recognition systems. Today, no one thinks of those things as AI anymore. They’re just... software.

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Great founders don’t search for markets – they manifest them

We invest in "zero billion dollar" markets: opportunities that don't exist until a founder steps in and creates them. Here's what that thesis looks like in practice.

Design

State of AI in Design

AI

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

The Future of Design in an AI World: Insights from SXSW 2025

Steve sits down with Katie Dill, head of design at Stripe, to discuss what changes when AI enters design and what skills matter most.

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

When model providers eat everything: A survival guide for Service-as-Software startups

OpenAI and Anthropic are moving up the stack fast. How do you build an enduring app-layer startup when your platform might become your competitor?

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

What it takes to build AI agents that actually work

There’s a narrative in some corners of Silicon Valley that engineering skills have suddenly become less important now that AI can write code. I believe the opposite is true: engineering knowledge matters more than ever.

Enterprise

AI

Company Building

Funding

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Announcing our investment in Viven: A personalized AI for every employee

I've known Ashutosh Garg for nearly two decades. We share the same name (he goes by Ashu) - a coincidence that's led to more than a few confused introductions over the years.

AI

Crypto

Enterprise

Company Building

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

,

Alejandra Martinez

,

Steve Vassallo

DoubleZero: Scaling distributed systems through new internet rails

Compute and storage have scaled exponentially. Network performance hasn't. DoubleZero is building new internet rails to close the gap.

Fintech

AI

Funding

Company Building

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

Building the always-on finance team: Our investment in Maximor

Finance leaders are at the heart of their business’s strategic conversations, tasked with forecasting the future, advising the CEO, and shaping major business decisions. Yet behind the scenes, their teams are trapped in a mess of manual processes and outdated tools. 

AI

Fintech

Funding

Company Building

News

Fintech Global

Maximor raises $9m to expand AI finance automation

B2BaCEO

AI

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

The new rules for startup CEOs

Startup CEOs today are caught between two realities. On the one hand, investor expectations for AI startups are sky high.

AI

Funding

Company Building

Crypto

Enterprise

Fintech

News

Crunchbase

'Zero Billion-Dollar Markets': Inside Foundation Capital’s Strategy To Back Ideas Before They’re Industries

B2BaCEO

AI

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Build Artificial Superintelligence

With Jonathan Siddharth, Co-founder and CEO, Turing

Cyber

Funding

Company Building

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Sid Trivedi

Our Investment in AegisAI: The overdue email security breakthrough

Today, AegisAI emerged from stealth to announce its next-generation email security platform and the $13M seed round Foundation Capital co-led alongside Accel.

AI

Fintech

Funding

Company Building

News

Business Insider

A second-time founder graduated from Y Combinator with a new AI financial services startup. Read her pitch deck.

AI

Company Building

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Leo Lu

The decade of centicorns: why scaling to $100B is the new normal

When intelligence becomes abundant, we won't use less of it: we'll find exponentially more things to do with it. Welcome to the age of $100B startups.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Joanne Chen

What robots can (and can’t) do in 2025

Ken Goldberg is a professor of engineering at UC Berkeley and the co-founder of Ambi Robotics, a company applying AI-enabled robotics to the logistics industry. Ken has spent over four decades working on one of the hardest problems in robotics: how machines perceive and manipulate the physical world. We spoke about why tasks that seem effortless to humans - like picking up a glass or folding laundry - are still incredibly difficult for robots.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Purpose is a verb: The case for living your purpose, not just pondering it

Every summer, I set aside time for self-reflection and reading. This summer, I've been thinking a lot about the idea of purpose. 

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Leo Lu

How AI agents will redefine market research

What if research wasn't a quarterly project but an always-on network? AI is closing the gap between "what we learned" and "what we do."

Fintech

AI

Perspectives

Nico Stainfeld

,

Zach Noorani

A new blueprint for fintech: Goodbye human data transfer, hello AI agents as human APIs

Last year, one of our portfolio founders casually mentioned what might be the most illuminating observation we’ve heard about fintech in years. "You know what I finally figured out?" he said. "Banks don't actually run on software. They run on humans pretending to be software."

Enterprise

Funding

Company Building

AI

Perspectives

Jaya Gupta

,

Ashu Garg

Leading PlayerZero’s 
Series A

The best technical founders don’t build for obvious trends: they build infrastructure for the problems those trends will create. When we led PlayerZero‘s $15M Series A, we recognized a pattern that’s defined our most successful investments: a founder who sees what’s coming before everyone else.

Company Building

Funding

Enterprise

AI

News

TechCrunch

PlayerZero raises $15M to prevent AI agents from shipping buggy code

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Reasoning + RL: A new recipe for AI apps

I explore why forward-looking AI builders have moved from RAG to reasoning + RL and share the roadmap they’re charting for others.

AI

Enterprise

Funding

Company Building

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Celebrating the launch of dltHub: AI-powered data pipelines for the software 3.0 era

The story of software is one of layered recursions. First, we wrote explicit code: line-by-line instructions for computers (software 1.0). Next, with the rise of deep learning, we trained neural networks to learn how to achieve objectives directly from data (software 2.0).

Company Building

Crypto

Enterprise

Fintech

Events

Christine Hendrickson

2025 CEO Summit

Our largest CEO gathering of the year where we brought together leaders from across Foundation’s 30-year history, from IPO veterans and serial entrepreneurs to our newest pre-seed founders.

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

The $4.6T Services-as-Software opportunity: Lessons from the first year

The real prize isn't the $200B SaaS market: it's the $4.6T enterprises spend on salaries and services. What we've learned a year into the services as software era.

Crypto

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

,

Gracie Zaro

Rewriting the way money moves with stablecoins

Moving money can now cost fractions of a penny and settle in under a second. What that means for financial services at scale.

AI

Enterprise

News

Forbes

Can Gen Z Fix Construction’s Labor Crisis? This Startup Is Betting Yes

AI

Enterprise

Funding

Company Building

News

TechCrunch

Tiny AI ERP startup Campfire is winning so many startups from NetSuite, Accel led a $35M Series A

B2BaCEO

AI

Company Building

Ashu Garg

Meta’s bet on Scale & the new AI data paradigm

I explore how the data needed to advance AI has changed, and what it will take to push AI to the next frontier.

B2BaCEO

Company Building

AI

Enterprise

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

Ion Stoica, co-founder and executive chairman of Databricks, on how to turn research into real companies

In this episode, I sit down with Ion Stoica, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and the co-founder of Conviva, Databricks, and Anyscale. Over the last two decades, Ion’s research labs - the AMP Lab, the RISE Lab, and now the Sky Computing Lab - have seeded a generation of category-defining companies.

Crypto

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

,

Nico Stainfeld

,

Steve Vassallo

3 reasons crypto will win in America

The regulatory winds have shifted. There's never been a better time to build for and with crypto in the U.S.

B2BaCEO

Company Building

AI

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

Ramesh Srinivasan, senior partner at McKinsey, shares how great leaders build empathy, resilience, and purpose

Ramesh Srinivasan, senior partner at McKinsey, shares how great leaders build empathy, resilience, and purpose

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

AI's next frontier is the agentic web

A year ago, nearly all the focus in AI circles was on the models themselves: how large they'd grown, which benchmarks they were saturating, and whether their impressive leaps in reasoning capability could continue scaling.

Design

State of AI in Design

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

The State of AI in Design: What we learned from 400+ designers

Startups are adopting AI twice as fast as large companies. What we learned from surveying 400+ designers on AI in their workflows.

Cyber

AI

Enterprise

Company Building

Events

Sid Trivedi

IT + Security RSA 2025 Happy Hour

At Foundation Capital’s 7th annual RSAC Happy Hour, we had a record-breaking turnout for an engaging fireside chat featuring Subra Kumaraswamy (CISO at Visa), Mike Elmore (CISO at G

Crypto

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

Solana at SXSW: Lessons from crypto’s fastest-growing ecosystem

Bear markets create perfect conditions for building. Raj Gokal on Solana's rise, going direct to users, and how crisis forces focus.

Design

State of AI in Design

AI

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

The tech & tools designers need to thrive in an AI world

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Three months after DeepSeek, what’s changed for AI founders?

In January, DeepSeek surprised the tech industry by releasing a model - R1 - that matched GPT-4-level performance at a fraction of the cost. The initial reaction was loud, but for anyone paying close attention, it shouldn’t have been.

Company Building

Fintech

Crypto

Perspectives

Alyssa Spagnolo

Fintech AI founders: The revolution is here - we’ll help you build it 

We've backed Lending Club, Stripe, and Solana. Now we're launching an accelerator for the next generation of AI-native fintech founders.

AI

AI in the Real World

Enterprise

Podcasts

Jaya Gupta

The promise of State Space Models - Karan Goel (Co-founder & CEO of Cartesia)

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Jaya Gupta sits down with Karan Goel, co-founder and CEO of Cartesia, a company pioneering the use of state space models (SSMs) for AI applications.

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

NVIDIA’s "AI Factory" Bet

I break down NVIDIA’s push to own the full AI stack - from silicon to software - and explore what it means for startups building in the era of agentic AI.

Crypto

Funding

News

Fortune

How Jump and Solana vets are building a hyper fast internet for blockchains

B2BaCEO

Company Building

AI

Cyber

Enterprise

Fintech

Crypto

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Thirty years of betting on day zero

I reflect on Foundation's three decades of conviction-based investing, and why our Fund 11 marks our deepest commitment yet to early-stage founders.

Funding

Company Building

Fintech

Enterprise

Crypto

Cyber

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Announcing our Fund 11: A new $600M fund in support of our enduring commitment to founders

We share a legacy of constant reinvention, of standing alongside singular individuals who pull the future into the present. As a 30-year-old firm, we've lived through - and helped shape - the Valley's most important inflection points: the dot-com era, social media's rise, cloud computing, mobile, crypto, and AI.

Funding

Company Building

Crypto

Cyber

Enterprise

Fintech

AI

News

TechCrunch

Foundation Capital, an early backer of Solana and Cerebras, raises $600M fund

AI

Enterprise

Funding

News

TechCrunch

Regie.ai injects sales enablement with AI, but keeps humans in the loop

Fintech

AI

Perspectives

Nico Stainfeld

AI-Driven Innovation: Opportunities for Startups in Financial Compliance and Risk Management 

AI is changing how financial institutions handle risk and compliance. We talked to execs across the industry to map where startups can win.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Jaya Gupta

Building the next generation of AI models: Rohan Taori | Researcher at Anthropic & Alpaca co-creator

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Jaya Gupta sits down with Rohan Taori, a researcher on Anthropic's multimodal pre-training team.

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

DeepSeek shows that AI’s future turns on ingenuity, not just scale

The shift from brute-force AI spending to smart, systems-level design is here.

Company Building

Enterprise

Fintech

Crypto

Funding

Design

AI

News

Sand Hill Road

Why does Steve Vassallo of Foundation Capital choose to invest early?

AI

AI in the Real World

Cyber

Podcasts

Sid Trivedi

Securing AI systems against adversarial attacks - Chris 'Tito' Sestito (Co-founder, CEO HiddenLayer)

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Sid Trivedi speaks to Chris "Tito" Sestito, the co-founder and CEO of HiddenLayer.

AI

Enterprise

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

The paradox of self-building agents: teaching AI to teach itself

BabyAGI creator Yohei Nakajima on the opportunities and challenges of self-building agents, and why developing them is a lot like managing an intern.

B2BaCEO

AI

Enterprise

Company Building

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Solve AI-Powered Search (Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean)

In this episode, I spoke to Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean. After helping build Google's search infrastructure and co-founding Rubrik (which recently hit $1B in revenue), Arvind launched Glean to solve the problem of enterprise search and help employees enhance their work with AI agents.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Ten predictions for tech and AI in 2025

I reflect on tech's 2024 milestones and chart what lies ahead in 2025.

News

Charles Moldow

Celebrating a Remarkable Milestone: EvolutionIQ has been acquired by CCC Intelligent Solutions for $730 million

I am thrilled to announce the successful sale of Foundation Capital Fund 9 and Leadership Fund 3 portfolio company EvolutionIQ. This is a huge moment for co-founders Mike Saltzman, Jonathan Lewin, Tomas Vykruta, and the exceptional team at EvolutionIQ, and we’re proud to have played a part in their journey. 

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Joanne Chen

How generative AI changes software development - Melody Meckfessel, CTO, Jasper

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital General Partner Joanne Chen speaks with Melody Meckfessel, the CTO of Jasper.

Events

Joanne Chen

,

Jaya Gupta

5 takeaways from the AI Unconference

Exactly two years after ChatGPT’s launch, AI is reshaping every industry.

News

Christine Hendrickson

2024 AI Unconference

More than 100 researchers, founders, and builders gathered for small-group discussions about the biggest ideas in AI.

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

How Systems of Agents will collapse the enterprise stack

SAP, Oracle, and Salesforce, beware. Systems of agents are eating four decades' worth of enterprise tech.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Has AI scaling hit a limit?

On the eve of ChatGPT’s second birthday, I examine the fault lines in one of the field's most powerful assumptions.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Leo Lu

Marketing's self-driving moment: Systems of Agents will put an industry on autopilot

Today, AI is marketing's copilot. In the future, two interacting agent systems—one for content creation, one for distribution—will put marketing on autopilot.

News

Nico Stainfeld

Banking's New Tech Stack: A market map of generative AI in financial services

Over the past few weeks, we've explored how generative AI is transforming every stage of the banking lifecycle. We began with customer acquisition and onboarding, examining how AI is helping banks convert and serve new customers more efficiently. We then turned to customer engagement and collections, where AI is deepening digital relationships and making traditionally costly processes into opportunities for relationship recovery.

Perspectives

Nico Stainfeld

From Transactions to Trust: How generative AI helps banks build deeper customer relationships

The digital profitability gap is one of banks' most pressing challenges. AI offers a path from shallow transactions to deeper trust.

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to rewrite the rules of ‘Founder Mode’

Frank Slootman, former Snowflake CEO, shakes up the ‘Founder Mode’ debate

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

Frank Slootman rewrites the rules of ‘Founder Mode’

With Frank Slootman, former CEO of Snowflake

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Nico Stainfeld

Winning the First Impression: How generative AI can improve acquisition, onboarding, and underwriting

80% of banking data is unstructured and sitting idle. AI can now unlock it for richer customer profiles and personalized experiences at scale.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Jaya Gupta

A System of Agents brings service as software to life

Software is no longer a tool for organizing work: it's becoming the worker itself. How builders can tap into the $4.6T services as software opportunity.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Nico Stainfeld

Banking Reimagined: How generative AI reshapes the customer banking journey

Banks today struggle with two seemingly incompatible realities: stubbornly low customer satisfaction and high service costs. They've invested massive amounts of time and capital in technology to help. Has it worked? Will it?

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Why OpenAI's $157B valuation misreads AI's future

I break down the logic behind the company's towering price tag and why I think the most valuable AI companies have yet to be built.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Steve Vassallo

The Path Forward for Multimodal AI with Darius Lam, Founder and CEO of NEX

Welcome to AI in the Real World! I'm Andrew Han, a partner at Foundation Capital, and I'll be your host today. I work closely with technical founders who are building software to solve hard, valuable problems.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Adapt and Win in Enterprise Software

Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, has guided the cloud content management platform from a dorm room project into a publicly traded company with over $1B in annual revenue. In his second appearance on B2BaCEO, Aaron reflects on his founder journey, sharing how Box capitalized on cloud computing and their recent push to integrate generative AI.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Leo Lu

,

Jaya Gupta

Overhauling logistics with AI: a $79 billion opportunity

LLMs and computer vision will knock out manual logistics tasks, from price quoting to packing automation. 

News

Sid Trivedi

Our Investment in Prime Security: Turbocharging Product Security Teams

Today, Prime Security emerged from stealth to introduce the public beta of its Prime Product Security Platform and the $6M seed round led by Foundation Capital. We were the first investor in Prime Security, and I’ve personally been on the board of directors since inception, working closely with the founders for several months before incubating the company at the beginning of this year.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

Founding-Employee fit: know who to hire when 

I recently wrote about founder-market fit—where a founder must authentically understand themselves, their company, and the market conditions in which they’re building. Success here comes from knowing yourself and how you want to (and need to!) run your business given the situation your company is in. 

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

To scale to $100M ARR, "Owner Mode" beats "Founder Mode"

I weigh in on the recent debate and outline a third path - “owner mode” - that allows startups to scale without losing what makes them special.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

Founder-Market fit: knowing yourself leads to success 

Recently, I was listening to a podcast from the Yale admissions office where the hosts discussed the importance of students expressing their authentic selves in applications. In many essays, students try to represent themselves as what they think the admissions office wants—but application reviewers are able to sniff this out pretty clearly, and that can lead to an unsuccessful outcome. 

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

Shock-proofing supply chain with AI: a $62 billion opportunity

With core segments of the supply chain technologically underserved, we see massive potential in three areas.

News

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

A battle-tested founder tackles security for AI

Foundation Capital’s investment in Acuvity combines two of the firm’s most deeply-held convictions.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

The AI Hype: $600B question or $4.6T+ opportunity?

As summer draws to a close, a familiar debate has reignited with renewed intensity. Are we witnessing the dawn of a new technological era? Or are we caught in yet another tech bubble?

News

Ashu Garg

Leading NEX’s $3.5M seed round: Next-generation visual foundation models

I met Darius Lam for the first time over ramen in Mountain View. Within minutes of meeting him, it was clear that he was a razor sharp technologist and had an endlessly enthusiastic, infectious energy about him. 

Perspectives

Jaya Gupta

,

Ashu Garg

The Observability Crisis

We've inadvertently created a maze of complexity and cost in observability. How did this happen?

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

Goodbye AIOps: welcome AgentSREs—the next $100B opportunity

 We've seen countless buzzwords come and go. "AIOps" is the latest in a long line of catchy but ultimately misguided terms that fail to capture the true potential of AI  in the world of IT ops and observability.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Steve Vassallo

Building the World's Fastest AI Chip with Cerebras Systems' Co-founder and CTO Sean Lie

Welcome to "AI in the Real World." I'm Steve Vassallo, a General Partner at Foundation Capital. In this series, we talk with leading AI researchers about their groundbreaking work and how it's being applied in real businesses today.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Reflections on 16 years in venture capital

Goodbye AIOps: welcome AgentSREs—the next $100B opportunity

Enterprise

Perspectives

Jaya Gupta

Docket: from idea to investment in 20 days 

A serendipitous meeting with a serial entrepreneur led to a bet on Docket, one of Foundation's speediest investments to date.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Joanne Chen

What's Next After Transformers

I talk with Recursal AI founder Eugene Cheah about RWKV, a new architecture for AI.

News

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

A Silver Age of AI innovation

AI advances have converged with a massive global demographic shift to lift senior health tech.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

3 breakthroughs driving AI forward, from Regie.ai founder Srinath Sridhar

3 breakthroughs driving AI forward, from Regie.ai founder Srinath Sridhar

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Databricks vs. Snowflake: What their rivalry reveals about AI's future

I explore the competition between these two data powerhouses and what it says about where enterprise AI is headed.

Enterprise

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

Beyond LLMs: Building magic

These 3 innovations will drive the next wave of AI.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Build a Multi-Billion-Dollar Software Business

With Mohit Aron, Founder of Cohesity

Enterprise

News

Sid Trivedi

Our investment in AirMDR: Closing the cyber inequity gap

A product and GTM strategy discussion with Kumar Saurabh and Foundation Capital Partner Sid Trivedi in Palo Alto.

Perspectives

Foundation Capital

Call for applications: AI startups ready to boost developer productivity

We’re partnering with Turing to look for startups that can truly enhance engineering productivity with AI—not theoretically, but today. 

News

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Cerebras lands on the TIME100 Most Influential Companies list 

Andrew Feldman explains an extremely difficult problem in relatively simple terms. He’s the Co-Founder and CEO of Cerebras, which develops specialized hardware and software systems to advance AI workloads. 

Enterprise

Perspectives

Sid Trivedi

Our investment in Stacklet: building cloud that scales

Foundation Capital Partner Sid Trivedi, with Travis Stanfield and Kapil Thangavelu on their first Stacklet trip to San Francisco in July 2021.

B2BaCEO

News

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Graduating from Series A: How to get to $10M ARR

I unpack the second phase of startup growth: scaling from $1M to $10M ARR. I break down its two main steps: evolving from founder to founder-CEO and transforming GTM into a well-oiled machine.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Joanne Chen

The Promise of Multi-Agent AI

In this post, I share learnings from my conversation with Chi Wang, a principal researcher at Microsoft and the creator of AutoGen.

Events

Sid Trivedi

IT + Security RSA 2024 Happy Hour

San Francisco felt more like NYC as over 50,000 attendees descended downtown for the RSA Conference.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

Samsara's Co-Founder Sanjit Biswas on How to Grow from Ph.D. to Two-Time Startup CEO

Sanjit and I discuss his journey from grad student researcher to the founder of two major startup successes: Samsara, which recently hit $1B in ARR, and Meraki, acquired by Cisco for $1.2B.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Where AI is Headed in 2025: A Builder’s Guide

It’s no longer just about training bigger and bigger models. I chart the growing shifts toward inference and compound AI systems and explain what they mean for founders.

Enterprise

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Jaya Gupta

AI leads a service as software paradigm shift

AI's push into the services market represents a $4.6 trillion opportunity.

News

Ashu Garg

Anvilogic's breakout moment: A founder's tenacity pays off

Cybersecurity startup Anvilogic faced plenty of hurdles. Thanks to a tenacious founder and pointers from Foundation Capital, the company is set to break out, announcing a momentous $45 million in Series C funding.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Nico Stainfeld

The New Fintech Frontier

​Financial services businesses are particularly sensitive to the macro environment—when the raw material is capital, the engine can shut off in a flash. In 2023, interest rates rose, inflation increased, and general economic uncertainty led to a correction of valuations and a general feeling of caution by most investors. 

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

How to go from $0 to $1M ARR

Bringing a startup idea to life is rarely a linear journey. Instead, it’s an iterative process of discovery, validation, and refinement—less like following a neat roadmap and more like trying to find your way to the center of a tornado. 

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Win Your First Enterprise Customer

My guest today is Doug Winter, the founder and CEO of Seismic, a leading enterprise sales enablement platform. Today, Seismic has a team of 1,500 people and nearly $400 million in recurring revenue.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

,

Jaya Gupta

Beyond RPA: How LLMs are ushering in a new era of intelligent process automation

At its core, every business is a collection of processes. From lead generation and customer acquisition to financial planning and procurement, these processes are interconnected, with the outputs of one providing the inputs for another. As a business grows, so does its number of processes, creating an intricate network of data flows and dependencies.

News

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

Leading Tennr’s $3.25M Seed Round: An Investment in Founders

Foundation Capital invests in amazing founders. Over the course of eight months, we watched Tennr’s founders iterate, learn, and execute—resulting in us leading the company’s $3.25M seed round.

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

$100M in ARR is the best north star for startup success. Here's how founders can get there.

I revisit the storied "unicorn" status, now a decade old. I propose a more rigorous benchmark for startup success, $100M in ARR, and outline the concrete steps that founders can take to reach it.

Perspectives

Foundation Capital

Why 2024 Will Be the Year of Inference

If 2023 was the year of large language model (LLM) training, we believe 2024 will be all about LLM inference — developers taking models and putting them into production for real-world applications.

AI

AI in the Real World

Podcasts

Joanne Chen

The Future of Generative AI Agents

In the coming months, I’ll be hosting a series of in-depth conversations with leading AI researchers where we’ll explore how state-of-the-art models are being applied in the real world.

News

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Cohesity: winning the $40B+ data security & management market

Cohesity announced its intent to merge with the data protection business from secure, multi-cloud data management platform Veritas—giving enterprises a unified platform to manage and extract insights from data using AI.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Gracie Zaro

Where is All the Differentiation in Fintech x AI?

With large sums of venture money pouring into anything “AI” (just check out YC’s winter 2024 batch), we have a growing number of copilots, agents, APIs and foundational models serving any given vertical. Name the point solution and you’ll likely find a swath of options promising to improve efficiency and insight.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Nico Stainfeld

From Idea to Integration: Four Steps for Founders Integrating AI

Advances in Generative AI have unlocked an explosion of AI use-cases, making shiny-object syndrome a real concern for founders. This challenges founders to filter through a mountain of ideas to identify the use-cases that align with business goals and constraints.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Ten AI Insights from Databricks, Anyscale, and Microsoft

I journey through the B2BaCEO archive and surface ten AI learnings from some of my most influential guests.

Perspectives

Sid Trivedi

Our Investment in Neurelo: Making Databases Easy Again

Today, Neurelo emerged from stealth to announce the general availability of its cloud data API platform and the $5M seed round that we led.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Nico Stainfeld

A Framework for Identifying High-Impact AI Use Cases with Tennr

At our Fintech x AI PortCo Summit, Trey Holterman, co-founder and CEO of Tennr, shared a practical framework for thinking through exactly these types of challenges. Drawing on the team at Tennr's expertise in leveraging AI to automate complex tasks, Trey's framework empowers founders to evaluate and select high-value AI use cases.

Enterprise

News

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Investing in Infield: Dependency Management on Autopilot 

Today, we are excited to announce Infield’s $3M seed funding, and the general availability of its dependency management platform across Javascript, Python, Typescript, and Ruby (with Java coming soon)! Infield is solving a complex and growing (but often overlooked) problem for software engineers — and we're thrilled to lead its seed round and share Infield with the world today.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Decoding AGI

I explain why we need to understand this technology before we rush to regulate it. I share insights from my conversation with AI pioneer Naveen Rao on the path to achieving it.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Shape the Future of AI

My guest this month is Naveen Rao, the co-founder of MosaicML and current head of generative AI at Databricks.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

A technical history of blockchain design, innovation, and narratives: Part III

In the previous installment of our three-part history of blockchain innovation, we explored how Ethereum introduced programmability, Proof of Stake, and a flurry of new energy to blockchain. In the last part of the series, we’ll discuss Solana’s origins, accomplishments, and our expectations for it as the leading next-generation chain. We’ll then wrap up the series by weighing Solana versus Ethereum and reflecting on the space as a whole.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

A technical history of blockchain design, innovation, and narratives: Part II

In the first part of this three-part series on blockchain’s evolution across networks, we dove into what influences these evolutions, what technical innovations led to Bitcoin’s broader market adoption and dominance as a store-of-value L1, and what Bitcoin’s hallmarks mean for its future. In this part, we’ll do the same for Ethereum. Specifically, what distinguishes it from Bitcoin, the trade-offs to its technological leaps, and the implications this has for builders in its ecosystem.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

A technical history of blockchain design, innovation, and narratives: Part I

This historical analysis helps new founders decide where to build by exploring each network’s technical innovations in their historical context. Foundation Capital has been investing in — and rooting for — this space for ten years. Our deep, long-term involvement means we’ve developed a time-tested view of how major L1s have achieved their current dominance and how their initial technical accomplishments will define them going forward.

Perspectives

Jaya Gupta

,

Ashu Garg

Year One of Generative AI: Six Key Trends

Just over one year has passed since the release of ChatGPT. In the intervening twelve-odd months, it’s become abundantly clear that generative AI represents a fundamental platform shift.

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

Celebrating Rover's Acquisition by Blackstone

Today we celebrate Rover's acquisition by Blackstone for a remarkable $2.3 billion. It is not just a victory for employees and shareholders but a testament to the vision and resilience of an outstanding management team combined with the power of a high-functioning marketplace.

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Is OpenAI the Next Netscape?

This weekend was one to remember for those actively invested in the future of AI. In this special edition of B2BaCEO, I’ll summarize what unfolded (as of Monday, November 20 at 5 pm PT).

Steve Vassallo

A New “Golden Age” for Alternative Lending

As the market tentatively rebounds from rate hikes and inflationary pressures, a major opportunity is emerging in LendingTech—a field that many of you, our readers and partners, have been journeying with us. Lenders today face a new reality—one where innovation isn't just a buzzword but a survival kit. 

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Incumbents vs. Startups: The Showdown Over Generative AI

I explore the debate over who benefits most from generative AI—incumbents or startups—and share where I think startups have an edge. I then dive deeper with a leading AI founder, Robert Nishihara.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Power the AI Boom

In this episode of B2BaCEO, I speak with Robert Nishihara, co-founder and CEO of Anyscale. Anyscale’s aspiration is to build the fastest, most cost-efficient infrastructure for running LLMs and AI workloads. When it is successful, Anyscale will be to the AI era what Microsoft was for the PC era: the underlying operating system on which all AI applications are developed and run.

Perspectives

Foundation Capital

The Data Hub and Spoke: Data Infrastructure “3.0” for the Age of Generative AI

Over the past decade, the term “modern data stack” has come into prominence with the rise of cloud-native software and an increasingly smart, connected world.

AI

News

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

Beyond Doomsday: Why AI Promises a Brighter Future

This fall, I had the honor of speaking at TEDx about the immense promise I see in artificial intelligence.

AI

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Why Generative AI Needs Design

Mention generative AI in a crowded room, and reactions fall somewhere on a spectrum from worry to wonder. Venture capitalists—particularly those like me who work with founders at the very first stages of company creation—are fond of saying that we’re still in the “early days” of a technology’s life cycle.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

A Founder's Guide to 2024 Planning

I advise founders on planning for 2024 amid intensely troubling world events. I recap my discussion with Matei Zaharia of Databricks at our Enterprise CEO Dinner. I spotlight our NY Tech Week event.

Fintech

AI

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

,

Nico Stainfeld

Fintech x AI: Practical Lessons for Founders

Since the start of the year, a common question has come up in our conversations with portfolio companies: “I know that I should be using AI, but how do I get started, and where should I focus my efforts?” To address this, we organized our first “Fintech x AI Portco summit” this summer.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Build, Scale, and Sell a Startup

My guest this month is Tracy Young, the co-founder and former CEO of PlanGrid, a productivity tool for construction companies. From going through YC and losing a cofounder to cancer, to being acquired by Autodesk for $875 million, Tracy has picked up many valuable lessons that other founders and CEOs can learn from.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

My Reflections on My Summer in India's Silicon Valley

I explain why the enterprise software industry will revolve around two poles—Silicon Valley and Bangalore—by 2030. I podcast with Tracy Young, co-founder of TigerEye and PlanGrid. And more!

AI

Fintech

Christine Hendrickson

Fintech x AI PortCo Summit

On June 28th, 2023, we hosted our Fintech x AI PortCo Summit to help executives across the Foundation Capital Portfolio answer the question “What should I be doing about AI?”

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

How Perplexity.ai Is Pioneering The Future Of Search

For the past two decades, search engines like Google and Bing have been our primary gateways to the internet. Yet, over time, their signature “10 blue links” have been increasingly buried by advertisements and algorithm-optimized content. Driven by ad-based revenue models, these sites often feel more like auctioneers of users’ attention than trustworthy guides to the World Wide Web.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

B2BaCEO: August 2023 Newsletter

I share anecdotal learnings and unpack three industry reports on the state of generative AI adoption. I plug my latest post on the enterprise LLM workflow. I introduce our new EIR, Mahmoud Arram.

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

The Momento Moment: Bringing Next-Gen Auto Insurance to Mexico

Today we’re announcing our investment in Momento Seguros, a new full-stack auto-insurance carrier for Mexico. Memento is bringing the digital-first offering that consumers in other emerging markets already enjoy and expect across verticals. 

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

The Mexican Auto Insurance Market

We’ve announced our investment in Momento Seguros, a new fullstack auto carrier for Mexico. Here, we share more about our investment thesis on the market landscape for others considering building / investing in this exciting space.

AI

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

,

Jaya Gupta

Applying Generative AI to Enterprise Use Cases: A Step-by-Step Guide

When it comes to generative AI, the only thing that’s constant is the speed at which this technology is changing. Over the past few months, we’ve spoken in-depth with a diverse range of builders and technologists who are exploring generative AI.

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

Faster, Better, More: An Open Letter to the Federal Reserve

Dear Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Congratulations on your recent launch of the FedNow System for instant payments! Government support has been an important component to the success of faster payments across the world, including India’s United Payments Interface (UPI), Brazil’s PIX, and the UK’s Faster Payment System. But merely lending your support is insufficient. 

Events

Foundation Capital

Super-Secret Fintech Dinners

Sign up here to request an invitation to our hush-hush fintech dinner series. Each month — at different, cool locations in SF or NYC — we’ll be hosting a small, curated gathering of founders and operators who are redefining financial innovation.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

B2BaCEO: July 2023 Newsletter

I weigh in on the contest between Databricks and Snowflake, as each vies to own the end-to-end enterprise AI workflow. In short: It’s data all the way down.

Perspectives

Rodolfo Gonzalez

,

Alejandra Martinez

Clivi: Managing Chronic Diseases in Latin America

Our strategy for investing in LatAm is defined by two core ideas: (1) backing the most ambitious founders, and (2) backing projects leveraging the rapid penetration of Internet-connected smartphones to build massive user bases via tech-driven business models.

AI

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

Top Takeaways from Our Generative AI “Unconference”

In early May, we hosted our inaugural, invite-only Generative AI “Unconference” in San Francisco. The event convened over eighty of the top (human!) minds in AI, including founders, researchers, and industry experts, for an energizing afternoon of group discussions about building successful AI companies

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

AI x Blockchain: The Next Level

Blockchain and artificial intelligence: the two most era-defining technologies of our time. Each has been a mighty, groundshifting force in its own right, like Godzilla and King Kong in their respective domains. But from time to time, Kong and Godzilla have teamed up when facing a monster that neither could take down on their own.

B2BaCEO

AI

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

B2BaCEO Newsletter: June 2023

I share takeaways from FC's inaugural Generative AI "Unconference." I announce our Generative AI 25 list! I share my latest pod with AI pioneer Matei Zaharia. I debrief our event at AGI House.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Deploy AI in Your Company

If you’re not hardcore about AI, then stop the podcast now — because this episode for real technology nerds. Ashu’s guest is Matei Zaharia, CTO and cofounder of Databricks, and a professor of computer science at Stanford University.

Perspectives

Nico Stainfeld

,

Charles Moldow

The Emperor Has No Tech: Why the Insurance Industry Desperately Needs Startups

When Lloyd's of London faced the unique challenge of insuring a million-pound reward offered by a Scottish whisky firm for the capture of the Loch Ness Monster or protecting the precious legs of 1940s starlet Betty Grable, they turned to their underwriters to assess the risk and determine an appropriate premium to charge.

Events

Foundation Capital

Generative AI Unconference

On May 10th, 2023, we hosted our inaugural, invite-only Generative AI “Unconference” in San Francisco. The event convened over eighty of the top (human!) minds in AI, including founders, researchers, and industry experts, for an energizing afternoon of small, group discussions about building successful AI companies.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

The State of Enterprise AI Adoption

I explore two major AI reports and weigh in on a leaked Google memo. I offer three takeaways from this year’s RSA conference. I share my conversation with Microsoft’s Chief Strategy Officer.

Events

Christine Hendrickson

AI Unconference

On May 10th, 2023, we hosted our inaugural, invite-only Generative AI “Unconference” in San Francisco.

Events

Sid Trivedi

IT + Security RSA 2023 Happy Hour

This year, RSA, the world’s leading cybersecurity conference, was back with a bang. Over 40,000 people attended: a more than 50% increase from last year.

Perspectives

Foundation Capital

Collaboration as Competitive Strategy

What the heck is this in my inbox, you might be asking, yet another piece of content marketing? Why yes! This is the first installment of Foundation Capital’s new quarterly fintech newsletter. Our aim is for this mass mailer to be roughly 19% more nutritious and to the point than the usual flotsam. 

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Capture the AI Moment

As everyone listening to this podcast knows, the release of ChatGPT last November ushered in a new age of AI and catalyzed a wave of AI startups. For this episode of B2BaCEO, Ashu goes deep on AI with Bobby Yerramilli-Rao, former serial entrepreneur and investor, and current Chief Strategy Officer at Microsoft.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Software ate the world. Now AI is coming for software.

Software ate the world. Now AI is coming for software. I chart three implications of this paradigm shift. I give a primer on large graphical models (LGMs). And I recap my partner Sid’s SXSW discussion with cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch.

Events

Sid Trivedi

Digital Warfare with One of the World's Greatest Hackers

Last month, amid the chaos of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, my friend Dmitri Alperovitch and I found ourselves preparing to take the stage at SXSW. Our topic was another mounting, yet rarely discussed, threat: digital warfare. 

Perspectives

Foundation Capital

Passion, Purpose, and Conviction: Why I’m Joining Foundation Capital

One of my childhood heroes, the legendary Gordon Moore, passed away at the end of March. Moore, who co-founded Intel and developed the eponymous law on microchip innovation, was among the most influential builders and thinkers in Silicon Valley. His contributions to semiconductor technology helped give the Valley its name. In many ways, I have him to thank for where I am now. 

Perspectives

Foundation Capital

Cash Management for Startups

The events of March 2023 will change the way many startup companies think about managing their cash. Our recommendations are simple, and they are not unique.

Fintech

Perspectives

Charles Moldow

A Local’s Guide to Fintech Investing

Over the past five years, everyone could—and did!—make money in fintech investing. When valuations are skyrocketing, and seed to Series A graduation rates are approaching 100%, even the greenest investor can look like a genius.

Perspectives

Jaya Gupta

,

Ashu Garg

Foundation Model Ops: Powering the Next Wave of Generative AI Apps

Late last year, we published our framework for the enterprise AI stack and gestured toward the potential of foundation models to advance innovation at each of its layers, from AI-optimized hardware, compute, and cloud on up.

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

Internet HQ

In 2019, only six percent of workers in the U.S. worked from home, and 75 percent had never done so. By fall 2020, around 54 percent of employed Americans were remote at least some of the time.

Perspectives

Joanne Chen

FC's Generative AI Challenge

At Foundation Capital, we’ve long had conviction that AI will be one of the defining technologies of our time: the catalyst for a new generation of software and, with it, a new generation of businesses.

Perspectives

Sid Trivedi

Our Investment in DevZero: Taking Developers to Cloud Nine

Having been on DevZero’s board of directors since day one, I wanted to offer a few thoughts on their product, why we invested, how we partnered, and the road ahead.

B2BaCEO

Perspectives

Ashu Garg

B2BaCEO: Newsletter, January 2023

I share AI predictions from CEOs of AI companies. I interview the one and only Frank Slootman. I introduce you to my partner Angus, a born entrepreneur. And I lay out Foundation Capital’s new enterprise AI stack.

B2BaCEO

Podcasts

Ashu Garg

How to Grow in a Bear Market

Beerud Sheth is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gupshup, a leading platform for cloud messaging. Prior to that he was the cofounder of what is now Upwork, a pioneer of online freelancing and remote work. Beerud took the slow and steady pace to winning the race, building two unicorns over 25 years.

News

LA Venture

LA Venture: Zach Noorani

Perspectives

Steve Vassallo

The Realm of Venture c. 2014

2015 is already off to a rip roaring start whether it’s holograms or drones or virtual reality, the trade winds of tech continue to blow at high speed.

Get insights directly to your inbox.

Set your newsletter preferences:

Set your newsletter preferences: