Arena has crossed $100M in annualized revenue run rate, eight months after launching our evaluation product. With our recent release of Agent Mode, millions of users on Arena are doing real work with agents, from coding to document analysis, in long-running, multi-turn sessions with hundreds of tool calls. Arena now evaluates objective criteria like task completion rates, hallucination rates, and more, far beyond our original human preference voting model. This expansion has taken us from a student project at Berkeley to one of the fastest growing companies in history. Go Bears! 🐻 Our core thesis is simple: to align AI with human values, we must directly measure its impact on people in the real world. Today's milestone is proof that Arena’s platform is the de-facto standard for post-deployment evaluation of AI.

Straiker has raised a $64M Series A, bringing total funding to $85M, to secure the agentic workforce. AI agents are becoming the fastest-growing workforce in the enterprise. They are writing code, connecting to tools, accessing data, and taking action across real systems. Some will be useful. Some will be weaponized. 𝑻𝑯𝑨𝑻 𝑰𝑺 𝑾𝑯𝒀 𝑺𝑻𝑹𝑨𝑰𝑲𝑬𝑹 𝑬𝑿𝑰𝑺𝑻𝑺. Thank you to our customers, partners, team, and investors for helping us reach this milestone. We’re just getting started.

Real-time world models represent a fundamental shift in AI. @reactorworld is building the platform for real-time generative video infrastructure, supporting developers who need the tech for use across entertainment, physical AI, and robotics. Co-founders @taiuti and @_bschmidtchen joined us last week on The Investment Memo, hosted by Partners @buckymoore and @theamberyang, to talk about the era of world models. The conversation centered around the infrastructure Reactor is building, why real-time models are the edge right now, and current use cases for the product. Alberto and Bryce agreed that world models are shaping the way simulations are created, and that developers need a streamlined platform that can support their ideas. We believe Reactor is positioned to be at the frontier of research into real-time generative models. We look forward to seeing how these models apply across industries. Chapters 00:00 Introduction & Overview of Reactor 01:08 Meet the Hosts & Founders 02:18 The Origin Story: From 3D Assets to World Models 05:07 Real-Time Video Applications Across Industries 06:55 The Open Source World Model Explosion 07:23 Why Infrastructure Is the Opportunity 08:42 Parallels to Past Technology Waves 09:51 Bridging the Research-to-Production Gap 13:13 What Developers Are Building with World Models 16:41 Lessons from Luma AI 18:23 What Apple Vision Pro Taught Bryce About Real-Time Systems 20:48 Company Values & Team Culture 22:40 Series A: What the Capital Unlocks 24:13 Reactor's Five-Year Vision 26:09 Closing Remarks

I'm beyond excited to announce that I’m joining @Lightspeed as a Partner on the early-stage investing team and helping to build everything they're doing in new media. I've spent the last six years investing in early-stage companies, and the last year building a media platform in parallel. What started as a side quest has reached 350,000 followers and millions of viewers a month. For me, investing and storytelling have always been two halves of the same job. This work has put me in rooms with incredible founders, researchers, and operators - many of whom have become close friends, collaborators, and early stage bets. There's so much happening at the frontier right now, and the media platform has given me a way to be in those conversations early (and to bring the people I admire most into a wider audience). When Lightspeed reached out, we saw the same opportunity. Venture and media are converging, and the next generation of great firms will need to show up differently: reaching founders and builders before they've even started a company, and being the place where people first get excited about what's happening in tech. With more than $50 billion in AUM, Lightspeed has been building alongside founders at the frontier of technology for decades. It's a firm I've admired for years since I started investing - for its intellectual rigor, its long-term conviction, and the way it approaches company building. I’m excited to join a team that brings real depth and substance to its work, and I hope to bring that same ethos to everything I put out. Thank you to @ravi_lsvp, @bsomaia , and @Machiz for believing in this vision and trusting me to help build it. I’m so excited to see what we do together. If you're an early-stage founder, building or thinking about starting something, or just curious about this ecosystem - please reach out. My DMs are open and I’d love to chat!

We released Sonic-3.5 and Ink-2, the #1 streaming models for text to speech and speech to text you can use in your voice agents today. New architectures enable new frontiers for speed and quality. We're now the only provider to have #1 models for both speaking and listening.

5 things @alanaagoyal does differently > solo gp that commits code every single day > doesn't take pitch meetings > runs her agents in cmux on top of @mitchellh's ghostty > built her personal website using a dozen of her own portco's products > automated her investor updates without AI writing ep 4 of show me your stack is live!

The Wedge got nutty today and might be even gnarlier tomorrow. Who says it never gets heavy in Southern California? Photos from Grant Ellis.

Today Reactor is coming out of stealth. We’ve raised $59M in Seed and Series A funding, led by @lightspeedvp, with participation from @AmplifyPartners, @wndrco, @Sky9Capital, and @FPVventures. Reactor is the platform for building in the World Model era: the infrastructure that lets developers build with them at global scale for the first time. Stream from a frontier World Model to your app, in real time, all in under 10 lines of code. World Models represent the next major shift in AI: pixels, audio and actions are generated on the fly, in real-time, in response to user inputs, and to the environment. Every time computing has made a shift from passive to interactive, entire industries appeared that didn't exist before. We're standing in front of such moment again. Over the last 6 months, we’ve assembled an all-star team with alumni from Apple, Meta, Google, Luma AI, Netflix, and Replicate. We're already partnering with some of the biggest names and labs in the world, and hundreds of developers are already building on Reactor. The World Model era starts now.