GP @benchmark. Director: Instinct @hone @ExaAILabs @mercor_ai @SierraPlatform @ollama @ClickHouseDB @Sorare @digits @TigerDatabase @LabsCockroach @Docker
Joined April 2007
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A positive second derivative at this scale feels like magic 😊
Every quarter at Sierra, we celebrate the end of the quarter with Double Denim Day (or, as some like to call it, Canadian Tuxedo Day) 👖. This Q3, we needed a lot of denim to celebrate the most remarkable quarter in Sierra's 2.5 year history.
We added over $150M ARR this quarter, bringing our total ARR beyond $400M. Remarkably, we added more ARR in one quarter than we had all of last year.
The most exciting thing to me is that our pace is accelerating. It took us six months to double from $100M to $200M ARR, and only five months to double from $200M to $400M ARR.
@claybavor and I are grateful to our customers and proud of the entire Sierra team.
Peter Fenton retweeted
From Benchmark leading the seed to an $8.8B valuation in 2.5 years, the Legora team has led the industry by bringing the best products to lawyers around the world. Thrilled to be joined by our friends at Atreides, Baron Capital, Capital Group, Fidelity, JPM, and many others!
We have raised a $550M Series E at an $8.8B valuation, led by Atreides.
Every major existing investor is back in, and we’re welcoming Baron Capital, Capital Group, Fidelity, Glade Brook and J.P. Morgan. We picked investors who think in decades. Several of them work with law firms and legal teams every day, so they can see where the work is heading.
Lawyers are moving from AI assistants to agents that do multi-step work. The money goes there. We’re growing our teams across North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific, and going deeper on the Legora aOS.
Thank you to the 1,000+ people at Legora, and to the 140,000 legal professionals who use what we build.
I say this a lot because I believe it: it’s the best time in history to be a lawyer. We're thankful to be a part of it.
Full story: legora.com/blog/series-e
Real flywheel kicking in for @ExaAILabs seeing them compound their lead in all the critical areas
Introducing Exa 3.0: our largest ever improvement to search quality.
Exa is now #1 on every benchmark we tested, from public evals to verticals like coding and GTM intelligence.
It's the result of multiple research breakthroughs 🧵
Peter Fenton retweeted
Exa just passed $100m in annualized revenue.
We've grown almost exactly 10x per year for 3 years. We now handle 2 billion requests a month from 200k+ teams. And it’s still so early:
We predict agents will search 1000x more than humans by 2030.
Agents don't search like humans. They write long, complex queries and want all the world's data, not just the web. We've spent 5 years building a search engine designed for them.
We now serve personal agents, AI labs, coding agents, GTM agents, really any agent. Exa gives these agents access to 100s of billions of web documents and tons of proprietary data.
Our customers are increasingly noticing that information is the bottleneck to agent performance. While the world seems close to perfect intelligence with models like Fable and Astra, we are very far from perfect information.
To our small but legendary team, thank you for getting us here, from engineering to research to GTM to ops.
To our customers, it is an honor to serve you. We have some exciting releases coming soon and can't wait to share them 🫡
Peter Fenton retweeted
On Tuesday, Sierra announced Personal Agent Protocol with Meta, Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe, and Walmart. The response has been incredible and today we’re publishing the first draft of the protocol at personalagentprotocol.org and announcing 35 new design partners.
As personal agents take on more, our goal is simple: consumers have choice and control, and companies know when they’re dealing with an agent and who it represents.
This draft is a starting point. We’d love for companies, developers, and personal agent builders to read it, give feedback, and help us build an open standard together.
Such an inspiration to work with @moritz_stephan and the team @hone. They saw the gap between what AI can do and what organizations can put to work—and are closing it. The shift enables orgs to go from buying tokens to entrusting AI with meaningful, long-running work that delivers real value.
As intelligence becomes less of a bottleneck, the real challenge is making a business outcome well specified so that it can be automatically hill climbed.
At Hone, that means turning production traces into replayable multi-turn evals, building high fidelity simulations of messy real world environments, and getting systems to robustly learn from their own experience.
We’re a team of Thiel Fellows, Jane Street quants, published researchers, and early engineers from Cognition, Mercor, Decagon, and Ramp.
If you want to work on AI that owns real outcomes at real companies, send me a DM or check out our careers page below.
hone.com/careers/
Peter Fenton retweeted
People often ask me what books and podcasts I recommend for learning about AI.
The truth is, I learn most about the future of AI and the data market through conversations with leading AI researchers.
I want to make more of those conversations available to everyone, so I’m starting a podcast interviewing the people shaping the frontier of AI.
More soon 👀
Peter Fenton retweeted
We built a time machine for the web.
Introducing Exa Snapshot: an index of 400 billion historical snapshots of webpages that lets you search as if it's the past.
Snapshot is already being used for backtesting prediction models, RL at labs, exploring the pre-AI web, and more.
Peter Fenton retweeted
We’re giving Instinct access to more tools. Starting today, your Instinct will have its own email address. This is the first step towards enabling your Instinct to own and run its own accounts.
Most everyday tasks flow through your email: creating accounts, confirming bookings, contacting businesses, and following up when things need attention. With its own email, Instinct can send and receive emails without cluttering your inbox.
For example, Instinct can use its own email to contact a restaurant about a special request, ask a business about availability, or sign up for a service it needs to complete your task.
You can get started by claiming an email address for your Instinct at mail.instinct.com. If you were a very early user, we went ahead and reserved a preferential email address for you. Your Instinct will tell you what reserved for you 🙂.
Peter Fenton retweeted
Truly remarkable momentum at Legora. Q3 ARR goal hit one month early in August! With the best product and team in the market, Legora is delivering the promise of AI to legal teams around the world.
The momentum continues at @WeAreLegora ...we beat our original Q3 '26 plan a full month early. July was the strongest quarter-opening month in Legora's history, and August was even larger.
Total net new ARR grew 36% MoM.
But the story of the month is in-house teams. ARR from in-house is up 15x+ YoY, average ARR per in-house customer is up 2.5x+ YoY, and in-house teams are now almost half of our total new customers.
Most importantly, you earn ARR by building the best product on the market. Our usage climbs every month: 16+ hours per monthly active user.
In September, we expect to add more ARR than in all of Q1 '26 combined, which would make Q3 the best quarter in our history and capture yet another ARR milestone.
LFG!
The rarest founder phenotype: the one who makes exceptional people bigger, not smaller. Aaron Katz @ceo_clickhouse has this gift more than almost anyone I've worked with — it's a big part of how ClickHouse became the ascendant juggernaut in data. This interview is a window into how he does it thetwentyminutevc.com/aaron-…
Peter Fenton retweeted
Some of you may have noticed Instinct’s slower responses over the last 24 hours. We’re actively working on supporting the exploding usage. You should expect Instinct to be 2-3X faster within 12 hours from now. I’m actively working on this.
Peter Fenton retweeted
So happy for @noahrshinn - I am proud his path to inevitable success led him through Sierra. He is one of a kind wsj.com/tech/ai/the-latest-v…
Peter Fenton retweeted
From the Series A to over $150M run rate revenue in just 9 months! Fomo is one of the fastest growing consumer fintech companies of all time. Remarkable product and extraordinary team.
Peter Fenton retweeted
Today, Sierra’s launching Voice Personas, which enable you to give your agent not just a voice, but a personality. Voice AIs shouldn't sound the same. It's time to empower every company to define their own brand voice. And we had a ton of fun messing around, as you’ll see in the video.
Cost containment is a short position: gains capped, best case you save what you spend. Revenue expansion is a long position: unbounded upside. That’s why @claybavor and @btaylor acquired TakeOff
I’m incredibly excited to share that Sierra is acquiring TakeOff, the leader in long-horizon AI agents. @claybavor and I couldn't be more excited to welcome @letsleverup and the entire TakeOff team.
In less than a year, they've built something truly special: an agent platform that delivers real business outcomes, is beloved by customers, and is growing incredibly quickly. Their maniacal focus on revenue driving, long-horizon agents has taken them from 0 to near 8 figures in revenue across several 7 figure contracts since the start of this year.
As we got to know the team, it became clear we were making the same bet: that fully autonomous agents would perform human-level work at software scale and that the largest businesses in AI would be built around outcomes, not inference. Takeoff has built an exceptional platform and team to make that real, and together we’re excited to build the leading company in long-horizon AI agents.
Welcome, Aakash and the Takeoff team. teapawt.org/letsleverup/status/208…
