📝 VC Memos (Week of Mar 27 - Apr 2)

"A new financial system of record… [is a] very hard problem to solve. It requires (1) a deep understanding of financial mechanics from general ledgers and charts of accounts in multiple markets to different tax regimes and treatment of FX and (2) exceptional product-building capabilities — it’s not as if the office of the CFO needs another SaaS tool."

"Fixie makes it easy for developers to assemble complex LLM application stacks into useful, differentiated applications. It does that with “agents” — powerful units of compute that combine the reasoning abilities of LLMs with memory, access to data sources, and APIs. Agents are reusable, composable, and easy to create because they use LLMs under the hood."

" A simple example of a workflow you might automate with Fixie would be to take a look at a GitHub project, identify all of the items due within the next 7 days, generate a list of those, then email each of the item owners with a reminder and schedule a sync meeting on each person’s Google calendar to discuss any blockers to shipping on time. "

" As pricing models have evolved, finance, product, and engineering teams increasingly share responsibility for pricing and billing. Despite these changes, however, existing billing solutions haven’t kept up. Incumbent solutions were built for an earlier era, with high complexity and an inability to support sophisticated usage-based pricing models. There’s a significant opportunity to evolve enterprise billing with a platform that can power modern pricing "

"Perplexity’s mission is to build the world’s best conversational answer engine and be the source people trust to discover and expand their knowledge… The company has seen strong momentum in its web product offerings, consistently growing about 100% month-over-month with 10M monthly visits and 2M unique visitors in February alone. 

"While the process of discovering and developing a new drug typically takes 14 years, ArriVent has initiated Phase 1b and Phase 3 trials of furmonertinib, which may drastically shorten the time to marketing authorization in the US and Europe. FFurmonertinib has the potential to be a best-in-class, pan-EGFR mutant-specific targeted therapy for NSCLC, and we believe the ArriVent team is well-positioned to bring this therapy to patients around the world."

"Unlike other emerging PayTo providers, Paypa Plane has chosen to distribute its product through banks... [and] already counts Commonwealth Bank and a number of large Australian banks and payment providers amongst its customers, who, in turn, will provide the new functionality to their millions of account holders."