Michelle Fang

Today we release Ripple-65B Preview, our 65B dense LLM we pretrained from scratch. Ripple sets a new state-of-the-art for U.S. open-weight models in agentic coding tasks, surpassing significantly larger models including Muse Spark Open-816B, Beam-501B, Inkling-975B, and Nemotron 3 Ultra-550B. Learn more: ricursive.com/ripple

Today we're announcing @Corridor's $25M Series A led by @Felicis. More code will be written this year than ever before. At Corridor, securing AI coding at the source, enabling companies to their development without security being a blocker. 🧵

We started Lux in 2000 with a simple conviction: the biggest opportunities lie at the frontier of science and technology that others find too hard, too early, or too confusing. Twenty-five years later, that conviction hasn't changed. What has changed is that the world has caught on. Now compute, automation, and biology have matured into scalable engineering disciplines, and what was once fringe "deep tech" has become essential infrastructure. New talent, new tools, and new industrial capacity now exist to turn the most cutting-edge technology across the physical, computational, and life sciences into enduring businesses. For these businesses and founders to become category-defining winners, they need meaningful capital and conviction. That is why we are especially excited to announce our largest fund to date, Lux Ventures IX, a $1.5B commitment to investing in the people turning sci-fi into sci-fact. Today entire sectors of aerospace, biotech, defense, industrials, transportation and beyond are being reinvented by a new generation of brilliantly ambitious, often irreverent, scientists and engineers. And while markets have changed and capital reshapes around fewer companies and larger checks, our focus on the craft remains constant. That focus matters because science doesn’t scale itself. The path from a result in the lab, only known to a few, to something durable the entire world will use requires a different kind of partnership. One that deploys the first $100K and the last $100M, that stays through the full arc of company-building, that mobilizes a powerful network of kinetic like-minded founders, and that treats capital as a tool rather than the product. Forty-four people at Lux now manage $7B, still operating with the same discipline and purpose we had on day one. We find and fund founders others have overlooked, back conviction over consensus, and build alongside these rebels of science and tech at every stage. We’re grateful to our valued LPs who've partnered with us through multiple cycles, and to the founders who trust us with their life's work. The mission continues, with even greater intensity and momentum. luxcapital.com/news/announci…

Generalists are useful, but it’s not enough to be smart. Advances come from specialists, whether human or machine. To have an edge, agents need specific expertise, within specific companies, built on models trained on specific data. We call this Specific Intelligence. It's what we're building at Applied Compute. We unlock the latent knowledge inside a company, use it to train custom models, and deploy an in-house agent workforce that reports to your team. We work with sophisticated companies that have already captured early gains from general models, like @cognition, @DoorDash, and @mercor. They’re pulling even further ahead with proprietary in-house agents that don’t need to wait for the next public model release. Together, we are building and validating models and agents in days instead of months, achieving state-of-the-art performance on customer evals. Our team has high density and low latency. Our founders all worked on different parts of this problem while they were researchers at OpenAI — @ypatil125 as a key member on the agentic software engineer effort (Codex), @rhythmrg as a core contributor to the first RL-trained reasoning model (o1), and @lindensli as a core contributor on ML systems and infrastructure for RL training. Two-thirds of the team are former founders, and everyone brings a deep technical background, from top AI researchers to Math Olympiad winners. We are backed by $80M in funding from Benchmark, Sequoia, Lux, Elad Gil, Victor Lazarte, Omri Casspi, and others. With their support, we are growing the team, scaling deployments, and bringing to market the first generation of agent workforces built on specific models. In short: 1. We are building Specific Intelligence for specific work at specific companies. 2. That will power in-house agent workforces to support their human bosses. 3. That in turn will unlock AI’s full potential through humanity’s greatest engine of progress: thriving corporations in a free market.

Valthos builds next-generation biodefense. Of all AI applications, biotechnology has the highest upside and most catastrophic downside. Heroes at the frontlines of biodefense are working every day to protect the world against the worst case. But the pace of biotech is against them: more powerful methods to design biological systems, with near-universal access, open up an increasing surface area of threats. In this new world, the only way forward is to be faster. So we set out to build the tech stack for biodefense. Our team of computational biologists and software engineers applies frontier AI to identify biological threats and update medical countermeasures in real-time. We are backed by $30M from @OpenAI, @Lux_Capital, @foundersfund and others including @Definition_Cap. We are actively hiring engineers to join in the mission - if that sounds like you, get in touch.

General purpose robots are inevitable They’ll perform any task in any domain Mass labor replacement soon But won’t happen all at once Robots will gain skills level by level Each unlocks capabilities To track progress, we created a Robotics Levels of Autonomy classification system

To win the AI race and ensure global technological dominance, we need more power.

Cognition has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf. The acquisition includes Windsurf’s IP, product, trademark and brand, and strong business. Above all, it includes Windsurf’s world-class people, whom we’re privileged to welcome to our team. We are also honoring their talent and hard work in building Windsurf into the great business it is today. This transaction is structured so that 100% of Windsurf employees will participate financially. They will also have all vesting cliffs waived and will receive fully accelerated vesting for their work to date. At Cognition we have focused on developing robust and secure autonomous agents, while Windsurf has pioneered the agentic IDE. Devin + Windsurf are a powerful combination for the developers we serve. Working side by side, we’ll soon enable you to plan tasks in an IDE powered by Devin’s codebase understanding, delegate chunks of work to multiple Devins in parallel, complete the highest-leverage parts yourself with the help of autocomplete, and stitch it all back together in the same IDE. Cognition and Windsurf are united behind a shared vision for the future of software engineering, and there’s never been a better time to build. Welcome to our new colleagues from Windsurf!

1/ Published a piece with @bchandras3karan this AM on why we think startups building and selling commodities are poised to dominate the next decade; quick thread below