📝 VC Memos (Week of Apr 24 - Apr 30)

"As often happens following fundamental technology breakthroughs in any field, we now see the pace of innovation in RNA medicines accelerating even further. (For other examples, think of the PC market after IBM; the biotech sector after Genentech pioneered the use of recombinant DNA…)"

"Pinecone is not the only vector database, but we believe it’s the leading vector database — ready now for real-world adoption — by a significant margin. Pinecone has seen 8x growth in paid customers (approximately 1,600) in just three months, including forward-looking tech companies like Shopify, Gong, Zapier, and more."

"The average cost of a data breach in the financial sector was US$5.97 million in 2022, making cybersecurity one of the most critical areas of concern in the BFSI industries. To quantify the potential impact of an organisation’s cybersecurity risk, insurers and contractors typically deploy statistical techniques and data analysis, which can be arduous and expensive."

"Today, data lives across five platforms: AWS, Azure, GCP, Snowflake, and Databricks. But those platforms are not designed to work together… But for companies and partners that operate across multiple clouds (there are so many), much of the cloud-native tooling leaves companies with functional gaps."

"Harvey is starting with the legal market, which is $300Bn+ in the U.S. alone. Legal work is the ultimate text-in, text-out business—a bull’s-eye for language models—and Harvey has already begun to make an impact… In February, Allen & Overy became the first announced enterprise customer. In March, PwC announced it was coming on board. More than 15,000 law firms are on the waiting list today."

"Of the world’s 2,000 largest public companies, at least 21% now have net-zero commitments. To fulfill these commitments, companies need to understand their full emissions. Despite increased efforts, there are still two major obstacles to comprehensive emissions accounting."