Simon Anderson

Slingshot Insights acquires Noble Insights Exciting to see consolidation in the expert network space. This will likely lead to more innovation, more proprietary content via transcripts and surveys and the opportunity to see a bigger expert network emerge.

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Sustained ~252–291 GiB/s of HBM memory throughput on H100s under decode load — essentially hitting the hardware roofline. This matters because HBM throughput, not FLOPs, is the real bottleneck in LLM inference. By keeping memory nearly fully saturated, I’ve unlocked far higher efficiency and throughput than standard engines. The result: 0.9–1.36M tokens/sec with ~0.1 ms first-token latency  #AI #LLM #GPURouter #H100 #Inference #CostEfficiency #Innovation #DeepLearning #AIInfrastructure #HighPerformanceComputing NVIDIA AMD OpenAI Google Shilpa Kolhatkar Keith Strier a16z speedrun

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An engaging read from Olivia Levine on why software engineering is no longer becoming the safe career bet from Greenfield Partners: What happens when 30% of production code is AI-generated? The review layer becomes the new battleground. As AI absorbs code production, the bottleneck has moved to human judgment, and a new category of "integrity platforms" is emerging to own this control point.

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🚨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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Thrilled for OVNI Capital to be backing RIFT in a pre-seed round led by AlleyCorp (Luc Ryan-Schreiber). Rift is building the first real-time aerial intelligence network, a new layer of infrastructure for persistent, on-demand visibility where it matters most. This funding will scale production of their autonomous stations, accelerate deployment in high-stakes environments, and expand the team leading the next phase. 🗞️ Explore the full story: - StartupMafia: https://lnkd.in/dARrg25N - BFM Business (FR): https://lnkd.in/eADSUsn7 - Les Échos (FR): https://lnkd.in/eFG3zAy5 👨‍🚀 Join the mission → https://lnkd.in/erm_SrTG

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Ruthless velocity is our core cultural value. We will work more and more efficient hours than anyone. Nobody gets hired unless they were the psycho who outworked everyone at their last job. These hours become ever more efficient as the AI dev tools, such as Claude Code, continue to mature. Great feature here of Vulcan Technologies’s use of AI not only in product but in dev. Our completely non-threatening “opponents” still code the old fashioned way or worse offer only laughably slow and expensive non-technical consultants. We offer a team of consultant engineers, all trained at the top schools and firms, and now also equipped with the top tools.

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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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Worth paying attention to... Anthropic vs. Cursor. While Cursor was paying Anthropic hundreds of millions in API fees to power its AI code editor, Anthropic seems to have studied exactly what developers wanted, then launched Claude Code to "eat" their biggest distribution partner. The result. Claude Code hit $1B ARR in just six months and has already surged past $2.5B, proving that when you're a "wrapper" startup, you're often just paying your provider to learn how to replace you. Keep an eye on Cursor layoffs...

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Crosby, a new kind of AI-powered law firm, has launched out of stealth with $5.8 million in a seed round. Crosby is not just selling software; it is a registered law firm that uses its own internally developed AI, overseen by its own hired lawyers, to provide legal services. The firm is initially focused on providing fast and affordable contract-review services to startups, promising to review new client contracts in under an hour, a process that typically takes weeks. The round was led by Sequoia Capital and Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from a host of high-profile angels, including the founders of Ramp, Opendoor, and Instacart. The funding will be used to scale its innovative model of combining proprietary AI with human legal expertise to fundamentally change how legal services are delivered. Congratulations to co-founders Ryan Daniels and John Sarihan. TechCrunch: https://lnkd.in/dTT3SMxt #LegalTech #AI #LawFirm #LegalServices #GenAI #SeedFunding #Sequoia #VentureCapital

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If you care about out-innovating China in the AI war, you need more efficient chips, not just brute force buildout for hot, inefficient chips and architecture. That’s why DCVC backed Mythic — up to 1000x the SWapC of NVIDIA’s 2028 roadmap for real time embedded and datacenter compute. Oh, and by the way, *made on American fabs with zero Taiwan supply chain dependency*… We can’t pour more concrete than China, and our grid interconnect workers don’t slave away under threat of being murdered for their organs. We need smaller, cooler, faster, smarter, more power efficient chips. Mythic is proving that *today* with live silicon.

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Big milestone for Firmable. We’ve raised $14m Series A led by Airtree. Sales has moved through a few big waves: intuition-led, CRM-led, data-led. We’re now entering the next one – intelligence-led sales. The opportunity isn’t just better data. It’s turning that data into clear direction and action, without adding more work for sales teams. That’s what we’re building at Firmable: a foundation of trusted external data, layered with intelligence that helps sellers know who to focus on and when. Led by Airtree, this round supports our expansion across Asia and into the US – and accelerates the build-out of AI agents that take the admin work off sales teams so they can focus on what they do best. Proud of the team, grateful to our customers and investors. We’re just getting started. Read the exclusive in the AFR. https://lnkd.in/gr66uknb Leigh Jasper | Tara Salmon | Karthik Venkatasubramanian| Chester Thompson| Chath Widanapathirana

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More layoffs announced as the economy remains uncertain and the slow (but increasing) march towards increasing ai/automation dominance continues. Neo-liberal capitalism is not equipped to deal with the social upheaval this will cause. In order to soften the blows, business and government leaders need to re-orient our system from income for labor towards income from assets, with more widespread asset ownership. At the national level, it looks like sovereign wealth funds, but at the local level, it’s increasing support and incentives for employee-owned businesses and co-ops, which have proven to be more resilient through economic shifts over time. https://lnkd.in/esXW4CKa

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In my earlier post this morning, the center of gravity was the vision for the future of law - and the obstacles that stand in its way. This excellent piece by Ben Chiriboga focuses on how the vision becomes reality (bearing in mind many of the concerns outlined by Quentin Solt). The economist in me - buried under the multi-decade layers of my legal experience, but persistently refusing to fade to black - immediately points out that the payoff structure in the legal market is several orders of magnitude more complex than Ben’s framework allows for (long-term and short-term economic, reputational, and even emotional considerations would need to be factored in), but - directionally - I could not agree more with the analysis. P.S. apologies to my network (and especially your loved ones!) for bringing not one but two long-reads to your attention on a holiday weekend, but if you are a legal tech aficionado, you can’t help spending some of your “heart emojis” on these kinds of texts. Happy Valentine’s Day!

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I’ve spoken to over 2 dozen MDs at PE firms I can confidently say that the arb of figuring out how to implement Vertical AI at portfolio companies is very real right now It will fundamentally change underwriting for those who can do it predictably and unlock generational returns. Most are aware they need to act. Very few have.

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Dashboards don’t create accountability. They create meetings. Charts get shared. Everyone nods. Action items get “noted”. Same problems. Next quarter. Accountability doesn’t come from visibility. It comes from systems — where ownership is clear and decisions can’t be ignored. I wrote a short note on why dashboards feel productive but rarely change behaviour — and what actually does. If your org has great dashboards but the same issues every review��� this will sound familiar. Dashboards Don’t Create Accountability — Systems Do: https://lnkd.in/gCGpm-VU

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Working with NRF to pursue our patent strategy is an important step in recognizing that proprietary AI systems and workflows are becoming a new form of intellectual property for modern firms. Great to partner with George, John McBride, and the team at Norton Rose Fulbright as we work at the frontier of how AI can transform investment decision-making in venture capital. At Decasonic, we believe the next generation of companies will reinvent with AI workflows and systems how organizations operate, how leaders make decisions, and how teams collaborate with intelligent systems. In going through this streamlined process, it's clear to me that many more startups should clarify their IP strategy. Our internally developed AI platform, RLEN, reflects that philosophy. We are building AI not to automate tasks and flourish outcomes, in collaborative ways for human and AI teammates. This enables our investors to test ideas, explore alternative perspectives, and reach deeper insights faster when navigating uncertainty. More broadly, we are seeing trailblazing work across industries and cities as leaders experiment with how AI can reshape communities, companies, and countries. Leadership with AI forever transforms. We are still in the early innings. Appreciate the partnership and collaboration from the Norton Rose Fulbright team as we continue inventing and innovating. Special shoutout to my colleague Abdul Al Ali who's listed as a co-inventor.

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Xona Space Systems has secured a landmark $92M Series B funding round, led by Craft Ventures with continued support from Seraphim Space and other top investors. This brings Xona’s total funding to over $150M as they accelerate their mission to rebuild global navigation with their groundbreaking Pulsar constellation in Low Earth Orbit. Earlier this month, Xona successfully launched Pulsar-0, their first production-class satellite, a huge milestone on the path from R&D to full commercial deployment. Pulsar’s 100x stronger, encrypted signals with centimetre-level precision will transform autonomy, critical infrastructure, defense, and more. Xona’s Pulsar constellation is changing the game with a commercial-grade satellite navigation system built in low Earth orbit that offers: 🛰️ 100x stronger signals for reliable coverage in urban canyons, under dense foliage, and indoors 🛰️Centimeter-level precision critical for self-driving vehicles, robotics, precision agriculture, and augmented reality 🛰️Built-in encryption and signal authentication to protect against spoofing and interference Huge congratulations to Brian Manning and the entire Xona team on this incredible achievement. We’re proud to continue supporting their journey! #SpaceTech #Navigation #LEO #Investment #Innovation #Seraphim #XonaSpaceSystems

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