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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…
Applications for 8VC’s 2027 Engineering and Design Fellowships are now live!
This cohort marks ten years of our Fellowship program, and what a decade it’s been. Hundreds of Fellows have leapt into startup life, shipped real products, built enduring relationships, and learned what (and who) it takes to scale unstoppable companies.
Like @Saronic, whose valuation has climbed from $4 billion to $9.25 billion since we filmed the video below.
One project. Twelve weeks. Uncapped possibility. But don’t take our word for it:
Check out and apply for the 8VC Fellowship here:
8vc.com/fellowships
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8VC retweeted
Surgery cannot be mastered by simply reading books. It would be convenient if true, because training great surgeons requires decades of hands-on experience and we don't have enough of them.
What if there was another way to scale surgical intelligence? Mosaic Intelligence Labs was founded to solve this difficult and important problem. Today we are excited to introduce Mosaic to the world.
Mosaic's focus is on endovascular procedures - surgeries that use flexible catheters to reach deep inside the body through blood vessels, entering through a puncture just millimeters wide (often the femoral artery near the groin - see animation).
Mosaic is building sensing-enabled surgical instruments, spatial intelligence, and robotics. The immediate goal is to give surgical machines their own perception of the anatomy they navigate and expand what surgeons can perceive. Machine perception is a foundation for a future of reasoning and robotic actuation that assists surgeons.
If successful, Mosaic will enable more patients to access a broader range of interventions with less cost. It will give every surgeon the intuition and dexterity of the very best practicioners in the world, enabling new procedures and substituting invasive surgeries with access through blood vessels.
It is a mission that we are extremely proud to support at @8vc as the lead investor in Mosaic's $47M seed round.
Cofounders, the excellent @ilepirox and @alimackanic will be sharing more through the week.
And we are hiring in San Francisco! Read more at mosaicintelligence.xyz
The future of surgery lies in the far reaches of the endovascular network, where many of the most pervasive and deadliest diseases originate.
This has always been one of the hardest areas in medicine: visibility is poor, observability is nonexistent, and there is no room for error. Existing procedures can only be performed by a relative handful of highly experienced surgeons.
We backed @mosaicintel_lab through 8VC Build to equip surgeons with semiautonomous, intelligent instruments to extend their grasp and dexterity, push the frontier of non-invasive intervention, and make the rarest procedures abundant.
Congratulations to co-founders @ilepirox and @alimackanic, who will be sharing more throughout the week!
Today, I'm proud to introduce @mosaicintel_lab
the company I've spent the past year building with my cofounder and best friend, @alimackanic.
We are emerging from stealth with $47M in seed financing, to build machines that can make extraordinary surgery far more ordinary.
What does it take to automate procurement at the world's largest manufacturers, where critical information is scattered across emails, documents, and decades of institutional knowledge?
Following our recent Series A investment in @fragmentdata, 8VC's @jack_moshkovich sat down with @pranavmulgund to discuss the company's origins, the engineering challenges behind building AI that can reason across these disparate sources, and how Fragment is turning that context into autonomous action.
Learn more about opportunities at Fragment here: fragment.ai/careers
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8VC retweeted
Introducing SWE-2 Flash, our new fast & efficient coding model.
On leading evals, it outperforms all American open-weight models, even ones 3x larger.
To balance transparency and cyber risks, we are building a program to securely share the weights with partners & researchers.
8VC retweeted
Proud to report that the 2nd Marauder is in the water and running under its own power out of our yard in Franklin, Louisiana. The team really stepped up across the board - this hull took 8% fewer labor hours than the 1st. That’ll continue to get better, every build needs to be more efficient than the last.
When we took over this shipyard it was shutting down and capacity was trending towards 0.
Today it's is active again + expanding. Fully ramped we’ll do 20 Marauders a year in Franklin.
Thanks to everyone @Saronic for their hard work getting this done.
8VC retweeted
1/ Excited to announce our new company Particle
This is our first step in a series of models focused on developers.
With particle-1, we focused on token efficiency and managed to keep parity in performance while using ~45% fewer tokens.
Live now: particle.ai
For decades, enterprise software has transformed how companies manage purchasing, yet much of procurement remains stubbornly manual. At the world's largest manufacturers, buyers still spend countless hours chasing suppliers, reconciling discrepancies, and navigating fragmented systems.
Thrilled to back @pranavmulgund, Naveen Kashyap, and the team at @fragmentdata as we lead their Series A to tackle precisely this challenge.
Starting with direct procurement, Fragment is building AI agents that investigate and resolve complex operational issues across existing enterprise systems. At Flex, the team went from pilot to production in just three weeks, increasing employee productivity 4x.
Beyond automating manual work, we see an opportunity to fundamentally change how manufacturers understand their suppliers and make purchasing decisions.
More on our conviction in this exceptional team and the opportunity ahead: 8vc.com/resources/announcing…
8VC retweeted
Enterprise software has spent decades digitizing paperwork while leaving the hardest work to people. We're changing that.
Today, we’re launching @fragmentdata with $56 million in funding, including a Series A led by @8vc and a seed co-led by @generalcatalyst and @A_StarVC, with angels including @roelofbotha, @nikesharora, and @jeffawilke.
Today, @BigHatBio and @AnthropicAI announced their historic therapeutics partnership.
For the pilot project, an Anthropic researcher + Claude collaborated with BigHat’s automated lab to optimize two novel antibodies—with inspiring results.
As frontier AI moves into bio, data gen platforms are more important than ever. Under the leadership of @peytongreenside and team, BigHat has built the Ferrari.
A big step for Anthropic and BigHat, and an even bigger step for AI biodiscovery.
Learn more in our latest blog by @fjeg1987 and @sussan_liu (below).
8VC retweeted
Palantirian-turned-founder @RayanKrishnan built a leading independent evaluator of AI models.
He has a unique view of the AI frontier, and a deep understanding of how to score model performance - and risks.
New AO episode out now, with Rayan and my @8VC Partner @vvkgopalan
NEW🚨 Inside the Company That Evaluates AI Labs; Who Will Reach Recursive Self-Improvement First?
@JTLonsdale & @vvkgopalan sit down with @RayanKrishnan, founder & CEO of @ValsAI
They cover:
- How Rayan used Fable to solve a 370-year-old cipher
- The science behind model evaluation / can you stay ahead of the labs?
- Should labs self-regulate? What's the role for independent evaluators?
- Which lab will reach RSI first — and what happens next?
- How do models try to deceive evaluators?
Episode 167 out now!
(00:00) Episode intro
(02:00) Palantir, Machiavelli & lessons from Alex Karp
(07:50) Solving a 370-year-old cipher / Is AI making new discoveries?
(12:10) How do you measure AI abilities across finance, legal, etc?
(15:30) What is the science behind model evaluation?
(18:00) The importance of independent evaluation
(23:35) Evaluating Chinese models & addressing distillation
(26:45) Will Anthropic reach Recursive Self-Improvement first? What happens next?
(28:30) How do models try to deceive evaluators
(33:00) Why Rayan remains optimistic about AI
Few industries are more fundamental to America's future than construction. Yet persistent skilled labor shortages and limited equipment capacity constrain our ability to build at the scale our country needs.
When 8VC led @BedrockRobotics Series A last year, we believed bringing autonomy to heavy equipment could fundamentally change the economics of construction, unlocking new levels of productivity and expanding what skilled crews can accomplish.
Just over a year later, Bedrock's fully autonomous excavators are already performing paid work on live commercial job sites, marking a major milestone in bringing physical AI into the real economy. With a rapidly growing customer base and deployments expanding nationwide, the team is demonstrating how quickly this technology can move from technical breakthrough to industrial scale.
Thrilled to continue backing @bsofman, @kevinmpeterson1 and team as they announce their $600M Series C to scale autonomous construction nationwide and help usher in a new era of American industrial capacity!
Today we’re announcing a $600M Series C, co-led by @CapitalG and @emergencecap, to bring fully autonomous machines to more job sites across the U.S.
We want autonomous equipment to become beautifully unremarkable, as ordinary on a job site as GPS or grade control.
CRL’s primates come from Cambodia and Mauritius, not the West. An American ticker isn’t an American supply chain. Our portfolio company Safer Human Medicine is building ethical, biosecure supplies on U.S. soil. Please let them know if you or your companies want to advance cures for diseases and need some monkeys!
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“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.
