📝 VC Memos (Week of Mar 20 - Mar 26)

"Using foundation model technology pioneered at the Stanford AI Lab, Numbers Station’s mission is to accelerate insights and data workflows by democratizing access to the modern data stack — starting with data transformation — for a non-technical audience of business and data analysts."

"Repetitive tasks can take up 80 percent of a data worker’s time, according to Harvard Business Review… Leveraging its proprietary foundation model, Numbers Station is building an AI co-pilot with which data analysts can collaborate. Using natural language, users can offload repetitive data tasks such as data cleaning, data preparation, deduplication, classification, and normalization."

"Staggeringly, upwards of 95% of hydrogen is currently produced from fossil fuels, accelerating the perilous path toward an uninhabitable planet. It has become increasingly clear that the time is now to invest in technology that boldly reimagines the archaic and broken energy ecosystem and ensures life on this planet is sustainable for current and future generations."

"Throughout the ups and downs of crypto financial markets, one thing has remained the same: builders are still building. The number of active developers contributing to open-source projects continues to climb, and is now more than 300% of what it was in 2018."

"Most businesses trying to analyze images and videos are stuck doing supervised machine learning — manually collecting, labeling, and training large internal datasets — even for relatively simple business needs. There hasn’t been a simple way to apply domain expertise to large pools of visual content. This is where Coactive AI comes in."

"Like consumers, enterprises are also struggling to leverage their ever-growing visual content stores. According to multiple analysts, unstructured data accounts for 80% of enterprise data. With a large majority of enterprise data being unstructured, this is often a massive, under-tapped resource at companies, especially in industries with a high amount of visual content."

"In contrast to scripted games, EVE is a giant sandbox where players determine the narrative, self-organizing into corporations (“guilds”) with their own progression, politics, and incentives. Since 2018, 50 million EVE players have manufactured over 276 billion items and engaged in some of the biggest and most expensive wars in games history."

"Dragonfly is specifically designed for the modern multi-tenant and cloud native world, including many technical advancements that allows it to achieve 25x performance and 30% memory efficiency relative to Redis. However, its main advantage is in its simplicity and ease-of-scaling, and its ability to fully leverage the latest hardware advancements for modern cloud workloads."

"We had also heard from multiple front-end developers how Clerk was a critical part of their application development stack. After watching a demo of the product that blew us away, it was clear Clerk was the future of identity, authentication and user management in a world where front-end developers are the architects and builders of next-generation applications."

"Beam enables construction businesses to collaborate online for payments and compliance, bringing together various parties in the Beam network to allow for seamless and prompt payments. Long term, Beam will embed even more financial services into their platform as they set out to be the comprehensive financial source of truth for the construction industry."

"The potential of this technology is huge. Imagine any company with an app store or any open source project, allowing developers to easily contribute applications/extensions (i.e. plug-ins) in any language they chose to write in, all with WebAssembly’s inherent security from its sandboxed execution."

"When the former Shopify CTO describes a type of tech as “generational technology,” you pay attention. When you discover that teams at Adobe, Figma, Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, and other leading companies are all utilizing the same technology, you dig in."

"Nexl automatically and securely captures all interactions with every lawyer at a firm. Any email sent or received and any meeting with clients, prospective clients or referral sources are automatically captured, analysed and transformed into actionable insights."

"In Australia alone, the agriculture industry faces a capital shortfall in excess of A$159 billion. IIF’s mission is to break down the barriers between the people who grow our food and those who consume it, all done through a consumer investing app that bridges the capital shortfall."

"…teams are still forced to use kludgy, decades-old analytics tools to actually make all of that data useful and deliver insights to users. But these are the types of opportunities we love at Sequoia: when a shift in the competitive landscape creates a clear opening for an enduring company to emerge."