Accel

“Greatness is on the other side of failure.” Recwntly at SCET Newton Series, Kaizen @thekaizenlabs CEO Nikhil Reddy @bignikhilreddy & Accel @Accel Partner Amit Kumar discuss embracing failure & staying true to your conviction. Full video: na2.hubs.ly/H08Bljr0 #ucberkeley

New pod drop!! Loved meeting Dylan Fox (@YouveGotFox), founder and CEO of @AssemblyAI. He’s one of the calmest founders I’ve met: nine years in, 100M API calls a day, and he still calls the whole thing “fun.” @AssemblyAI also just announced AssemblyAI-TTS-1, a text-to-speech model built for voice agents. As someone who prefers talking to writing, I’m really excited for this launch. We talk about: Five years without a market → Series A in 2022 -Why the last 10% of an AI product is the whole product -Target furniture as a risk strategy -“Everyone’s still just figuring it out” -180% net dollar retention with zero contracts -Married to a founder whose company took off while his didn’t -Why he deleted X in 2023 (I think he’s back tho) -“I’m just a builder” and so much more! Timestamps (00:00) Trailer (01:16) Dylan Fox, Founder & CEO, AssemblyAI (01:46) YC's first AI batch and five years to a Series A (05:49) Granola, Tolan and the voice agents built on AssemblyAI (07:27) Why the last 10% of an AI product creates product market fit (09:43) 180% net dollar retention with zero committed contracts (14:04) Field sales techs earning $20K more commission with voice AI (17:47) Voice as the primary interface to all hardware and software (24:42) Teaching himself to code to build a DoorDash for toiletries (29:17) Rejected by Twilio, hired by Cisco (33:07) The Amazon Echo that started AssemblyAI (40:56) Applying to YC a month late with no co-founder (45:01) How Daniel Gross got him into YC (1:01:30) Scaling up too early and resetting go-to-market (1:07:21) Leaning on Accel, Insight and founders from Synthesia and Pinecone (1:14:19) Why he quit X (1:15:10) Outro

We have raised a $550 million Series E at a $8.8B valuation to accelerate our growth in the U.S. and globally, and deepen investment in the Legora aOS, our agentic operating system for legal work. @Atreidesmgmt leads this round, alongside new investors @BaronCapital, @CapitalGroup, @Fidelity, @GladeBrookCap, and @jpmorgan. Every major existing investor is participating. We’re grateful to have partners who share our ambition and our long-term view. We build AI together with the people who use it. That’s always been our approach. Our customers help shape what we build, pushing us to go further on the work that matters. This is the most exciting time in history to be a lawyer, and we’re lucky to be in the middle of it. Read the full release: legora.com/blog/series-e

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.

The AI Builder Program is expanding across Europe with $10M in total support across compute grants, capital, and community programs. Are you building open models, developer tools, or applications on top of them? The program helps builders go from experimentation to scale-up through: - Compute grants for selected projects in areas such as open models, coding agents, post-training, and evals - VC connections to help turn open source projects into companies - Hackathons and demo days with communities including @AITinkerers, @techeurope_ , and @esra_robotics to build, connect, and share your work We’re kicking off the European expansion this week at #NVIDIAGTC Berlin with @NVIDIAAI, @Accel, and a network of European VCs. Building AI in Europe? Details below. 👇

Today we're announcing that Modal has crossed $1B in annualized run rate, as well as raised a $750M Series D at a $15.75B valuation, led by @Accel. Since our Series C, usage has tripled and we’ve grown more than 15x year-over-year. We are deeply grateful to the developers and companies building on Modal. There's still so much more to build, and we can't think of a better time to be building software.

Field also worked on Apple's secretive car project and oversaw development of the Tesla Model 3. spr.ly/6012BH1PPa

Introducing Scuba, the shared context engine for teams and their agents. Never lose a great idea. Capture anything, share what matters, and keep your people and agents aligned as you move faster together. We’re emerging from stealth with $34M.

Exclusive: new startup Scuba launches today with $34M in funding and a mission to build the "context engine" for more effective teamwork using AI tools. I spoke to its ex-Slack founders, Noah Desai Weiss (@noah_weiss) and Dolapo Falola (@dolapo), about their product and work 👀

We’ve signed an agreement to acquire C1.ai, an agentic identity platform for people and AI agents. With C1.ai, Workday will become the identity governance layer for people, money, and agents. w.day/3UsJttH

The infra behind some of the fastest growing consumer AI agents we know and love? Kernel.

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…

As OpenAI and Anthropic grapple with how to safely push the AI frontier, Accel’s Matt Weigand says “alignment needs to keep pace” with rapidly improving capabilities and expects cybersecurity companies to play a role in making that happen bit.ly/4rwzjnO

We @Accel are excited to have led the pre-seed round in @andocorporation, and deepen our partnership with @saradu as they announce their seed round and $20M in total funding led by our friends at @IndexVentures and @emergencecap. Ando is a new team messaging product, built for a world where humans and agents work side by side. Agents are now very capable partners across software development, customer support, legal, finance, and many other functions. And as AI-native work becomes more multiplayer, coordinating context, memory, and activity across a growing number of agents is the new bottleneck. Today, Ando is opening up access to more teams, and you can sign up at ando.so/ More in the video and comments below on what makes Ando so unique.