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The Cloud
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VC interest in robotics is surging
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AI native startups consume less capital
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AI native startups have fewer employees
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Solopreneurs are making it big
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.@pmarca on the data center build-out and how America is holding itself back:
"What's happening literally in the US right now county by county with the ability to build data centers is profoundly destructive."
"And that's entirely domestic. And a large number of politicians are feeding that hysteria as much as they possibly can."
"A lot of our leading public figures, and a lot of intellectuals, and a lot of the press, and a lot of the analysts, and the rest of it, it's just this kind of hyper paranoia about building data centers and the consequences of data centers."
"This completely fake meme about water use, which is just factually not true, which is just running wild through the public discussion that somehow these data centers are basically destroying all the water, which is this completely insane idea. That factor is [such] a bigger factor holding us back than anything involving external trade."
"External trade is the thing that's easy to talk about. It's all of our internal issues that are much, much more important."
With @NGirishankar @CSISEST
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On Easter morning earlier this year, Artemis II Mission Pilot Victor Glover spoke these words:
"Maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we're doing is special.
But we're the same distance from you, and I'm trying to tell you—just trust me—you are special.
In all of this emptiness—this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe—you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together."
In this piece from astronautical engineer William Whittenbury, a deep dive on the historic Artemis II mission that brought us back to the Moon, and why Glover's words ring true: a16z.news/p/nasas-artemis-ii…
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a16z retweeted
Introducing our first model, Un-0!
We trained an image generator powered by a backbone of coupled oscillators in place of a more traditional conventional neural network.
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.@11x_official's revenue agents are generating hundreds of millions of dollars in pipeline for their customers.
Here's their full stack of internal agents, AI they run inside their own company, so that they can spend maximum time building agents for customers.
We sat down with CEO @prabhavjain and went through their full internal AI operating stack:
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One pattern we're tracking: the technical CEO.
@prabhavjain led eng at @brexHQ & was @11x_official's CTO before he was CEO.
A company that runs on agents is a system design problem.
And that's creating a lot of horsepower for engineers in the CEO seat.
Watching this space.
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PS – 11x is hiring:
• sales
• success
• growth
• engineering
• design
jobs.a16z.com/jobs/11x.ai
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We're excited to lead Netris' Series A.
Data center networking may be changing even more quickly than compute. It is enormously complex to manage, and when it fails, a data center full of expensive GPUs stops working.
@netris_io built a powerful and robust network management solution for GPU clouds or anyone running a large GPU data center.
What impressed us most was the scale: operators run close-to-$1B data centers on Netris software - and the company has spent 8 years earning that trust.
We’re excited to partner with @alex_saroyan, Arsen Arakelyan, Tigran Martirosyan, and the Netris team to take networking into the age of AI.
By @appenz, @RaghuRaghuram, and @JasonSCui
Today, we're announcing our $15 million Series A, led by @a16z.
In 2018, @tmartiro , @ars_arakelyan , and I started @netris_io . The hyperscalers had proven what's possible when you automate the network at scale, but it took custom tooling and armies of engineers. We wanted to put the same technology within reach of any operator.
For eight years, we built very complex technology that automates the hardest part of any cloud, the network. Our vision was ahead of its time. At the early stages, most investors and most of the industry didn't believe in what we were building.
Then, it started working. Tier 2/3 cloud operators and service providers began choosing @netris_io to automate their networks, proving our bet was right.
Then AI infrastructure arrived. GPU clusters require dynamic configuration and automated management of multiple networks at once — East-West, OOB, North-South, scale-up, host, and edge networking, involving multiple technologies – Ethernet, InfiniBand, NVL72, DPUs, SuperNICs, RDMA, RoCE, XDP, and others — none of which were designed to work together in concert. Networking became the hardest problem in AI infrastructure, and it was at a scale and complexity no one had seen before. And it was the exact problem we had spent years solving.
We worked closely with @nvidia and other partners to build automation and multi-tenancy across all AI network fabrics. We built an ecosystem of partners around the platform — compute orchestration software vendors that, together with Netris, give GPU cluster operators everything they need to launch, operate, and monetize GPU clouds. Thanks: @nvidia , @HPE , Rafay, @vclusterlabs , @RedHat , @MirantisIT , and all amazing partners
The results followed. Netris has become an essential network automation and multi-tenancy layer for AI infrastructure. Over the last 12 months, Netris grew its ARR 800% and surpassed 35 live AI cluster deployments — more than all other network automation vendors combined. Today, many of the world's largest AI clouds, sovereign AI operators, and AI factories run on Netris.
None of this would have happened without my co-founders Tigran Martirosyan and Arsen Arakelyan, the early founding team members, Armen Hovhannisyan, Gor Poghosyan, Artashes Balabekyan, and the entire Netris team.
Big thanks to Leon Ariyan, @SkyDeck_Cal , @SmartGateVC , @GranatusVC , and all early Netris investors.
And huge thanks to all our customers!
We're excited to welcome @appenz to our Board of Directors. I'm excited to have him, along with fellow a16z partners @martin_casado and @RaghuRaghuram, on our side. At Nicira, VMware / NSX, and BigSwitch Networks, they helped build the networking layer that defined the modern data center. Netris is doing the same for AI.
The AI buildout is still in its early days. We’re seeing 10-100K GPU clusters among our customers. Their scale, demands, and complexity are growing quarterly — and that's exactly what we built Netris for. We're just getting started.
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