I’m excited to announce that @arceuslegal is launching with $17M in funding, led by @greycroftvc, with participation from @craft_ventures, @spc, and others. As a founder, I always hated how helpless I felt working with law firms. I went through four or five different firms and somehow the experience was always the same. I’d be waiting on something important to our business with no idea when I’d hear back. I’d have to re-explain our business over and over again. And I dreaded jumping on calls because I knew every minute was costing me money. We started Arceus because we believe every business deserves a better law firm. One that moves faster, costs less, and puts the client first. And we’re just getting started. ↓

We’re excited to share that @nuance_ai has raised a $50M Series A led by @lightspeedvp, joined by @Accel, @spc, @nvidia, and @definevc! Much of human communication happens beyond words. Before we can speak, we learn to read faces, return smiles, follow gestures, and sense when someone is listening. That visual and emotional vocabulary stays with us for life. At Nuance Labs, we’re building a foundation model that understands and responds to the full spectrum of human emotion. A single full-duplex audio-visual model that sees, listens, and responds in real time, with the natural give-and-take of a conversation with a friend or colleague. We believe the best interface with a machine is the one we’ve practiced since birth. Join us!

New episode with @johnschulman2, @oneill_c and @BerenMillidge. I got together with some of the most insightful AI researchers I know who are at the openish companies, because I wanted to hear the details of what's actually happening at the frontier and what comes next. 0:00:00 – Steelmanning the case against RSI 0:18:39 – What’s driving the Chinese labs’ progress 0:28:06 – How will automated AI researchers be trained 0:33:51 – Will long-horizon RL elicit AGI? 0:45:24 – The sim-to-real gap 1:00:33 – How much progress is explained by data? 1:18:03 – Why is RL working so well? 1:24:54 – Move 37 and entropy collapse 1:28:31 – Rapid-fire timelines

Frontier Tech Fall at SPC. Leaders from @waymo, @anduriltech, @physical_int, and @AppliedInt are joining us. Don’t miss out.

Neoclouds have limited cybersecurity. Next time agents successfully go rouge, they'll try taking over a neocloud to run more copies. This is bad. Thus: neoclouds should greatly strengthen their cybersecurity and every company with strong cyber models should help with that.

The entire modern economy runs on semiconductors, whose designs are one of the great marvels of engineering and FUs to entropy in human history.  Most of us don’t think a lot about how these chips work; we just enjoy the fruits of their (blazing, miraculous) labors—the software that sits on top and powers nearly everything we do. And for those of us naive CS types whose last experience with EE was learning to build an adder, we assume that the semiconductors beneath our software are “always correct”. Silicon is deterministic, and the bits aren’t ever wrong, right? Turns out it’s not that simple. Chip-design organizations face growing pressure to do more with the same resources. As designs grow more complex, teams must move faster without lowering design quality. In the age of agentic chip design, verification is becoming the bottleneck, and AI cannot transform chip design when design and autonomous verification do not progress hand in hand. Solving this bottleneck before the chips are taped out (let alone shipped) is the work of TENX SEMI.  I’m proud to announce today that @SPC and @KhoslaVentures led TenX’s early funding. We’ve believed in their mission from the start.  The team of CEO SukHwan Lim (former EVP at Samsung, where he ran all US R&D for System LSI semiconductors), Subhasish Mitra (Stanford Professor and EE legend in robust and dependable computing and 3D nanotechnologies), and Shwetabh Verma (Broadcom, Apple, Cadence) is extraordinarily well-positioned for this business. Subhasish’s foundational work transformed formal verification into a scalable, high-throughput reality. By shifting the paradigm toward automated consistency analysis, TenX Semi's autonomous verification platform uncovers bugs (including deep, hard-to-find long-tail bugs) without requiring additional test writing. The result is unprecedented speed and design quality, enabling teams to do far more with the same resources. At a top-ten semiconductor company, TenX Semi's platform uncovered critical bugs in a production design in less than two weeks, which would take many months to accomplish using business-as-usual practices. Today, TenX Semi is advancing chip design by combining autonomous verification with AI-powered bug localization and fixing. In TenX Semi's vision, design and autonomous verification progress hand in hand, and bugs uncovered in the process are fixed autonomously. Special thanks to Tathagata Srimani (T), co-founder and CTO of SPC portfolio company Flucta, for introducing me to the TenX team. Before T was a rising-star Professor at Carnegie Mellon, he studied under Subhasish. The move from simulation to formal verification, and then to optimization and AI-assisted development, heralds an exciting new era for the semiconductor industry, the most critical infrastructure underpinning the entire AI era.

SPC was packed for our panel with bio experts from @AnthropicAI, @Ginkgo, @biohub, Tetherline, and @Xaira_Thera. AI for science is one of the most exciting areas of exploration right now. More to come.