"Everybody told us it was the stupidest thing they'd ever heard." - @blitzyai CEO Brian Elliott When Blitzy got started in 2023, it was dismissed as building something the LLMs would eventually do. "That view on the world is fundamentally flawed," he says, because of inherent limits around how LLMs are structured. To take on huge amounts of legacy code, without worrying about context windows, "the model was never going to do it alone." "Whenever you have a view on the world that everyone else tells you is incorrect, and despite that you just know it's true, that is really worth going all-in on." Catch the full interview on The Upstarts Podcast, presented by @Rippling.

Last week, we announced we raised a $60 million Series B led by @BatteryVentures. This brings our total funding to $85 million in just under a year. We weren't planning to raise until the fall, but the round came together in just six days. Our mission is to arm ambitious American companies with Workday-grade power, but with the usability and delight of an Apple product. Read more about how we are thinking about this new era below

There's an electric atmosphere in San Francisco right now. AI is creating endless opportunity for innovation at every layer of the stack, and founders are moving quickly to build what's next. The energy was on full display at Café Battery last Friday, where founders and operators from across our network stopped by to grab a coffee, make new connections and share what they're building with members of the Battery team. Thanks to everyone who joined us and made it such a memorable morning ☕️

Today, we're announcing a $60M Series B led by @BatteryVentures, bringing our total funding to $85M in just under a year. Also joining the round are founders and operators who’ve built generational companies of the last two decades – @tobi (CEO, Shopify), @arashf (Dropbox), @chughesjohnson (Stripe), and more. The round came together in 6 days. Here's why. Every major category in enterprise software is seeing multiple AI-native challengers. CRM, ERP, ITSM – all being rebuilt from scratch by a new generation of companies applying AI to solve persistent problems we couldn’t before. Employee Management (also known as HCM) is the exception. It’s the last frontier, and we believe the most important one. The operating layer to manage people, run payroll, benefits, compliance, and IT, for every company in the world, is still built on architecture that predates AI by decades. This fundraise is the story of how Warp is changing that. The average Warp customer is growing 5x faster than their peers, with 1/10th of the HR and admin overhead. We’re seeing a massive shift happening in how the best companies run their people operations. From the fastest-growing AI-startups to massive public companies, the winning teams are running lean: HR, finance, and ops generalists who automate as much as possible, and use their time instead for strategic work that AI can’t automate. Warp is the platform of choice for ambitious companies operating at this new pace. Legacy HCMs help humans track the work. Warp uses AI to proactively complete the work. Workday was built for the last era. We're building for the next one. And it’s working. We've – - Doubled ARR in Q1 - On track to $2B payroll volume this year - Signed enterprise customers with thousands of employees - Launched entire product lines back-to-back: Warp benefits brokerage and Warp Fabric (our AI-native IT automation suite built in-house). A few thank-yous: 1. Our customers, the fastest-growing companies in the world, who trust us with their most critical systems. We wouldn't be here without you. 2. Our team - 50 people in NYC who've built this platform, taken on the hardest problems in business-critical software. We're just getting started. 3. Our investors doubling down in this round, and some of our earliest believers – @sound_ventures_ (@aplusk, @epsteineffie), @PeakXV, (@arnavsahu341), @harjtaggar at @ycombinator, @balajis, @kevinhartz, @kvogt, @amasad, @HOFCapital (@myfady), @colinevans (@OpenAI) We're here to arm ambitious American companies with Workday-grade power, but with the usability and delight of an Apple product. With this new funding, we plan to fund deeper AI agents, tax and compliance infrastructure, expand our product suite, and support even closely our fast-growing customers. Come join us.

We're taking over the most hip cafe in SF this Friday (6/26) to bring together founders, operators, and AI tinkerers ☕ No agenda. Just good coffee and good conversations. Sign up here and swing by! 👉 events.battery.com/battery-v…

We’re excited to announce our $1.5B Series F. Baseten exists to help companies own their intelligence and run AI products in production with speed, reliability, and control. As we enter this next chapter, three things are clear: 1. Customers like Abridge, Clay, Cursor, Decagon, HubSpot, Lovable, Notion, and OpenEvidence are proving that AI can create transformational value across industries and workflows. They have built products where intelligence is core to the customer experience and central to the value they deliver. 2. Open models - like GLM 5.2 - are now exceptionally strong, and the quality gap with leading closed models is smaller than ever. We’re seeing more companies turn to open and specialized models for better economics, performance, and ownership over their stack. Baseten provides the fast, reliable inference layer to run those models in production across every modality. 3. Post-training is giving companies a path to turn their own data, evals, feedback, and judgment into durable technical advantage. The most sophisticated teams are already using RL and domain-specific optimization to outperform closed models on important tasks and workflows. This will become a defining capability for every company building at the application layer. We're excited to accelerate progress to this future of owned intelligence. Thank you to our customers for your trust and partnership. We’re grateful to be building this future with you!

Databricks co-founder and CEO @alighodsi recaps everything you need to know from Tuesday's keynote in 60 seconds. We introduced the agentic data foundation: Lakehouse//RT, Lakebase Disaster Recovery Vector Search, LTAP, Lakeflow. The context layer: Genie Ontology, Unity AI Gateway, OpenSharing, Omnigent OSS, Agent Bricks. Tools for agentic dev work: Genie One, Genie Code, and Genie Agents. And apps: Lakewatch for your SIEM and Customer Lake for your CDP. Watch the full keynote: databricks.com/dataaisummit?…

We're excited to to welcome our 2026 summer interns! Over the next 10 weeks, our 14 investment team interns will work in our San Francisco, Boston and Israel offices alongside our teams — building meaningful new connections and gaining hands-on experience in early, growth and buyout investing across technology markets. We look forward to supporting them as they learn, grow and help us find and partner with the world's most innovative companies.

When the team from @Forbes came to our San Jose headquarters, the conversation quickly became about more than just chips. It became a discussion about the future of AI and what it actually takes to run it at scale. As AI adoption accelerates, the challenge is no longer training models, it’s inference: running models efficiently, reliably, and fast enough to power the next generation of agentic applications. As our CEO and Founder @RodrigoLiang put it: “It's much lower power, much smaller footprint, and it's faster than anybody else. What's not to like?” And as @Dthakker02 General Partner of @BatteryVentures explained: "The technology that SambaNova has is very complimentary to what @intel has because most AI data centers need a combination of CPUs and GPUs." A big thank you to @aton2006 and @v_mohan_ for helping bring this story to life and for the thoughtful conversations throughout the day. We’re excited about what this shift means in practice, from premium inference and agentic AI to more efficient, sustainable data center infrastructure that lets enterprises deploy AI at scale, not just experiment with it. And thank you to Kirsten Taggart and the team at @Forbes for spending the time with us and taking a deeper look at what we’re building. 🎥 Watch the full feature below.

AI adoption in finance is hitting a wall. We surveyed 129 CFOs and finance leaders to find out why. The top concerns: 71% say AI models aren't accurate enough to trust, 44% worry about cost and 36% can't justify the ROI. On the adoption side, integration complexity and skills gaps on the finance team top the list of barriers. Yet 95% are still willing to pay a premium for tools that actually work. CFOs want AI and they're willing to spend on it — the products just aren't delivering yet. Read the full survey findings for a breakdown of what it will take to close the gaps: okt.to/OTft1J

The world's first heterogenous disaggregated inference cloud was just shown running live at ComputeX. VC2 — backed by a $3.5B compute commitment to SambaNova from @Vista_Equity & @cambiumcapital — brings three chips together in production for the first time: - NVIDIA B200 GPUs — prefill - SambaNova RDUs — decode, running MiniMax over 400 t/s - @intel Xeon® 6 CPUs — orchestration Air cooled. Order of magnitude lower power. Deployed in existing brownfield data centers in Los Angeles. @RFS_Vista @LipBuTan1 @vipulved @togethercompute

Last month at AI✦NY, Battery and @FirstMarkCap brought together CEOs helming the industry’s fastest-growing AI startups for a day of candid conversations on what it takes to build, scale and sell in the AI era. Catch the highlights in our recap video: youtube.com/watch?v=z2PmBvt8…

A complex cancer patient's record can run 300 pages, and roughly 80% of it is unstructured: clinical notes, radiology, scanned PDFs, faxes from outside providers. Reading and reasoning over those records has required human judgment at every step, creating a bottleneck in nearly every workflow in cancer care. @Triomicsinc has built the oncology-specific AI infrastructure to change that. We’re excited to lead the company’s $22M round, with @BrandonGleklen joining the Board of Directors. Founders Sarim Khan (@k__sarim) and Raj Singh (@hrituraj1997) built Triomics with a clear philosophy: you need to deeply understand both oncology and AI workflows to know what “correct” means in the context of hundreds of pages of unstructured data. Their OncoLLM architecture reads the full patient record and produces a structured longitudinal profile that incorporates every clinical note, lab result and imaging readout. Sitting on top of that foundation is a growing set of products that help oncology teams prepare for patient visits, identify eligible clinical trial candidates, populate disease registries and curate real-world data for research. Leading cancer centers and some of the nation's largest community oncology practices already trust Triomics to power their clinical and research workflows.  Congratulations to Sarim, Raj and the Triomics team. More on why we invested at okt.to/jpHQ2R