Keith Smith

🚨NEW EPISODE: Recorded live at FUTURE TITANS 2026 - Jeff Perry of Carta sat down with the iconic Seth Levine, co-founder of Foundry. Seth has been in venture for 25 years, built Foundry from scratch as an emerging manager himself, and has backed about 50 emerging manager funds through his fund of funds. He has genuinely seen every side of this table. They went deep on building Foundry, why VCs are in the influence business, not the decision business, and why the concentration problem in venture is not only bad for LPs, but also for the innovation ecosystem overall. And why Seth's new book, Capital Evolution, is so important for the future of America. 🎧 Links to listen... Apple: https://lnkd.in/ehQUQ2EM Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eU4FExpg

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Substack, a popular platform for writers and creators, has raised $100 million in funding, valuing the company at $1.1 billion, and is pivoting towards incorporating advertising as a complementary revenue stream to its existing subscription-only model. This strategic shift aims to diversify revenue streams for creators, increase average revenue per user, and provide a more comprehensive monetization framework. The integration of ads may lead to increased earnings for creators, but also raises concerns about content integrity and user experience. The move may prompt competitor platforms to reassess their own monetization strategies, potentially leading to a broader industry trend towards hybrid models. Substack's growth prospects and challenges, including balancing advertising with user experience, managing potential creator backlash, and navigating ad revenue sharing models, will be crucial in determining the platform's long-term success. The company's evolving approach may significantly influence the broader online publishing landscape, driving growth and experimentation in the creator economy. https://lnkd.in/eiK-cAhr

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Trying something new this week - a studio industry roundup with my take on what matters. The studio model is no longer an experiment being run in a handful of places. It is infrastructure being built across geographies, sectors, and institutional types. 5️⃣ stories from the past seven days:  1️⃣ OSS Ventures hit a EUR 40M first close on a EUR 75M follow-on fund -- capital raised specifically to back the 30 companies their studio created since 2019. The "build then fund" lifecycle is maturing. B'More Venture Studio with a similar thesis: studio operations first, then dedicated capital to scale what's working.  2️⃣ Delta40 raised $20M from 54 investors across 13 countries to launch Africa's first integrated venture studio and fund. The LP base is almost entirely DFIs and foundations. Impact capital is discovering the studio model as a deployment vehicle, something I seeing across geographies (conversations with Michael Bob Starr and Damias McDonald this week alone) 3️⃣ Start Holdings launched Start.vc out of NYC and Barcelona after a $200M EV infrastructure exit. Another operator-turned-studio-founder. This is the pattern we see quite often in our work at 9point8 -- experienced operators like Jason Goldsmith who've built and exited deciding the studio model is how they want to build next.  4️⃣ UBC HATCH admitted 10 new deep-tech spinouts for Winter 2026 -- mostly climate tech. University venture builders are quietly becoming one of the fastest-growing segments. Follow Evan Allen and Jaimie Testai to keep track of its rapid evolution.  5️⃣ The INVEST Act is advancing through the Senate. If passed, it expands qualifying VC fund size from $10M to $50M and loosens general solicitation rules for accelerator and university events. For studio-funds -- and for folks in the The Venture Studio Forum community tracking policy -- this could be the most significant capital formation legislation since the JOBS Act. If this roundup format is useful, I'll keep it going. What other noteworthy news hit your desk this week, and what stood out to you?

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💥 Metropolis Technologies Raises $𝟭.𝟲𝗕 💥 Funding comes in 2 rounds: $500M equity round led by LionTree and $1.1B from J.P. Morgan. Metropolis is now ���𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 $𝟱𝗕. With the fresh funding, the plan is to take their "recognition and payment-automation" tech beyond parking assets. This would include retail stores, drive-throughs, gas stations, hotels and partnerships with real estate/asset owner. Congrats to Alex Israel, Peter Fisher, Courtney Fukuda, Travis Kell, Ryan Hunt,Chris Sherman, Robert Bland, Paul Rooney, Lookman Olusanya and the rest of the Metropolis family. #fundraise #parkinginvestment #parking #parkingindustry #metropolois Parking Today Media Parking Network B.V. National Parking Association International Parking & Mobility Institute (IPMI) Tim Maloney Advisory Tim Maloney Reservations Lab

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Love this - AI is the Oppenheimer moment for marketing. It fundamentally collapses the time and cost of production. A $2.5 million campaign that used to take four months can now be delivered for $500,000 in four weeks. Legacy firms that charge based on hours with the 'time-driven' model are existentially threatened by this.

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Every #VentureStudio GP knows some portfolio bets won’t hit. That's expected - and it's one of the reasons studios are such a powerful vehicle for innovation. And while a venture's failure might be what's visible to the outsider, what keeps them up at night isn’t failure at the venture level — it’s failure at the systemic level within the studio. One bad entity design. One IP misstep. One governance gap. That’s how studio operations fall apart. We break down how to spot (and fix) these cracks before they turn into fault lines in our latest paper, "The GP Dilemma" - DM me and I'll send you a copy!

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Investor communication has quietly become a liability surface. As scale increases, inconsistency, misstatement risk, and narrative drift compound faster than human oversight can control. This is not a tooling problem. It is an infrastructure problem. That is the category we are building.

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Investors (esp deep tech investors) generally think about things/bet on "layers": the application, the infrastructure, the model. I think that's becoming the wrong way to look at it? The real opportunity is in the feedback loop *between* the layers. A new social app creates demand for new hardware, which in turn demands a new kind of intelligence - I'm calling it "The Agency Loop". My latest newsletter explores this thesis through three signals: the "weaponized transgression" of Cluey, the AI-driven materials science in Nature, and the architectural critiques of Kenneth Stanley. Bet the loop, not the layer :) You can read the full analysis here: https://lnkd.in/ggdVGEda #vibecap #vibecapital #vc #deeptech #AI #cluely

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New from Buyers x Builders 🚀 Dispatches from the frontier of enterprise AI. Every week, Dave Ambrose interviews 2-3 startup founders building the enterprise workflows and infrastructure of the future. First up: Paul Klein IV from Browserbase on automating agentic workflows. It's called Dispatch. It's weekly. And if you want to know what's actually being built (not just what's being hyped), this is it. Link in comments. Let us know what you think 👇 #BuyersxBuilders #EnterpriseAI #AgenticAI #Procurement

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The Headline family is experiencing incredible momentum, and today our portfolio company DeepIP is announcing a $25M Series B, bringing total funding to $40M.  This is the kind of company that doesn’t just add AI to a workflow, but it sets the standard for an entire category. The momentum speaks for itself: 1️⃣ 10x ARR growth in < 18 months 2️⃣ Trusted by 400+ law firms and leading corporate IP teams globally 3️⃣ 2M+ chats on the DeepIP platform We’ve had the chance to back FX (Francois-Xavier) L. and Edouard D., leading their Seed round with Headline. Watching them take on a problem as complex and high-stakes as patent work has been genuinely impressive. And working with them has been an absolute pleasure: these 2 are coupling very high ambition and humility. Tech built in Europe, but opening the US office very early and FX starting a life in NYC with his family with 0 hesitation in order to build a global category leader in the IP industry. What convinced me early is still what stands out today: patent teams don’t need another standalone AI tool. They need something that fits the way the work actually happens: documents, long-running matters, multiple stakeholders, and zero room for sloppy context handoffs. Big congrats to the whole DeepIP team + Korelya Capital, Balderton & Serena Proud that we’re doubling down at Headline and continuing the support for what’s next!

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I’m Andrew Clark, founder of Summit Bullion. I am proposing a low-risk pilot for the State of Florida to hold allocated gold in U.S. depositories with daily public proofs, monthly CPA attestations, and scripted redemption drills—a modern, transparent version of a depository receipt in digital tokenized form. Title remains with the State at all times; no rehypothecation. Tokenized gold could help the transferability of physical gold to better align with Florida's new HB 999 (2025) program initiatives. Two reasons the timing is right in Florida: Legal-tender pathway: Florida enacted HB 999 (2025) recognizing gold and silver as legal tender (effective 2026), creating a clear policy signal for sound-money infrastructure. Tax treatment: Florida also removed the $500 threshold—all bullion sales are now tax-exempt—broadening market access and market depth in-state. Pilot mechanics (state first, retail later): Custody: Allocated bars in U.S. depositories; serial-numbered; dual control; insurance. Transparency: Public dashboard (circulating supply, bar lists, variance policy), auto-pauses on out-of-tolerance. Transfers: Instant on-chain transfers between approved state wallets; conventional wire/ACH rails remain as fallback. Redemption-first: Physical redemption remains the primary right; drills executed on a cadence to prove it. Income angle (optional, policy-gated): If permitted under Florida’s investment statutes, the State could provision limited liquidity to the regulated secondary market and earn a pro-rata share of transaction fees, without surrendering title to its metal. Parameters (caps, slippage bands, kill switches) would be codified, and all counterparties are KYC’d with provenance controls. Use cases we can enable in phase 2 (subject to the HB 999 timeline and agency adoption): Agency-to-agency transfers (treasury ops, escrow/permits). Vendor settlements via approved payment partners. Wallets for municipalities or state funds with policy guardrails. Blaise Ingoglia State of Florida City of Jacksonville

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With the launch of Claude Co-Work (and tools like it), I feel like every week in 2025 carries the weight of a decade. Some thoughts: 1. The technology is genuinely different this time. Claude Co-Work isn't an incremental improvement — it's a 100x leap over what existed 12 months ago. If you haven't used it yet, stop what you're doing. 2. Markets. Software and advisory businesses face an existential reset .Not decline. Reset. Consulting, legal, accounting, financial advisory — these industries aren't disappearing, but they're heading toward 80% fewer people doing the same work. KPMG just told auditors to cut costs by 50%. This is the beginning, not the exception. 3. Real-world industries aren't safe either — they're just next. Industrials, energy, consumer goods, travel all have a natural (physical) moat. But consumer brands being built today are doing it with 80-90% less headcount than their predecessors. Any company older than 6 months that isn't adapting is already behind. Jack Dorsey's Block cutting 50% of its workforce despite strong growth is a preview, not an outlier. 4. The new bottleneck is energy, not labor. Once labor becomes abundant and cheap, the constraint shifts. Whoever can produce energy at scale and reasonable cost will have the most important infrastructure asset of the next 20 years. 5. The job market is being structurally changed for good and this is not a minor adjustment. Bankers, lawyers, accountants, software engineers — some roles will survive the way painters survived the printing press. Most won't. The talent that moves fastest onto new tools will capture a disproportionate share of the upside. We're entering a period of massive productivity unlocks and equally massive collateral damage. The future is bright. The transition is not going to be comfortable. Go test out some of those new tools.

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Great conversation between Peter Diamandis and Dave Blundin. One point from Dave is especially important for operators and investors, and it often gets lost in the hype: AI drives the cost of intelligence toward zero. Not literally zero. But low enough that it stops being the constraint. His nuance matters. Even in a world of cheap models, intelligence isn’t free. Tokens are still scarce when you’re running multiple agents, grounding outputs, reducing hallucinations, and coordinating real workflows.  For SMB owners and Sponsors looking at the investment case, here’s why that matters: The marginal cost of AI inference is falling exponentially, and over time will be trivial compared to the value created when intelligence is embedded inside operations. SMB owner/operators can deploy at scale to aggressively eliminate bottlenecks with little risk of future cost pressure. Sponsors will see that once access is democratized, execution becomes the moat. Those who build a repeatable model for operational intelligence will have an asset that compounds across a portfolio.

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Broadcasters didn’t lose the audience. The audience outgrew the operating model built to reach them. And here’s the part most underestimate: Gen Z and Millennials now are the majority — and they spend 1.5–4× more on streaming, content, and eCommerce than older cohorts. This is the most valuable audience in media history, and they are accessible everywhere any time.. But they don’t tune in — they flow: short-form → YouTube → OTT. And the most counterintuitive insight? Your archive — not your newest show — is your biggest untapped growth engine. Algorithms reward relevance, not recency. Broadcasters that align with how the New Majority already behaves will lead the next decade. Check out my latest blog (and download the full white paper for the blue print operating model)

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Even the most skeptical voices are starting to acknowledge the value of LLM generated code. Not as a replacement for deep expertise, but as a practical tool for acceleration, exploration, and iteration. When someone as famously disciplined about code quality as Linus Torvalds publicly acknowledges that AI generated code can be useful, it signals a shift worth paying attention to. The takeaway is not that AI writes better software than humans, but that good engineers are learning where and how these tools create leverage. https://lnkd.in/eFbNFqYN

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Exciting to see the incredible progress from Peptone, a company we’ve backed since the early days at Walden Catalyst Ventures. Peptone just announced Peptron-O, developed in collaboration with NVIDIA — a groundbreaking AI engine that brings ensemble-first structure prediction to the disordered proteome. This is a major scientific and technological milestone, targeting one of the most complex and previously inaccessible areas of biology: intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs). By shifting the paradigm from static models to dynamic ensembles, Peptron-O opens new doors for drug discovery — especially in areas like oncology and neurodegeneration, where IDPs play critical roles. We’re proud to have supported Peptone on their mission to build the infrastructure for next-gen molecular physics. Their work is a great example of how deep tech can transform life sciences. Read more about the announcement: 👉 https://lnkd.in/eygnKQ67 #AI #Biotech #DrugDiscovery #DeepTech #LifeSciences #WaldenCatalyst #Peptone #NVIDIA #PeptronO with: Kamil Tamiola, Ph.D. Francis Ho Shankar Chandran Nicolas Autret Andy Kau Roni Hefetz Victoria Slivkoff

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