Battery Ventures

No two companies are built the same way. In our new series, The Founder Formula, founders from across the Battery portfolio unpack the strategic bets and defining decisions that shaped their growth journey.

In the inaugural episode, @LetterAICo co-founder and CEO Ali Akhtar joins Battery Partner @BrandonGleklen to share how he turned a firsthand business frustration into a fast-growing, multi-product organization.

When ChatGPT launched, Ali was working at a Chicago-based startup alongside his future co-founder Armen Forget. Convinced this powerful new technology would reshape how software was built and what it could do, Ali put in his notice that same day.

Letter AI grew out of a frustration Ali and Armen had both experienced: Sales enablement. Getting salespeople the tools and content they needed to engage buyers and close deals was cumbersome, while existing platforms saw little adoption.

Generative AI offered a way to make learning faster, more relevant and easier to apply. Letter is now building on that foundation with a growing suite of products that help revenue teams train sellers, respond to RFPs and engage buyers in real time.

Tune in to the full conversation:

YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=sWbWXA…

Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/6yjpUp…

Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how…

@Tenzai_Labs finished #1 on @Hacker0x01's VDP business leaderboard again this quarter.
Last Q we ran on US frontier models; this quarter we used GLM 5.2 & 5.3, open-weight models from z.ai.

We still came out on top, with just 3.5% false positives, and roughly 30% lower cost per report.
For us, it shows the harness matters more than the model underneath it - we built Tenzai to work with a choice of models.

The bigger point is the warning. Open weight models are freely available and highly capable to power offensive AI operations at scale. Attackers can and will build malicious agents with these models.

@nytimes covered it today: nytimes.com/2026/10/01/sci…

If you're defending applications, networks and infrastructure the window to test them continuously, before someone else does, is closing.

Full write-up on how we did it: tenzai.com/blog/an-open-w…

My partner Neeraj coined the T2D3 term a few years back: triple, triple, double, double, double, as the fastest way to grow from zero to $100M in ARR in five years. Now AI companies get there in five months with a fifth of the employees!

And T2D3 has instead become a fundraising mantra! Raise three times a year, at triple the valuation every time, or at times, three tranches at different valuations for the exact same round!

But to what end? Just because you can raise doesn't mean you should. Why do hyper-efficient companies getting to hundreds of $M in ARR with sub 100 employees need to raise hundreds of millions multiple times a year. For some, securing expensive GPU supply or datacenter co-lo requires massive capex outlays, but for most it's become a proxy for success rather than gross margins or unit economics that public investors will absolutely care about in an IPO eventually.

Miter raised a $40M Series B, and we celebrated the only way we knew how: we drove a big purple van from SF to NYC to visit as many customers as possible.

It's time to build!

We’ve raised $85M for this moment.

Introducing Warp 2.0: The first AI Head of HR.

Every company is building AI to replace jobs. Warp is building AI to do the jobs no human should have to:

If you work in HR, I want you to spend time with the manager who needs help or building company culture people actually want to work at.

If you’re a founder, I want you to focus on signing clients or spending time with your family.

You shouldn’t have to figure out how to register state tax in California. You shouldn’t have to pay outrageous penalties because you don't know what a DE 9C is.

I want to make HR human again. Today, this is finally possible with the Warp Agent.

I’d love for you to see it in action: warp.co/agent

Today, G5 Labs is emerging from stealth with $14 million in seed funding to build a new abstraction layer for AI-native software development. @pillar_vc and @BatteryVentures co-led the round, with participation from @omegavp , Encoded Ventures, and prominent angel investors including @JeffDean .

G5 Labs is pioneering the post-developer era. A spinout from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the G5 Labs platform makes natural-language intent, organized as an ontology, the source code itself—putting software development in the hands of the whole organization while providing the governance needed to keep requirements, implementation, and organizational policies aligned.

We’re excited to build a future where employees across departments, from product owners to analysts and compliance leads, can create and evolve software using the language they already speak.

Read our full announcement: g5labs.ai/press

Read more in VentureBeat: lnkd.in/gh4H5_zF

The 2026 Intelligent Applications 40 is here.

Now in its sixth year, the IA40 recognizes the top private companies shaping the future of applied AI, from foundational infrastructure to full-stack intelligent applications.

This year's list reflects a market maturing fast:
→ 450+ companies nominated and voted on by 72 investors across 54 leading firms
→ $410B raised by this year's 45 winners since founding — more than 25x what the inaugural 2021 class had raised at the same point
→ 23 repeat winners and 22 new entrants, a 49% turnover rate, down from 68% last year, as some of 2025's breakout companies start to entrench

The big pattern this year is how companies are “Harnessing the Value of AI.” As frontier models become more capable and commoditized, the winners are increasingly the companies proving they can turn AI capability into real ROI, whether they're building the application, aggregating the models, or supplying the infrastructure underneath. Databricks remains the only company to appear on every IA40 list since we launched it in 2021.

Congratulations to all the 2026 IA40 winners. Your work is defining what's possible in this new era of intelligent applications.

Explore all 45 winners and our analysis of the companies, categories, and funding patterns defining this year’s list → ordnl.link/RAFgnA7

Thank you to our great partners: @AWSstartups, @GoogleStartups, @Microsoft, @NYSE, @Delta, and @McKinsey.

A major shift is happening in how businesses use AI. Today, we’re taking the next big step toward building it.

@salesforce is leading a $166 million investment in HiBob alongside @FarallonCapMgmt.

Read our CEO @RonniZehavi's perspective at the link in the comments.

Since 2021, more than 500 independent supply stores have trusted us with their operations, and today we announced a $30M Series B led by @BatteryVentures, with @BessemerVP and @CRV participating, to keep empowering them with the best technology. 1/2 🧵

$30M Series A. Less than 12 months after seed ($41M total). 🚀
Akamai joins as a strategic investor, with Battery + YL doubling down.
Why? Enterprise AI agents are exploding: • 2025: <15 per F500 • 2028: 150k+ projected 📈
Read more below👇
hush.security/resources/hush…