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We first backed @cognition in 2024, when Scott and the team were building ahead of the frontier. @DevinAI's architecture anticipated capabilities the underlying models did not yet have.
We believed those capabilities would catch up, and that the harder challenge would be turning raw intelligence into finished enterprise work. AI would move from local to cloud and individual to collaborative, with harness engineering coordinating models, agents and humans into reliable execution.
That's increasingly what we’re seeing. Better models enable agents to operate over longer horizons and take on more complex, higher-value tasks, giving humans far greater leverage and broadening the range of enterprise work Cognition can reliably execute.
We’ve continued to double down as the team translated a remarkably clear thesis into incredible commercial traction, while showing a level of talent magnetism that's hard to overstate. It feels like every day another engineer with their own lore shows up to build alongside @ScottWu46, @russelljkaplan, @stevenkplus1 and @walden_yan...
Today it's @alexstamos. Welcome to the team!
Our latest on Cognition and the future of machine intelligence: 8vc.com/resources/comparativ…
“Is it good or bad?”
A deceptively simple question, and perhaps one of the most enduring “Kolicisms” at 8VC.
Founding Partner and CIO @AlexKolicich has been instrumental in shaping 8VC's investment philosophy, bringing remarkable intellectual range, independent judgment, and an uncanny ability to cut through complexity to identify what truly matters.
Fantastic profile of the “quiet force” behind so much of what we’ve built at 8VC.
The Quiet Force. My profile of @AlexKolicich is out.
Raised by a single mom in Hamilton. Google engineer. Peter Thiel’s math guy. Founding partner of 8VC.
“8VC is 8VC because of Alex.” I was told.
I spent months reporting his story in SF, Palo Alto and Orange County, talking with founders and the people who knew him at Clarium, Mithril and 8VC.
Highlights
- Peter Thiel playing blindfolded chess
- Turning down Geoffrey Hinton’s lab twice
- Dreaming about oil
- Back story on 8VC's investments in Quince, Cognition and Anduril
Link to read below.
8VC retweeted
We’ve raised a $45m Series A, co-led by
@foundersfund and The @OpenAI Startup Fund, to build cancer therapy that learns. Technology is rapidly changing medicine, but data loops and rapid adjustments are still largely missing. When you start cancer treatment, knowing whether what you’re doing is working is too slow. Clearly there is a better way. Build systems to watch cancer in real time, then feed that data into a system that itself can treat the disease. This seeds a future where, unlike drugs, we develop medicine that continuously learns to improve itself. We've been building neurotechnology and BCI platforms to do just that.
@coherenceneuro
The next generation of American manufacturing won't be built by replicating yesterday's factories. It will require fundamentally rethinking how we translate hardware innovation into production at scale.
Hardware products are evolving at an increasingly rapid pace, but the associated manufacturing processes remain a critical bottleneck. Every design iteration can require extensive engineering work to reconfigure assembly lines, slowing production and making domestic manufacturing prohibitively expensive.
Led by @bobmcgrewai, a longtime friend of 8VC, @Arda_Industries is tackling this challenge by applying AI to manufacturing engineering. Already deployed at @anduriltech, the technology is dramatically accelerating the translation of product designs into production, laying the foundation for a future of increasingly autonomous, adaptable factories.
We've long believed that some of the most consequential applications of AI will be in transforming the physical world. We're excited to back Bob and the Arda team as they redefine what's possible in advanced manufacturing!
We started Arda in 2025 to speed up American manufacturing. We have spent the last year building with Anduril as our design partner. Today we are launching the company publicly on CNBC and announcing our Series A: $160M at a $1.5B valuation.
Our platform helps manufacturers design and operate manual assembly lines, putting designs into production faster now. Next we'll build automated lines that can be reconfigured as quickly as human workers, letting America make products that now require armies of workers in Asia.
Thrilled to announce that @OrchestraBio is joining @OpenAI!
Biology represents one of the most consequential frontiers for AI, with the potential to fundamentally reshape how we understand disease, develop new therapies, and accelerate scientific progress.
We're proud to have led Orchestra's Series A and are excited for this next chapter. @fjeg1987 and @sussan_liu share more on our conviction in the team and the extraordinary opportunity ahead for AI-driven scientific discovery.
8VC retweeted
Ramp just announced a $1.85B raise @ $60B; growing rev over 100% YoY, they're accelerating even faster at multi-B scale than before!
For a masterclass in speed, obsessing over outcomes, killing bureaucracy, and crushing the competition, learn from @eglyman & the @tryramp team.
NEW 🚨 Ramp Reaches $60B Valuation in 6 Years, Selling Outcomes vs Products & the Future of White-Collar Work
@JTLonsdale sits down with @eglyman, CEO of @tryramp
They discuss:
- Why Eric is obsessed with selling outcomes vs selling products?
- What’s Eric’s unique approach to managing small teams of exceptional talent?
- How does saving businesses money create one of the fastest-growing AI companies?
- What's the right way to think about AI and the future of white-collar work?
Episode 166 out now!
(00:00) Episode intro
(01:45) $2B in annual revenue; origins of Ramp
(05:20) "A productivity company that happens to move money"
(09:30) Could Ramp have been built before AI?
(11:15) Selling outcomes vs selling products
(15:10) Why Ramp beat Brex
(17:00) 3% of corporate cards, 97% to go
(20:00) AI spend is 2% of all white-collar wages
(22:45) How Router saves businesses 40% on AI spend
(24:00) Eric's small team philosophy and how to kill bureaucracy
(33:00) How Ramp maps the US economy
(39:10) Can Ramp modernize government spend? Audit the Pentagon?
(44:30) Future of work / optimism for the future
8VC retweeted
Today, we are announcing Nimble-v4 and Nimble-v4-max which are pushing the frontier of decision models, outperforming Jev and other variants.
On the Decision Index public scores, nimble-v4-max and nimble-v4 score +10 and +6 against Jev 1.13, making nimble-v4-max the #1 model.
Beyond benchmarks, we have done a lot of internal evals, and see meaningful improvements: 43% fewer mistakes than Jev, 50pp improvement on model routing decisions, being great at coding use cases, fact checking etc.
The models are available via our API service.
Go build nimbly: console.bespokelabs.ai
8VC retweeted
AI needs clear liability.
Today, @harborai_ comes out of stealth with a $10M seed round led by @Base10Partners, @AbstractVC and @8vc.
@elechi_v0, Cristian, Luis and I started @harborai_ with one mission: to insure the agentic economy.
Rather than pacing the frontier, we believe the solution lies in pushing this frontier with real skin in the game.
Pit Stop: Pixel Eight x @tryramp Design. Williamsburg, Oct 22, 6 to 9pm.
Part listening bar, part car showroom, part creative market. Come hang with the design community.
Set a lap and RSVP
8vc.com/pixeleight
Military logistics shape battles, wars, and the course of history.
We launched Gallatin from 8VC Build because our logisticians need precision on par with our weapons.
Today, they’ve announced a $50M Series A to advance that mission. We’re proud to once again be a part of it.
We've announced our $50M Series A.
Military logisticians deserve better than spreadsheets and endless briefings. Now we're putting Navigator in the hands of every allied sustainer.
To the spreadsheets: we're coming for you.
gallatin.ai/news/series-a-an…
8VC retweeted
We've announced our $50M Series A.
Military logisticians deserve better than spreadsheets and endless briefings. Now we're putting Navigator in the hands of every allied sustainer.
To the spreadsheets: we're coming for you.
gallatin.ai/news/series-a-an…
8VC retweeted
NEW 🚨 Inside Anthropic — AGI, AI Optimism, Regulatory Capture, Open Source & More!
@JTLonsdale sits down with Anthropic's @_sholtodouglas and @the_marwell
- Have we reached AGI — and what does it mean?
- What are the most exciting breakthroughs at Anthropic right now?
- What are the biggest risks and concerns?
- What is their stance on open source?
- Is Anthropic angling for regulatory capture?
- Do AI researchers share same values as the heartland?
Episode 164 out now!
(00:00) Episode intro
(02:00) Self-taught ML; Unlikely paths to Anthropic
(04:30) What are the most exciting things you're working on?
(08:04) Have we reached AGI — and what comes next?
(10:10) How to measure AI progress
(14:20) Is biology the next great frontier?
(16:50) Career advice & the decade of the generalists
(19:30) What could go wrong? What are the biggest AI risks?
(23:11) Offense vs defense; how technology evolves
(25:08) Answering the regulatory capture critique
(30:45) Anthropic's stance on open source
(31:50) Would you slow down and let China go ahead?
(33:05) Anthropic's view on distillation
(40:12) Is a post-scarcity world achievable?
(48:54) How do we preserve values, tradition & community?
(55:00) Predictions for 2028
One of the hardest parts of enterprise automation is understanding how work actually gets done.
@worktrace_ai maps real workflows to identify where automation can have the most impact. Now they’re closing the loop, going from discovery to executing the work itself.
Already deployed across 20+ enterprises, with 75,000+ hours of automation opportunities surfaced. Proud to back this team!
Worktrace AI and computer use complete each other. 🧡
We recently made a big update to @worktrace_ai . It not only FINDS repetitive work in your company, but it now AUTOMATES it for you too.
Advancements in computer use have unlocked a wave of personal agents. It will unlock enterprise agents too. The missing piece in enterprise is understanding how work happens.
Worktrace records your screen and maps out every workflow to surface top automation opportunities. It takes what it has observed, often hundreds of times over, and turns it into an agent that uses the computer exactly the way your team does.
We'd love to demo it to you!
AI has collapsed the timeline from vulnerability discovery to exploitation.
@ArmadinSecurity is building for that reality with autonomous swarms of agents that continuously test customers’ own systems, simulating sophisticated adversaries to uncover exploitable paths and help security teams eliminate them before real attackers can.
Just seven months out of stealth, Armadin is already in production with Fortune 500 companies and government customers.
We’re proud to double down as the team announces its $255.5M Series B.
Armadin raises $255.5M in Series B funding co-led by @a16z and @accel to bring proof, not assumptions, to the organizations that need it most.
Read more: armadin.com/blog-posts/inves…
"What this enables is the return of American shipbuilding... We're going to create 10,000 jobs... and Port Alpha is going to be the most advanced, most efficient, highest throughput shipyard, not just in the country but really in the world."
@Saronic CEO @MavrookasD on the significance of today's announcement.
We launched Saronic out of 8VC Build in the fall of '22 with a small, incredibly talented team united around a bold idea: America could rebuild its shipbuilding capacity.
Only four years later, they're building the ships and shipyards to restore American maritime strength.
We are incredibly proud of this team. They're just getting started.
