Peter Deng retweeted
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.
We’ve been talking about how the industrial wave is coming. With @Arda_Industries, it’s officially here.
Today, Arda comes out of stealth with an AI agent that turns CAD files into assembly instructions. It’s already been deployed across every division at @anduriltech, reducing engineering workflows from 30 hours to 2.5.
That's step one of a three-act plan. Next: use those instructions to train robotic production lines that adapt quickly to new designs. Then: make it possible to build anything domestically.
Thrilled that we at @Felicis have joined this round. More at @felicis: felicis.link/wJRN7I3
Congrats are in order, but this is to be expected. I'd never bet against @finkd.
Looks like Muse Spark Open is the #1 US OSS model.
Meta is truly back in the saddle. Incredible comeback. Congrats @alexandr_wang @finkd
📈 🚀
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 🫡
When @Felicis first invested in @Arena at the seed, we believed the company was building something essential: an independent, community-driven source of truth for measuring the AI frontier. That conviction only grew, and we went on to lead the Series A.
The progress since then has been extraordinary. Arena has surpassed $100 million in annualized revenue, facilitated 350 million sessions and 62 million votes, and grown into one of the world’s largest AI communities.
Today, Arena announced a $200 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation, alongside a new Alignment Index that measures whether AI agents behave safely, truthfully, and within the bounds of what users actually ask them to do.
As AI systems begin taking real actions on our behalf, measuring capability is no longer enough. We also need to know whether these systems can be trusted. Arena is uniquely positioned to give the industry that answer, grounded in millions of real-world human interactions.
We are true believers in @ml_angelopoulos, @infwinston, and the entire Arena team as they build the trusted measurement layer for AI.
arena.ai/blog/series-b
Read the Felicis profile on Arena: felicis.link/4D6naHy
What should an early-stage founder build when the models change every week?
That question was at the center of our packed design conversation at Arcana, hosted by @Soleio and @Felicis. @iansilber and @joellewenstein brought perspectives shaped by work at Instagram and OpenAI, Airtable, and early Facebook. The room was full of people eager to hear what that experience means for the next generation of products.
While the event discussion was off the record, there are a few takeaways worth sharing:
→ Build so better models make your product better, not irrelevant.
→ Create something that compounds beyond the model, like network effects or unique data.
→ Stay willing to change your mind. When capabilities shift weekly, speed of adaptation matters a lot.
The design discussion stuck with me, too. We don’t fully know what these models can do yet. The people who keep experimenting (while asking what users actually want!) will be the ones to discover possibilities that no model could have predicted.
Thanks to Ian, Joel, Soleio, and everyone who came ready to explore.
I used @ExaAILabs and @claudeai to draft my fantasy football team. I never opened a search engine. I did not want a list of links. I just wanted an agent to do the work with the best information possible. That is the product shift Exa is building for. We at @Felicis are true believers in @WilliamBryk, @jeffzwang, and the Exa team 🎧 felicis.link/4GpcMB7
cc: @tecoker
This is going to be a fun convo.
OCT 6, San Francisco
@pxd and I are bringing the design chiefs of Anthropic and OpenAI @joellewenstein and @iansilber on to one stage for a 4-way convo about AI, agents, and the future of design
There will be great coffee, great banter, and great company. Hosted by @felicis
Peter Deng retweeted
Excited to announce that Jeff Pinner has joined Exa as CTO!
Jeff was formerly CTO of Robinhood, a distinguished engineer at Cruise, CTO of Lyft, and way back a systems engineer at NASA.
We have humongous engineering and research to do at larger-than-google-scale and we need to do it quickly. Pinner has scaled massive ML systems before, super excited to work together on this one.
Real-world problems can’t be vibecoded.
When it comes to AI companies, the tech doesn’t have an impact without the services built around it.
We at @Felicis invested in a healthcare delivery platform, @joinadaptive, that understands this priority. They’re obsessed with solving the problem of how home health is delivered to patients.
Companies can’t just rely on their tech alone without going the last mile. I discussed this on the More Or Less Pod hosted by @lessin, joined by friends @wolfejosh, @RachelJHolt, @scottbelsky, @SAStanford
Check out the full podcast on YouTube: youtu.be/XySpdJ6UPkQ
Peter Deng retweeted
What makes Ion special? He's deeply in the details. In the office every day, these days. Writing PRDs like an IC PM. Ion loves the game.
Nothing/no-one is below him. Nothing is taken for granted.
Here he is next to me, working on Arena, literally right now. A true 🐐
How do you turn research into a billion-dollar company? We asked Ion Stoica, who did it with Databricks (>$100B), Anyscale and Arena AI, while his Berkeley lab built Ray, vLLM, and SGLang.
His signal that a project is ready: users start asking "who maintains this after the students graduate?"
New episode of The Information Bottleneck.
You can find it on our website, Youtube or the apps
Tackling an age-old problem while breaking massive rev goals is an incredible thing. Congrats to @paraformtalent for crossing $100M AR in 2 years!
xitter.cf/0xjohnkim/status/20777…
@paraformtalent hit $100M in annualized revenue just two years after making our first dollar - doubling revenue in the past six months alone.
A huge thank you to the customers, recruiters, and teammates who believed in Paraform early and helped us get here.
We’re building the talent company of the future: where every company hires, every recruiter builds their business, and every candidate finds their dream role.
And we’re just getting started.
Read more here: paraform.com/blog/100m-annua…
Peter Deng retweeted
What began as a UC Berkeley research project has become one of the fastest-growing and most trusted AI infrastructure companies in the world.
This week, the vision set forth by Arena founders @infwinston and @ml_angelopoulos reached another remarkable milestone: @Arena announced it has surpassed $100M in annualized revenue run rate just eight months after launching its enterprise offering, while growing to a community of more than 10 million users helping shape how frontier AI models are evaluated.
In the @Felicis profile on the company, Wei-Lin and Anastasios shared how they approached building a platform rooted in scientific rigor, neutrality, and community trust; principles that have become even more important as AI capabilities accelerate.
We've been true believers in Arena since Seed.
felicis.link/lDzsSiy
Arena reached a $100M annual revenue run rate just 8 months after launching our evaluation product. We started as a research project at UC Berkeley with a simple mission: measure AI progress through real-world use. As AI shifts from chatbots to agents taking on longer, higher-stakes work, the problem matters more than ever.
Today, Arena measures real-world AI utility with a community of tens of millions. With Agent Arena, we’re evaluating long-running agents on complex, real-world tasks - how they use tools, adapt to feedback, recover from errors, and accomplish goals set by humans.
We are excited to keep deepening our work in agentic evaluations.
Here’s @ml_angelopoulos on what this milestone means and where we go from here:
Peter Deng retweeted
A new internet economy, built for agents:
Agents break the old economics of the internet - when everyone has an AI assistant consuming and taking actions, what happens to ads?
Exa Connect is a step toward a new internet economy built on data, not ads. It's a marketplace where data providers choose what to charge for their data, and developers choose which data providers their agents use.
We feel this is the right economic model -- market-based, transparent, value-aligned, and as agent requests scale >1000x over the coming years, will be a more valuable market for providers than the ad market is today.
This is also a good path forward for the internet. It's one that monetizes transformer attention, not human attention.
We don't know exactly what that great intercontinental information exchange called the internet will become, but it's going to change, and we think very much for the better.
Introducing Exa Connect: connecting agents to data beyond the public web.
Available today with ZoomInfo, Crunchbase, Similarweb, and many other leading data providers.
exa.ai/connect