Lerer Hippeau

New York was a success. Next stop: #SF TECH WEEK by a16z 🌁 Come to our Lava.so 6 PM SF Tech Week session and we will help you set up your first AI teammate. If you've heard about Claude Cowork, Muse, Instinct, and you are still wondering what an AI teammate actually is and how they work, this night sorts it out. Lava.so will get you started with an AI coworker that runs on the apps you already use in your day-to-day work. Who should come: professionals, founders, solopreneurs, or anyone genuinely interested in getting work off your plate and into an always-on AI teammate. Event details 1. When: Wednesday, Oct 7, 6:00 to 9:00 PM PT 2. Where: San Francisco, address lands in your inbox once approved 3. Bring: a laptop and a task you have been dying to hand off to a (AI) teammate Food and drinks will be provided. Spots fill fast, so sign up now (link in comments or scan the qr code in the photo)

Glad to join a smart group of fellow VCs quoted in Sarah Wood González's Inc. Magazine piece on when startups should invest in their brands. My take: earlier than you might think. I (nearly) always advise my portfolio companies to do the challenging positioning, messaging, and visual identity work in advance of luring any eyeballs to their companies via funding announcements or other public-facing milestones. Be ready to capture attention productively when the moments arise, and put your best foot forward. In a market as competitive as ours, companies can't afford to debut uncerimoniously. Full piece linked below.

Today I'm excited to share that Footprint has raised a $25M Series B, bringing our total funding to $45M. Financial institutions are in an arms race with cartels and oligarchs. The movement of illicit money globally has grown by $1.3 trillion since 2023, now sitting at $4.4 trillion. And bad actors have taken full advantage of AI’s capabilities: generating fake identities and shell companies faster than any team can manually review. Yet, the work to combat financial crimes is still being done the old way - risk teams sifting through spreadsheets, PDFs, and disconnected tools one case at a time. AI lets us reimagine this sector. We're solving for this at Footprint by focusing on two things: time and memory. → Time: Percy runs your compliance program end-to-end in 1/10th the time, so your institution has extra eyes on every case, and your human analysts dedicate their time to the ones that truly matter. → Memory: Trust Fabric makes sure the grey area is removed and learnings are universal so your team (whether 5 or 500 people) catches more true positives and identifies fraud rings before they form. With this raise, we're doubling down on the thesis that risk operations will be re-envisioned for the AI-native era. As AI increases financial crime in the global economy, we're building the defense system that can expand to meet and defeat it. We're honored QED Investors doubled down on their conviction, leading our Series B two years after leading our Series A. The same goes for those who have invested since day one: Lerer Hippeau, Index Ventures, BoxGroup, Operator Partners, Definition, and Animal Capital. And for new investors MUFG, Commerce Ventures, Lightbank, and Alumni Ventures. To the Footprint team: this company would be nowhere without your belief in building a digital world full of trust. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for being on this journey with us. To our customers: thank you for trusting us with your most important decisions. Your partnership is helping us build a better future for financial crime compliance. Full story on our blog: https://lnkd.in/gnKmmHEQ

I’ve played a lot of poker tournaments, but this is the most excited I’ve ever been to play one. Thrilled to be joining forces with our friends at Union Square Ventures, Left Lane Capital, MetaProp, Chapter One, Venture Commercial, alongside our partners Pure, Rho, and Novig, to host the ultimate celebration of poker and NYC tech. For any of you who have wanted to knock me out for a while now, this is your chance. This one will be special. Hope to see you there! Link to sign up is below. Lerer Hippeau Jamesin Seidel Jackson Feder Arash S. Nikhil Raman Carlie Malone Jacob Bulbulia Jacob Fortinsky Drew Parten

Excited to share some big news. Today Zipline and Uber announced a partnership to bring autonomous drone delivery nationwide on the Uber network—with a shared goal of 1 million deliveries per day. As part of the partnership, Uber is also investing in Zipline. I spent seven years at Uber as the 25th employee. Helping change how the world moves was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Getting to work with that team again feels special—especially on something with this level of ambition. Over the last decade there’s been a lot of talk about AI in the physical world. Autonomy is its first commercially mature form, but the gap between pilots and real infrastructure has been enormous. Zipline is one of the few companies that has actually crossed it. We’re already proving it in the U.S. In Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, restaurants and retail partners are using the platform every day—food that arrives hot, fast, and at lower cost, while local businesses grow and cities see less traffic and pollution. This is the early shape of a modern logistics layer where anything you need can be minutes away and the physical world can start catching up with the digital world. Autonomy is this bridge. Zipline’s capability was built the hard way: starting with blood and critical medical supplies in Rwanda, then scaling a full-stack platform that has flown well over 140 million autonomous miles and completed millions of commercial deliveries with a safety record that stands alone. With Uber’s reach and scale accelerating the path forward, Zipline has the chance to do what Uber did: change how the world operates at a foundational level. It’s rare to get to help build something this important twice. Grateful to the entire Zipline team and to an all-star list of Uber vets from my days who are still building an iconic global company — Dara Khosrowshahi, Andrew Macdonald, Sarfraz Maredia, Aaron Emrich, and many others. And special thanks to Keller Rinaudo Cliffton and the Zipline team for for inviting me into this chapter. We’re hiring across commercial, operations, and launch markets (and many more roles company-wide). If you’re excited about scaling physical-world autonomy, please reach out! WSJ article with details on the partnership: https://lnkd.in/e7djVkWd

Reporting on 150+ portfolio companies used to take Lerer Hippeau 15 days each quarter. Now, boosted by Standard Metrics’ AI tools, it only takes two. “One of the best things about anything with structured data is you can do a lot of really, really cool stuff using AI. Standard Metrics and the KPIs of our portfolio companies just fit right inside of that.” - Daniel Rochkind, CFO at Lerer Hippeau Our very own Brian Cloughley visited Lerer Hippeau’s offices in NYC to sit down with Dan and Max Wechter, Senior Director, AI. This was one of my favorite Standard Metrics case studies to date, exploring how Lerer Hippeau uses AI across their firm’s operations and how we fit into the mix: - AI is democratizing portfolio insights across the entire firm - Data stored on Standard Metrics is connected to Lerer’s entire tech stack via our MCP to improve reporting - AI has helped cut the time it takes to finish a quarterly portfolio reporting process from 15 days to two. Full interview and case study linked in the comments. Give it a watch and let me know what you think.