Brett Berson

@brettberson

First Round

An aspiring learn it all. I’ve been trying to make @firstround a little better every day for 18 years. Partner to @stedi, @Persona_IDV and @clay

San Francisco firstround.com Joined July 2008

12.9KFollowers

2.6KFollowing

9.1KPosts

558Media

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@brettberson reposted

Jean-Denis Greze 💡

@jgreze

Forbes put Town on its first Agentic 20 list, alongside OpenAI, Meta, Stripe and a bunch of other great teams building AI agents.

There’s so much work in everyone’s day that isn’t particularly hard. You just have to remember to do it. Following up with someone, scheduling the meeting, finding something buried in your email, keeping track of all the little things that otherwise fall through the cracks.

I want Townies (your AI assistants) to increasingly take care of that stuff for you. The less time you spend telling an assistant what to do, the better.

We have a lot left to build, but it’s very cool to see Town included here.

Thanks to @annatonger and @Forbes for the write-up, and thanks to everyone using Town.

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@brettberson

Remember when a lot of people thought that with AI, there would be little need for early-stage venture capital and everyone would just bootstrap? 🤣🤣🤣

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@brettberson reposted

@firstround

What it's like working at @maticrobots: Build your own desk, then start making robots.

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@brettberson

Clay is building the GTM frontier.

Kareem Amin@kareemamin · Oct 8

Today at Sculpt, we showed 2,500 people from 30 countries the future of @clay, the self-learning revenue engine. These are the building blocks for that engine: 🧵

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@brettberson reposted

@nicckopp

@btrenchard at @firstround was our first backer.

We had no customers, revenue or proof that anyone could build an agentic ERP from scratch.

He saw the vision early, backed a hard build, pushed us where needed and supported us when things didn’t go well.

Thank you Bill. Couldn’t have done it without you.

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@brettberson

Incredible to see what @clay has become. 2,000 customers and partners pushing the frontier of GTM, all in one room.

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@brettberson

Over the years, I’ve become obsessed with references, so I decided to sit down and write out some of what I’ve figured out. x.com/i/article/2107…

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@brettberson

This is the latest episode of our @firstround series, In Office, with @maticrobots. Our first episode was with Notion. Matic’s office couldn’t be more different from Notion’s, and yet both are wonderfully thoughtful and authentic to the company.

Check out the fun tour from @mehul below.

Mehul@mehul · Oct 6

This is where the Matic happens

I took @firstround on a tour of our HQ

> Matic-themed movie posters
> Furniture from Facebook Marketplace
> A brand-new production line

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@brettberson reposted

@lizwessel

Very few of the “Act II” and “Act III” slides you see in seed pitch decks end up working out. When the @useflai team pitched us one year ago, I appreciated that they wanted to move from “just” voice AI to a more end-to-end system for car dealerships, including building out the system of record layer. After all, one of the biggest companies in the space was started in the 1800s (!).. and now, one year later, they’ve already proven this out.

I was a massive fan of @APolakof, @alen0vich & @juanalzugaray_ from the first meeting we had — at the time, I noted they were three of the most competitive yet authentic, hard core yet kind, and brilliant technologists I’d met. And every time I talk to them, I feel more and more that way.

Today, Flai is working with over 20% of the top 50 dealer groups, and they’re also announcing a $27M Series A led by @Base10Partners, with many of their largest customers as investors, including Toyota Ventures (their first investment in the category), Friedkin and Findlay. So proud @firstround gets to keep backing this team.

ari polakof@APolakof · Oct 6

Today, I'm thrilled to announce Flai's $27M Series A, led by Base10, bringing our total funding to $33M

This round also brings in some of the biggest names in automotive. With Toyota Ventures, Friedkin, and Findlay Automotive Group on board, we're now backed by the people who build, distribute, service, and sell cars.

A year ago, we announced our seed round with one product: an AI that answers the phone for car dealerships. Today, Flai is the first AI-native CRM for automotive, built for both the sales floor and the service drive.

Over the last year, @useflai has grown more than 20x, and we now work with over 20% of the top 50 dealer groups.

Dealerships still run on software from another era. One of the industry's biggest vendors started before the car was even invented. Dealer teams are buried in disconnected tools, and their customers feel every gap.

Flai changes that. On average, Flai generates ~$100K in additional monthly revenue for each dealership we work with.

With this funding, we'll invest aggressively in product and engineering to build the system modern dealerships run on.

I'm incredibly proud of our team and deeply grateful to our dealer partners for their trust in what we're building.

The round was led by @Base10Partners, with participation from:

@firstround
@Toyota_Ventures
@friedkingroup
@ycombinator
Findlay Automotive Group

We're growing extremely fast and hiring across every team: engineering, product, marketing, sales, and customer success. If you want to help rebuild how cars are sold and serviced, check out our careers page or reach out to me directly!

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@brettberson

GLP-1s have diffused into the real economy faster than AI. Who would have thought?

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@brettberson

Nearly all post PMF companies should be putting vastly more effort, creativity and capital into marketing and distribution.

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@brettberson

The prisoner's dilemma in company building right now: a competitor slop-cannons their roadmap, ships dozens of products, and sells them before they actually work. How do you respond?

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@brettberson

Incredible progress from the Gritt team.

puneet@puneetp · Oct 1

Gritt AI is now installing 1 MW of solar capacity per day at 4× the speed of a typical installation crew. And our daily installation rate keeps accelerating.

At our active site, each day’s installation adds enough solar capacity to meet roughly 200 homes’ annual electricity needs once operational.

That’s the milestone: every day, more infrastructure built. Every increase in speed, more capacity to meet America’s growing energy demand.

Solar is just the beginning. Next, we aim to bring Gritt’s construction superintelligence to data centers, water treatment plants, and pipelines.

Our mission: enable humanity to build centuries’ worth of infrastructure in decades.

Civilization. Accelerated.

@Jason @andrewbeebe @albertwenger @hayleybay @CleanVC @rebeccakaden @Rajil @GrittRobotics

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@brettberson

If everything happening on this website today has you more curious about sales, apply to join @firstround Sales Combine and get in on the action.

First Round@firstround · Sep 18

Despite billboards and headlines claiming otherwise, demand for BDRs and AEs is going up. But finding truly excellent sellers to fill these roles is hard. We think some of the best talent isn't in sales — yet.

We're launching Sales Combine to bring in a new generation of sellers who may not have the "right" resumes, offering free training and direct intros to companies like @NotionHQ, @p0, @fal, @togethercompute, @reductoai and more.

firstround.com/sales-combine

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@brettberson

This website is really something.

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@brettberson

I had the chance to see this in person last week, and what was most amazing wasn't just the capability as of last Tuesday but the rate of improvement week over week. The Dyna team is on an exponential.

Dyna Robotics@DynaRobotics · Sep 29

We are releasing Dyna-2.1, the first Physical Agent that achieves reliable super long-horizon whole-body autonomy. It combines our brand-new semi-humanoid hardware with an agentic system built around Dyna-2 to handle ultra-long real-world workflows.

Here is an uncut footage of Dyna-2.1 completing an entire hour-long laundry room workflow, just like a human does.

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@brettberson

In 2012, we posed a question at @firstround: "Students are gifted enough to create amazing companies. Why can't they be gifted enough to invest in those same companies?" The answer we landed on was Dorm Room Fund.

What started as an experiment on Penn's campus (some of the early pitch is below) has grown into something far beyond what we imagined. That's largely because of the work of countless brilliant students and, of course, the relentless @themollette.

Molly Fowler@themollette · Sep 29

The @DormRoomFund family did it again! Proud to announce a fresh $50M Fund 2 and a new brand to keep backing the best student and recent grad/drop-out founders.

My favorite part? 30% of our investors in Fund 2 are DRF alums and their firms.

Read more: nytimes.com/2026/09/29/tec…

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@brettberson

I wonder if the anxiety about the future of engineering is causing early career product and technical talent to consider a new path. Nearly 20% of all applicants to the Sales Combine come from either an engineering or product background.

Still plenty of time to apply to join us!

Liz Wessel@lizwessel · Sep 16

Contrarian career advice: This is an EXCELLENT time to go into sales. So many of the best / hottest AI companies will tell you how hard they’re working to find good sellers... because no one actually believes AI is replacing AE roles any time soon (sorry to all the sf billboards out there that suggest otherwise).

Obviously, as a candidate, it’s hard to break in if you don’t have the right logos or years of experience on your resume. As AI makes the mechanics easier to pick up, the team @firstround is betting we can teach high-potential talent the uniquely human parts of the craft.

So we’re launching the @firstround Sales Combine: We’ll train you up for FREE and put our name behind you when we make the intro to companies like @notion, @fal, @Rillet, @Gumloop, @Serval & @Verkada.

More below, apply by 10/3: firstround.com/sales-combine

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@brettberson

Over 3 years ago @paraga met with our team for an hour and made the case that AIs would become the largest consumers of the internet, and that the web would need to be rebuilt for them. At the time, "agents" didn't really exist as a category. GPT-4 had just been released. He called it almost perfectly. This was part of his deck.

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@brettberson

Today we're excited to launch grants for @firstround's Sales Combine. For those who can't afford to come to San Francisco, not only is Sales Combine free, we'll now pick up the cost to get you here.

If you're ambitious, competitive, kind, and curious, there's now no reason not to apply.

More info here: firstround.com/sales-combine#…

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Brett Berson (@brettberson) — posts, photos & videos | PeekX