Articles by Kristina
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From Demo to Business: The Race in Physical AI
From Demo to Business: The Race in Physical AI
Authors: Kristina Shen, Bohan Lou and Nick Faulkner The past few months of robotics demos have taught us a lot. Robots…
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Cloud Market Rebounding? BVP Cloud Index up 23% in the Last 1 Month
Cloud Market Rebounding? BVP Cloud Index up 23% in the Last 1 Month
Friday 2/5/2016 was the Biggest Drop in BVP Cloud Index History, dropping 17%, resulting in $28bn of public cloud…
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Biggest Drop in BVP Cloud Index History – Beginning of Cloud Market Bubble or Market Bottom? - $28bn of Cloud Market Cap Lost in 1 Day, $63bn YTD
Biggest Drop in BVP Cloud Index History – Beginning of Cloud Market Bubble or Market Bottom? - $28bn of Cloud Market Cap Lost in 1 Day, $63bn YTD
Friday (2/5/2016) was a horrific day if you were a public cloud company! In a single day, the 45 public cloud companies…
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Kristina Shen shared thisToday, Proximal is announcing its $15M seed round led by General Catalyst, and Chemistry is proud to be part of the round. Some founding teams you meet and immediately start rooting for. Proximal is one of those. We back people first, and this team made that easy. Calvin Chen had already built and sold a company, and continues to be one of the highest velocity builders we know. Justus Mattern led RL research at Prime Intellect and is well recognized as one of the experts in the space. But what stayed with us was how they work together. They brought research depth, systems chops and product instinct to one founding team, and they moved so fast that the bar went up every time we met. Proximal builds systems that automatically evaluate AI models, find where they fall short, and create the post-training data to fix them. We think closing that loop is one of the last unlocks for models that recursively self-improve, for faster progress across science and engineering, and for enterprises actually putting AI to work. And they're just getting started. Calvin, Justus: we're thrilled to be on this journey with you since day one. At $200M runrate revenue, its been an incredible 10 months.
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Kristina Shen shared thiswelcome Ayaan Momin to the team! 🥰Kristina Shen shared thisAyaan Momin has never met a problem he didn’t want to investigate. He’s worked on antibiotic-resistant bacteria and surgical robots. When GPT-3 landed and everyone else was asking it to write poems, he was experimenting with an early version of agentic coding. That led to another question: if there were going to be many models, how would you know which one to use? So he co-founded Neutrino to route requests across them. Then the problem moved down another layer: how do you actually serve these models efficiently at scale? That took him to Fireworks AI, where he has done a little bit of everything over the past two years: sales, field engineering, multimodal inference, and performance optimization on the core engine. Along the way, he developed the kind of familiarity with chips, infrastructure, and compute that means he can probably tell you more about AMD GPUs than you were planning to ask. Ayaan is now joining Chemistry as an investor. What ties all of this together is an instinct to keep going deeper. Ayaan doesn’t tend to stop at how something works; he wants to understand what makes it possible in the first place. That tendency has taken him steadily down the stack, from applications to models to inference infrastructure and, increasingly, to the chips, power, and systems underneath it all. That perspective feels particularly relevant right now. As AI becomes more interactive, multimodal, and embedded in the physical world, some of the most important questions are moving below the application layer: how compute is priced, which silicon is available, where the power comes from, and how all of those constraints shape what gets built next. His interests extend well beyond technology. He has strong opinions on Goya’s Black Paintings and disappears into national parks for days at a time despite being very afraid of bears. If you’re building in inference, data centers, chips, robotics, or anywhere the infrastructure underneath AI is being reinvented, or you’re simply pulling on a thread nobody else is yet, Ayaan is someone you should talk to. Welcome to Chemistry, Ayaan! Mark Goldberg, Kristina Shen, Bohan Lou, and I can't wait to work with you!
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Kristina Shen shared thisWe are in the age of compute, and yet there is no default exchange to manage it! Excited to partner with Ronit Jain and the whole Liquid Compute teamKristina Shen shared thisThe Next Trillion-Dollar Futures Market: our investment in Liquid Compute My first job out of college was on a capital markets desk at Morgan Stanley. This was weeks before the Global Financial Crisis would decimate financial markets and nearly crater the economy. As a newly minted liberal arts major, the experience became a crash course on the interplay between financial markets and the real world. Eighteen years later, the largest infrastructure buildout in history is running into the same lesson: when the financial plumbing lags the real economy, growth stalls. Compute is the defining input of the modern economy and still trades on relationships and one-off contracts. There's no benchmark price, no forward curve, no exchange and no clearinghouse. The same H100 rents at wildly different rates depending on who you are and who you ask. We’ll look back on this period as the Wild West chapter in compute financing. This bottleneck has become more obvious in recent months. From Jensen Huang to Larry Fink, leading chip companies and Wall Street firms are converging around the problem. And different startups are proposing solutions from various angles. We’ve met with almost all of them. New indices and data players. Brokers, growing fast but taking huge risk. Spot marketplaces. GPU-backed lenders. And then there is the Holy Grail – a clearinghouse that becomes a regulated exchange. A broker earns a fee on one trade at a time; every resale still has to be re-papered and re-underwritten. A clearinghouse standardizes and guarantees the contract itself, so a compute position can change hands over and over, and every broker, trading house, and eventually every derivatives venue ends up transacting on its rails. The toughest paths often create the most enduring value. Kalshi, becoming a regulated exchange before event contracts exploded in popularity. Plaid, building a network of connected bank accounts that laid the foundation for modern fintech. Liquid Compute, pursuing the CFTC license that lets it run a regulated exchange and clearinghouse for compute. When Bohan Lou and I first met Ronit Jain earlier this year, we were blown away by his determination and sophistication. The son of natural gas traders, he understood the importance of building this market from the ground up. His co-founder, Aarav Patel impressed us with his hustle and magnetism. The team they’ve assembled from Fluidstack, Nvidia, Nebius, Jump and HRT is executing like crazy, pricing tens of millions of dollars in notional and signing partnerships with BCG, Wintermute and Susquehanna. We're grateful to be supporting Ronit, Aarav and the Liquid Compute team alongside Ethan Kurzweil, Kristina Shen and the full Chemistry team alongside close friends like Adam Nelson and FirstMark, Mark Fiorentino and K8, Kristin Baker Spohn
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Kristina Shen shared thisHuge congrats to Bohan Lou for this very well deserved promotion :) he’s been with us since day 1 of the fund launch, and I’m proud to call him my partnerKristina Shen shared thisHe has starred on a Chinese game show. Road tripped across the U.S. to visit famous musical sites. Studied world religions on multiple continents. At his latest birthday party, he gave an impromptu and impassioned speech about the merits of China’s late leader Deng Xiaoping. And now, he's a partner at Chemistry. Curiosity is one of the more important attributes of any investor. Asking questions, exploring new ideas, and pulling threads often leads to the best founders. It’s also a core value of our fund. At Chemistry, Bohan Lou's wide breadth of interests have pulled us into various themes – from healthcare to robotics to workforce displacement and retraining. He’s played a critical role across many of our early investments. He’s also been with us since the beginning. When he joined Chemistry in October 2024, we didn’t even have health insurance (since added!) or an office of our own (since secured!) From those early days, his intellectual rigor, passion for investing, and relentless hustle have made a great imprint on our culture. As have some of his quirkier behaviors, like using chopsticks to eat chips or focusing on the price-per-protein metric at a given restaurant. His accomplishments read like a Wikipedia page, which is fitting, because Bohan reads them for fun. So we made him one, and gifted it to him on his b-day. Congratulations, Bohan! cc Kristina Shen, Ethan Kurzweil and the whole Chemistry team
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Kristina Shen reposted thisKristina Shen reposted thisAtoms Finance is hiring. We’re expanding the team to support our growth. Controller - https://lnkd.in/gxi3ueh7 Senior Director, Financial Operations - https://lnkd.in/gvK2wFDA Senior Director, Technical Accounting - https://lnkd.in/gU4DJgDt Vice President of Finance Technology - https://lnkd.in/gpNBvdFV DM me if you or someone in your network is a good fit. Happy to connect you directly with the team.
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Kristina Shen shared thisI got a sneak peek, and this is a legit group! A couple slots left... ping Emma Qian or me interestedKristina Shen shared thisWe're hosting an invite-only dinner for engineers building at the frontier of AI in NYC on September 17th. Join me and folks from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Jane Street, and other top engineering teams over a four-course Italian-Japanese fusion menu and great drinks. We have a few spots left — comment or DM me if you'd like an invite.
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Kristina Shen reposted thisKristina Shen reposted thisI first met Emilio Andere right after YC demo day – in the amazonian expanse of Plant Cafe Dogpatch. Over a pesto tofu scramble, I could see that Emi was clearly smart, talented, passionate, and driven – but it was clear his product - an inference optimization platform for the big inference companies - just wasn’t working. I could see the tension between belief and realism even as he pitched me on his original premise, and the breakout push that was just around the corner. My honest reaction was: I hope he works on something else. Turns out a breakout was around the corner. Emi was working on something else, deftly pivoting in April of this year to a new, more expansive and adjacent vision - making inference more accessible to the masses. In so doing, he leaned into the company’s competitive advantage - moving into an exciting and demand-laden, but yes highly competitive, market that many would have found way too daunting to tackle. Emi would need that passion and drive – which was blatantly obvious in that first meeting – in order to battle it out with much bigger incumbents in the wild west of a newly emerging market. One name change later, Wafer was reborn as a real-time inference cloud – taking advantage of their agents that continuously tune their inference engine, custom kernels, and hardware to each company’s exact traffic, model and SLA – in the end delivering the best performance per dollar in the market (at 30 to 50% more tokens per dollar) and climbing to #1 on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard. In the process, they became the first provider to make AMD GPUs competitive with NVIDIA’s – at a materially lower cost and shorter lead time. When Wafer posted their performance numbers, customers took notice; an engineer recently texted asking for eight figures worth of throughput “by the end of the week,” not a random ‘lead’ in Wafer’s funnel - but a soon-to-be live customer. Wafer already powers Vercel, Venice, Flip, Neon Health, Brilliant, and dozens of other fast-growing AI companies, servicing 2T+ tokens a month. And it’s not unusual for me to get a random text from a CEO or CTO sharing just how Wafer’s performance gains are speeding up the underlying performance of their products. So Emi and I kept meeting up until he let Chemistry co-lead their $40M Series A alongside Marathon Management Partners, Y Combinator (thank you Jared Friedman), and many angels. Congrats to Emilio Andere, Steven Arellano and their entire small but mighty team (side note: they are hiring!). Kristina Shen, Mark Goldberg, and Bohan Lou are excited to be on team Wafer for the road ahead.
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Kristina Shen reposted thisKristina Shen reposted thisWe’re expanding our Supply Chain and Manufacturing teams at Atoms. Head of Supply Chain Head of Quality Senior Buyer If you or someone you know is a fit, my DMs are open. I’d be happy to connect you with the team. Links in comments below
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Kristina Shen shared thisThree approaches are racing to build the data flywheel in physical AI 🤖 🧠 Foundation models — the intelligent "brain" of robots. Physical Intelligence, Generalist 🚀 Deployment-first — putting robots into production at customer sites today, partnering for intelligence. Ultra Robotics AI, Foundry Robotics, Watney Robotics Inc, Atoms 🏗️ Full-stack — owning the entire loop: train the model, deploy the robot, collect real-world data, repeat. Rhoda AI, Sunday, Mind Robotics, Walden Robotics, Skild AI Each is attacking the same problem from a different direction: how do you make physical intelligence reliable enough for the real world? We think all three produce generational companies — on different timelines. Full thesis from our team at Chemistry (in comments)
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Kristina Shen liked thisKristina Shen liked thisWe’re partnering with Databricks to bring richer customer context into Decagon agents. The best customer experiences depend on understanding the full context behind each customer. But that context often lives across orders, payments, product usage, and other data inside a company’s systems. Through our partnership with Databricks, Decagon agents can access that information directly when they need it, without requiring teams to build and maintain separate data pipelines. Insights from those conversations can also flow back into Databricks, giving companies an even richer view of their customers. We’re also a launch partner for Databricks’ new Transactable Marketplace, making it easier for enterprises to purchase and deploy Decagon through a vendor relationship they already have. Excited to keep building with the Databricks team!
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Kristina Shen liked thisKristina Shen liked thisThese recently funded robotics and physical AI startups are actively HIRING: 1. Feather Robotics - Humanoid robot platform for third-party developers ($7.6M latest verified round) 2. Maven Robotics - General-purpose robots for industrial material handling and assembly ($100M) 3. Gravis Robotics - Autonomy kits for heavy construction machines ($200M) 4. Norbert Health - Physical AI control system for robotic nursing assistants ($14M) 5. Avatar Robotics - Humanoid robots and remote operators for industrial workflows ($6.5M) 6. Generalist - Robot foundation models trained for general physical tasks (~$200M) 7. Gatik - Autonomous trucks for middle-mile commercial freight ($200M) 8. Vecna Robotics - Autonomous mobile robots for warehouse material handling ($31M) 9. Antioch - Simulation software for developing and testing physical AI systems ($32M) 10. Corvus Robotics - Autonomous drones for warehouse inventory management ($20M) 11. Planted - Automated solar installation and power deployment ($31.8M) 12. Reframe Systems - Robotics-enabled microfactories for home construction ($40M) 13. Exein - Embedded-device security for robotics and physical AI systems ($270M) 14. Alloy Robotics - Robotics fleet data and debugging tools for engineering teams ($8M) 15. Poseidon Aerospace - Uncrewed cargo aircraft for middle-mile freight ($60M) 16. O-ID - Modular humanoid robots for industrial work ($1.2M) 17. Locus Robotics - Autonomous mobile robots for warehouse fulfillment ($41.6M) 18. Lyte - Perception systems that help robots see and act safely ($165M) 19. Noetive - Self-improving AI for the physical economy ($41M) 20. Gritt AI - Physical AI and robots for solar and infrastructure construction ($26M) 21. Vexev - Robotic ultrasound system for vascular imaging ($6M) 22. Oshen - Autonomous ocean robots for persistent maritime data ($5M) 23. NavVis - Mobile mapping and spatial twins for real-world environments ($85M) 24. Foundational Industries - AI-native autonomous factories for domestic manufacturing ($25M) 25. Watney - Autonomous robots for data center and compute infrastructure ($80M) Find the links to the career pages in the comments 👇 Make sure to join my startup jobs newsletter if you’re looking to join the next rocket ship 🚀
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Kristina Shen liked thisKristina Shen liked thisComfy Agent is now available to everyone in Comfy Cloud. It plans, builds, and fixes ComfyUI workflows right on your canvas. We strongly believe creators shouldn’t choose between ambition and complexity. Comfy Agent is our answer. While it handles the technical part of Comfy, you can finally focus on visual craft! - It builds while you edit. It sees the assets you see. - Ask anything. Reference anything. - Create your own skills, or use the public ones. Agent in Comfy Desktop is coming soon in a few weeks. Click the link below to try Comfy Agent today ⬇️
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Kristina Shen liked thisKristina Shen liked thisFun to be back on campus with OpenAI to host a panel for students at Brown University! 🐻 Happy to report that p(doom) was low and spirts high. Thanks Matt Vail, Samantha Trimble for co-hosting! If you're an undergrad or recent grad working in AI, shoot a DM if you want to be included in future events.
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Kristina Shen liked thisKristina Shen liked thisExcited to announce Proximal's seed round led by General Catalyst! In the last 10 months, we have grown to more than $200M in annualized revenue building infrastructure to enable AI to learn from real world experience. If I had to name one thing that we’ve done right at Proximal, it would be hiring. Outside of raw technical talent, I’ve never seen a place at which people care as much and have as much fun together (I’ve been told that coming to the office feels like going back to college) We tackle extremely difficult technical problems at Proximal - achieving our revenue growth with such a small team was only possible because we executed very well on them. If you want to work on post-training infra, synthetic data and hard infrastructure problems, reach out!
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Kristina Shen liked thisKristina Shen liked thisBig life update: I’ve joined the Product team at SpaceXAI 🚀 As a founder, Cursor was the first AI coding platform I started using and what onboarded me to the AI revolution. More recently, I’ve become obsessed with using Grok Bot to automate all the tedious parts of running a business. I believe AI is truly going to bring superpowers to the next wave of entrepreneurs, and I feel incredibly lucky to be working on such an important and personal problem. If you’re a founder, business owner, or non-engineer at a company, I’d love to hear from you on what’s missing from the Grok Bot experience so we can make it the best possible agent platform for getting work done.🫡 And I’m still actively angel investing so always excited to meet more talented young founders and help out with optimizing your internal agents, hiring/fundraising, or product strategy!
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Kristina Shen liked thisKristina Shen liked thisThe most impressive things about the World Labs/AMD acquisition to me: - they planted flag in the space before anyone else. Now everyone talks about world models - Martin at A16Z was a true believer - two powerful Silicon Valley women CEOs transacting - M&A will provide great returns for founders. Not all companies need to try to stay independent to $100B+ valuations
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Salil Deshpande
As AI workloads eat up global computing supply, DRAM prices are surging like never before—creating major challenges for teams trying to plan out their data center spend. One of my portfolio companies, Mext, is addressing the largest cost component in the datacenter: server memory (DRAM). From being on the board of Redis for the last twelve years, I’ve learned a lot about the various aspects of this problem and approaches to solving them. Mext found a breakthrough, using new AI techniques, for dramatically reducing the amount of server-DRAM required to run applications, all while maintaining performance. It intelligently manages the server’s memory, keeping hot pages (i.e., those in use by applications) in fast DRAM and offloading cold pages (i.e., those less used) to a much less expensive memory tier (e.g., NVMe Flash). Key to the approach is ensuring cold memory pages that are about to be accessed by an application are back in DRAM before the application needs them or notices that they were gone. This is done without modifications to the application or the OS – so it can run in the cloud or on-premise. Mext thus allows applications to either run using less DRAM or keep their DRAM footprint but do more with it. They're hosting a webinar along with Fred Weber (former CTO of AMD) on Jan 22nd at 10am pacific time. You can register here: https://lnkd.in/gXe9GCeE
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Daniel Dart
🚨NEW EPISODE: Recorded live at FUTURE TITANS 2026 - Jeff Perry of Carta sat down with the iconic Seth Levine, co-founder of Foundry. Seth has been in venture for 25 years, built Foundry from scratch as an emerging manager himself, and has backed about 50 emerging manager funds through his fund of funds. He has genuinely seen every side of this table. They went deep on building Foundry, why VCs are in the influence business, not the decision business, and why the concentration problem in venture is not only bad for LPs, but also for the innovation ecosystem overall. And why Seth's new book, Capital Evolution, is so important for the future of America. 🎧 Links to listen... Apple: https://lnkd.in/ehQUQ2EM Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eU4FExpg
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Jason Pontin
DCVC is thrilled to be partnering with the founders of Proxima, Zach Carpenter and Luca Naef, as well as Zak Kanter and the whole team at the company, to make biomolecular interactions programmable. DCVC led the $80M Series Seed financing at Proxima, our largest TechBio investment to date for any investment through Series A, along with NVIDIA NVentures as well as Magnetic Ventures, who both partnered with DCVC previously at Relation.
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