angela strange

At this point @LosTacosNo1 is the official catering brand of @a16z NYC.

Oh and @zanelackey also gave a great chat on all things angel investing to our scout community. 🌮🌮🌮

our agents are going to originate a trillion dollars of mortgages in the next 5 years.

today, we're announcing the latest step towards that goal, our $30m series b led by conversion capital, with a16z and three of our customers participating. revenue is up 12x this year, and about 40% of the tasks on vesta are already automated.

a16z's Angela Strange sits down with @Valon's Andrew Wang and Linda Du to unpack what it takes to rebuild the infrastructure underneath a $13 trillion mortgage market that still relies heavily on systems designed before the internet.

Linda and Andrew explain why Valon chose the hardest path: becoming a regulated mortgage servicer, translating decades of federal and state regulation into software, and proving the platform on its own loans before selling it to the industry. That foundation made Valon roughly 3x as efficient as traditional servicing and created the system of record it is now using to bring AI into complex mortgage workflows.

They also discuss what AI makes possible on top of that infrastructure, from agents handling long-tail servicing tasks to voice interfaces and more personalized customer experiences. And they explain why deploying the technology into large regulated enterprises is ultimately as much a change-management challenge as a technical one.

01:02 From Soros to mortgage math
03:00 $13 trillion still on 1960s systems
09:38 Why build the whole stack from scratch
11:47 The 3-5 year licensing gauntlet
15:50 Turning 50 states of regulation into code
18:00 Winning the first customers
22:34 What AI unlocks now
29:47 Everything is servicing
32:52 $200M in deals within six months

YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=ZBDGuT…

@wangandrewd @xlindadu @astrange

Thrilled to announce Valon’s $150M Series D at $2.3B. Welcome @RibbitCapital to the Valon family and thanks to @a16z and others for the continued support. If you’re energized by solving the hardest problems, moving fast without breaking trust, and finding joy in cracking what others will not touch, come build with us.

So excited to announce that @valon has raised a Series D, doubling our valuation to $2.3B 📷

I’m incredibly proud of our team and grateful to our customers and partners. Huge thank you to @RibbitCapital @a16z and everyone who continue to support us!

There's a huge opportunity right now in being the deployment layer for AI into the economy. The amount of work it takes to change out workflows in enterprises tends to be far greater than anyone realizes or would prefer. Clearly this is what the applied layer of AI is going to look like in the form of software and agents, but also it opens up new services firms opportunities.

Legacy systems need to be moved to the cloud, data organization and access needs to be updated, software needs to be connected to agents in new ways, workflows need to be reengineered for agents, HITL needs to be figured out for the process, evals need to be generated and maintained, and the entire system needs to be continually updated as new models get released and new capabilities emerge. And the full list may even be longer.

AI is not the same as just deploying software. Software you generally did the implementation of an existing, well understood category of technology, then stepped back and the customer kept running. With AI agents, you're delivering actual work augmentation to the organization, which has a completely different set of complexities associated with it. You're no longer deploying tools that the company is merely enabled by, you're deploying work output in a process. Completely different implementation and enablement process.

As a result, this is going to open up lots of new kinds of firms and plays for existing firms to diffuse AI into organizations. We're going to see approaches by industry, by size of company, and by problem inside of companies. Traditional SIs will modernize and adapt (some will clearly not adapt as well), and new entrants will also be founded in this period that take advantage of this window. Great time to be an FDE or FDE firm.

Google personal assistant is geared at families, called CC

Great name!

labs.google.com/cc/

Today, I’m proud to announce Sardine AI Labs, an applied research group building fraud and financial crime AI models. As part of the launch, we’re funding 5 independent researchers with $375,000 in total funding.

I’ve wanted to build this for a long time. Let me give you an early example of the work we’re doing:

Typically, new card programs lack the data to detect fraud reliably, and they're often among the first targets for fraud rings.

In testing on card issuers held out of training entirely, the very first foundation model from Sardine AI Labs improved fraud detection accuracy by 68% for a consumer card issuer and 41% for a business card issuer compared with standard machine learning approaches.

Our consortium recently crossed 6.5B devices profiled and $1.8T in payments. This data, combined with our fantastic team of AI researchers and engineers, makes this lab and these early results possible.

In addition, the Sardine AI Fellowship Program is an initiative I wanted to launch alongside Sardine AI Labs.

When I was writing my PhD dissertation in the early 2000s, the preeminent research labs like Bell Labs, HP Labs, AT&T research did a lot to move research on various internet technologies forward. Over time, the concept of research labs withered away. This is our attempt to give back to the research community.

We're funding up to 5 research fellowships, with $375,000 in total, for researchers who want to help push this work further. Key details:

- Advanced-degree students, researchers, and faculty at US or Canadian universities.
- Fellows work with the Sardine AI Labs team to build new foundation models, and are encouraged to publish in peer-reviewed venues.
- Research areas include cross-institution generalization, multi-stream modeling, scaling laws, identity matching, real-time inference, cold-start learning, and applications beyond fraud.

Here’s more about Sardine AI Labs and how to apply to the fellowship: sardine.ai/ai-labs

I am absolutely thrilled to launch both of these initiatives. Thank you to the entire @sardine team who has brought this vision to life.

Excited to announce our $110M raise to scale our stablecoin-native banking platform for global enterprises across 35 countries (10 new countries!) 🚀🦁

Our stablecoin business crossed $1.5B annualized volume in just 8 months, driven by exponential enterprise demand. Since signing the Series C-1 term sheet, revenue has grown more than 50% in a few months. The pace is accelerating.

As we go deeper into the stablecoin ecosystem, I'm pumped to have @coinfund lead the round, joined by @AB_insights, @a16z, @cbventures, @CRV, GIC, @gpt, @paraficapital, Vista, @wmt_ventures, @ycombinator and others.

Also grateful to have the best founders building in the space joining the round: @zcabrams (Bridge, OUSD), @psneville (Circle, Catena), @sternhenri (Privy), @prabhakar2reddy & @karan705 (OpenFX), @SamBroner (Better Money Co.) and Ricardo Marino (Global Chairman at Itaú), among others.

Over the last year, AI & stablecoins have powered us to an inflection point. Today, we have fewer employees than we did two years ago, while revenue and volume have grown more than 10x crossing $5B in annualized TPV. AI is embedded across Jeeves and has fundamentally changed how we build and operate.

Alongside the round, we're launching:

💸 Jeeves stablecoin wallets: Our custom built wallets supporting USDC and USDT, with payouts to 190 countries, all in one platform.

💳 Cards in 10 more countries: Argentina, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay, Panama, Guatemala and others. The same award winning expense management platform used by BMW, Burger King and H&M are now available in these markets.

🧾 Accounts Receivable (AR): Alongside our core Cards and AP modules, we're launching our AR module, starting with Brazil 🇧🇷 This was one of the biggest customer requests!

📊 Jeeves Global AI Spend Tracker: We all know AI spend is growing but if you operate in six countries, with Claude spend in pesos & OpenAI spend in pounds, how do you actually know what you spent across models, countries, currencies & what drives ROI? Well now you do with our Global AI spend tracker across the globe 🌎

🇪🇸 Lastly, we opened our doors in Madrid to accelerate our expansion across EMEA, with a focus on stablecoin payment corridors between Europe & the world.

The next decade of global banking will be agentic and seamless between stablecoin and fiat. To build this companies need to own the primitives directly. This chapter is being written right now, and small teams with big ambition, powered by AI and stablecoins, will write it. We intend to be the company that defines it 🌎

Thank you to our customers, teammates and investors for the trust you put in us every day 🙏

If you want to shape the future of global money at the cutting edge of stablecoins and AI, come build it with us. It won't be easy but it will be fun 👉 tryjeeves.com/us/about-us

Day one of this next chapter starts now. It's time to build.

Oh man there is so much in the OAI launches this morning, early reactions:
- OAI leaning into its strengths around model breadth (full duplex voice / computer use), compute (ultrafast / decisions / price cuts), and knowledge work (spaces / dots)
- Spaces is an impressive effort to connect two key lessons from the last 6 months; one that consumers need "human shaped" interfaces to use models to their full ability (slack / imessage / anthropomorphic agent) and two that group productivity >> sum of individual productivity and requires dedicated collaboration tools like agent native docs / slides / etc.
- Dots acknowledges that consumers have a bounded view of chat interfaces ("better google") and the personal agents primitive needs a different positioning and personality. I like that the UI starts with a single "dot" (agent) and imagines expanding to teams, which combines the simplicity of a muse style approach with the power of grok bots, progressively disclosed.
- Security cloud is the first of many efforts where sensitive / proprietary model capabilities are vertically integrated and sold as an outcome vs API. Expect more of this in areas like biology (smartly framed today as "antibiotics" - who could dislike those?! 😂).
- Yes there are offerings at every spot on the Pareto curve (ultrafast at the high end, decisions at the low), but the wild 3D demo of ultrafast shows that these points on the curve represent new capabilities (i.e. just in time software, real time video transformation etc)
- Consumer adoption has accelerated w/ 1.2B WAU + Connect is a huge unlock for developers by letting users bring their own tokens—this unbundles the unit economics from product value & locks developers + users into the OAI ecosystem
- Plugin directory + discovery is maybe, finally the distribution channel we've been waiting for
- Marketplace allows SAAS partners to sell to OAI customers w/o the procurement headache
- $500 plan, and it's "cheap" given the capabilities .. I predict a $1000 plan by next year that will provide even more price/performance to consumers

Will think + share more when I have a chance to process, but wow some cool launches today.

We instituted an official AI Writing Policy at @Clay.

Massive thanks to @sophiebits on our engineering team who wrote this.

Originally this was just for eng, but other teams found it so helpful we expanded it company-wide.

Here are the four guiding principles:

1. You must stand behind every idea and sentence

It is your responsibility to make sure that the entire document is representative of your own thoughts before you share it.

2. Writing is thinking

Spending time on the writing process teaches you more about your topic. If you circumvent this process, you will walk away with a poorer understanding of the subject matter.

3. More time should be spent writing a document than consuming it

If you generate a document from a short prompt then ask your readers to go through the longer output, you are disrespecting their time. They can talk to ChatGPT themselves if they want to.

4. Longer is not better

AI makes it easy to generate long docs, and it loves padding them with sentences that say nothing. If you're producing docs from a short prompt, consider just sharing the prompt.

You can read (and borrow) the full policy below. Hopefully we all communicate a bit more clearly now :)

I don’t normally write these things. But this one hits a bit different. Nearly three years ago I told a16z I wanted to spend part time outside the firm helping @drfeifei start and build a frontier model company. And what followed were some of the most remarkable moments of my career. From being at the founding table. To watching the first git commits. Seeing the very early very rough results that hinted at something much greater. Contributing to the open source. Watching the creation of new model architectures that pushed the state of the art in multiple areas.

I saw the team spin magic from nothing again and again. And I was very privileged to be within the walls. I’m very proud of what was accomplished, and am so excited for what lies ahead.

So congratulations to AMD for entering into an agreement with the leading spatial intelligence frontier lab. And congratulations to the World Labs team on a partner that has the vision, ambition and leadership to be the top AI technology provider globally.

Also congratulations to Dr. Su and Dr. Li. Two world class CEOs with a common vision. The both of you working together is unimaginably legendary. Arguably the smartest leaders in tech with the shared goal of building the world's leading AI capabilities. I know you both share an optimistic view of AIs ability to aid humanity. We need far more of that.

As everyone knows. I’m World Lab’s biggest fan. And will remain so. Thanks to @drfeifei , @BenMildenhall , @jcjohnss and the entire team for letting me tag along. What a crazy fucking ride. You stood at the frontier, and moved it. And will continue to. Again, many congratulations to everyone involved. The future of AI will be so much brighter with this partnership. I can’t wait to see where it leads. Here’s to new worlds!

Amazon cuts off Muse.

While I am bullish Meta and Muse, I think many people are overlooking the digital knife fight that’s about to occur

Nobody wants to get commoditized or layered here. Let the games begin

Lazy work used to mean too little output.

Now, with AI, it often means too much and more work for everyone else.

@tobi call it "slop grenades."

A "Slop Grenade" is when you let AI produce the work and pass it on without adding any value (including checking it).

Someone else has to wade through it, catch the mistakes, and clean up the mess.

You save time and look productive but someone else pays for it.

Yesterday I uploaded my auto insurance policy to Meta @Muse and asked for a better rate with identical coverage. In ~5 minutes, it found a policy saving me $3,500 /year, bought it, and canceled my old one.

I knew I was overpaying. I’d abandoned several attempts to switch because insurance websites and aggregator portals are so painful.

Why fill out forms, compare quotes, and field sales calls when an agent can finish the entire job in five minutes? Killer product.