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Mike Ghaffary reposted thisMike Ghaffary reposted thisToday, WEX fleet customers can turn on Standard Fleet across 30+ vehicle brands. No installs, no hardware, just seamless access to our fleet management suite, including digital keys, remote access, and vehicle data from the vehicles they already own. WEX Venture Capital backed our Series A in 2025. A year later, that investment is a product their customers can use. Thank you to David Klein, Vanessa Trinh Keeling Kate Murphy, the rest of the WEX team, and to the Standard Fleet crew who built it. Press release: https://lnkd.in/gp4q3QEVWEX® brings Standard Fleet's connected vehicle platform to fleet customersWEX® brings Standard Fleet's connected vehicle platform to fleet customers
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Mike Ghaffary reposted thisMike Ghaffary reposted thisWe’re announcing our $13.5M Series A led by Standard Capital. AI has taken over engineering and companies are wasting millions. Weave gets you the most out of every dollar spent on tokens. 𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 - we use LLMs and ML to show you exactly how much work is getting done and how good the code is. 𝗧𝗼𝗸𝗲𝗻 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 - we pull in every AI tool and analyze everything from prompt to production. 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘁 𝗿𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗲𝗿 - we take this data, look at every prompt, classify it, then route to the cheapest model (without ever sacrificing speed and quality). And it learns over time. If for no other reason, have fun watching me conquer my fears with my acting debut and jumping out of a plane. If your company is trying to figure out AI spend, hit us up. We'd love to help. Huge thank you for the continued support from our early customers, angel investors and Burst Capital, Moonfire, Irregular Expressions, Agent Fund, Pioneer Fund.
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Mike Ghaffary reposted thisMike Ghaffary reposted thisWhat makes a great host? Over the last few weeks, we asked restaurant operators, customers, and our team to answer that question. The answers were all different, but they all came back to the same thing: great hospitality makes people feel taken care of, and that starts with the host. That idea is what inspired Hostie. Today, we’re excited to share that Hostie has raised a $12M Series A. Two years since the idea. Hundreds of restaurant partners. A team of people building across the country. This next chapter allows us to continue investing in technology that helps restaurant teams stay focused on guests, not ringing phones and missed calls. We’re incredibly grateful to every restaurant, operator, advisor, investor, and team member who has believed in us so far, especially Obvious Ventures for leading this round, along with Gradient, Scribble Ventures, Burst Capital, and Behind Genius. Hospitality is still at the center of everything we build, and we’re excited for what this next chapter means for restaurants.
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Mike Ghaffary reposted thisMike Ghaffary reposted thisIntroducing Willow Frontier Mini and Willow Frontier Pro. Willow Frontier Mini gives every user free, unlimited AI dictation that is fast, accurate, secure, and private. Willow Frontier Pro is our most accurate model yet, built for power users and teams who want the fastest and best dictation experience. For years, the tradeoff in dictation has been frustrating. Built-in dictation is free, but it has never been good enough for serious work. The best AI dictation tools work better, but they are locked behind a subscription. We think that should change. You should not have to pay just to get dictation that actually works. Willow Frontier Mini gives every user high-quality AI dictation anywhere they write, from emails and Slack messages to docs, notes, and AI prompts. Starting today, Frontier Mini is free for everyone to use at Willow
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Mike Ghaffary reposted thisMike Ghaffary reposted thisIntroducing Marvin (marvin@ccmarvin.com) is an AI agent by ccMarvin (ccmarvin.com) you can email like a human. His goal is to be a helpful research analyst for investors. He’s here to help you get news, research, investor memos, and daily news summaries of your portfolio, sectors, or people on X. Why did I build Marvin? A little background on who built Marvin. I did. I’ve been investing professionally as a super angel for 8.5 years. I’ve accumulated a lot of companies, over 250 active companies. Before angel investing I built and ran the engineering team at Yelp for nearly a decade, after that I started investing full-time. Companies like Vercel, Baseten, Namespace, Onebrief, and Benchling. How I built Marvin? As I vibe coded (with Warp, Amp & Claude) I looked for problems to solve, those solutions led to Marvin’s product roadmap. The first problem for me? News monitoring for my portfolio, scan X and other sources for all my companies for recent funding, product releases, and deal news and send me a daily update via email. Example to get started with Marvin, email marvin@ccmarvin.com - “Marvin, can you monitor my portfolio? It has Vercel, SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, Andril and Vanta in it.” Another common situation — I received a pitch deck and I want a summary of it from an LLM and analysis of it. Now with Marvin, I can just forward the email. “Here is a pitch deck, can you use the bessemer memo template and analyze this?” Last thing, I want to stay on top of headlines from folks like @sama and @elonmusk but I don’t have time to doomscroll on X, it’s just not a healthy way to spend my day. You can ask Marvin to send you a daily recap from X. “Marvin, can you send me a daily newsletter of all the things @sama and @elon are talking about on X for the previous day” There are many other things that Marvin can do, you can also ask him.. This is my experiment to see if folks like using email for their LLM. Give it a try, just CC marvin@ccmarvin.com. Technical Details Marvin is connected to multiple LLM providers under the hood via OpenRouter. For news I’m using xAI’s API and Keenable.ai, if you send in a YouTube video I can get a transcript via the Gemini API, and if you have a deep research query I can do that too. Acknowledgments Special thanks to my friends and colleagues for their feedback and support: Eytan Elbaz, George Strompolos, Samuel Woldenberg, Ben Austin, Nitay Joffe, Jackie Xu, Jason Mack, Geoff Donaker, Mike Ghaffary, Wendy Lim, Guido Gabrielli, Josh Bruno, May Allen, Raad Michael Mobrem, Bobby Lo, Gert Lanckriet, Ben Chess, Stef Strack, Georg Treu, Christina Melas-Kyriazi, Shouvik Banerjee, Amit Gupta, Josh Solt, Jeremy Stoppelman, Yair Riemer, Ron Rofe
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Mike Ghaffary reposted thisMike Ghaffary reposted thisWhat a day to announce I've joined Baseten. Today Baseten announces our Series F at a $13B valuation, and I get to say "we." 🥳 I joined as Head of VC Partnerships and Community 60 days ago. Before I signed, Bill Beer (a top Silicon Valley recruiter) told me something that's stuck with me: "Baseten is a 1% valley company, and it's run by grownups." Bill was right. For the last few years at Enrich, I sat in on hundreds of conversations with CTOs and CPOs. The questions were always some version of the same 3: • How do I deploy AI inside my org? • How do I manage my CEO and board? • How do I handle performance and stakeholder management? Then I started at Baseten, and they changed completely. Now what comes up most is: • How to move from closed models to open ones. • How to actually evaluate whether a model is performing. • How to operate in a world where you're not betting on one model anymore, you're juggling several. The leaders I talk to have stopped asking how to get AI in the door. They're deep in the hard part now, the part where the real advantage gets built or lost. At Enrich, I had a front-row seat to how leaders think. At Baseten, I get to be close to the infrastructure decisions shaping what they build next. And I get to do it working for Dannie Herzberg, which still doesn't feel real. If you're a builder trying to make sense of the multi-model world, come sit in on these conversations with us. It's the part of this job I'm most excited about. Thank you to Dannie Herzberg Tuhin Srivastava and Amir Haghighat for the opportunity. I feel incredibly grateful to be part of the journey. And thank you Mike Bilodeau for your partnership and support!
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Mike Ghaffary reposted thisToday, we are thrilled to announce Baseten’s $1.5B Series F, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital, co-led by Sands Capital and Wellington Management, with participation from Battery Ventures, Blackbird, D.E. Shaw Ventures, Durable Capital Partners, Greylock Partners, IVP, Verified Capital, and 01A. This is our fourth fundraise in 18 months, and we are grateful for our investors’ conviction and support and, most importantly, for the trust and partnership of our customers. Over the last year, our revenue has grown 20x, and inference volume has grown 40x. This growth reflects the new market reality: inference is the most important layer in the AI stack, and Baseten has become the partner of choice for companies looking for support with inference and post-training. We are proud to work closely with the teams defining this era, including Cursor, Notion, Lovable, Harvey, HubSpot, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Decagon, Parallel, and many more. These companies have built products where intelligence is core to the user experience, and their businesses are booming. They are also at the forefront of a wave of companies that are more motivated than ever to own their intelligence. As Satya Nadella shared last week, durable advantage will come from the learning systems companies build around their own data, judgment, workflows, and feedback loops. We see the same thing every day - our customers are building systems shaped by proprietary data, evals, domain-specific harnesses, post-training, and custom RL environments. The opportunity ahead has never been so apparent: open-weight models have become strong enough that enterprises can now use them as serious alternatives to closed APIs. Baseten’s work is to help companies take advantage of this progress with confidence. Our researchers and engineers embed with our customers, post-train and optimize specialized models, and serve those models with exceptional latency, reliability, observability, and cost at production scale. This financing allows us to invest aggressively in the compute, software, and talent required to support our customers as AI becomes central to their products and businesses. If you want to post-train custom models and run inference on the fastest, most reliable platform, we’d love to help. If you want to build the infrastructure layer of AI, we are hiring.
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Mike Ghaffary reposted thisIn 2021 I was sent to Mumbai with a one way ticket to figure out how to set up an Indian entity, and along the way I realized how hard it was for businesses to operate internationally. When Yaacov Tarko suggested we name the company Commenda, after a medieval contract, the company was born. We set out to solve the problem of how to make the world's regulations legible, and how to give every business the same tools that were only available to the largest companies. We have already helped 500+ companies expand oversees seamlessly, including TRX Training, Exa, Remote, Razorpay, AVEA, and more. Our AI managed entity platform lets every company click-to-register an entity in 74 countries, and then stay autonomously compliant with our fully integrated system of intelligence. One platform for all of your corporate records, filings, and reporting. We believe that the only way to solve this problem is with technology. We are building the machinery of economic freedom.Mike Ghaffary reposted thisWe are proud to announce today our $9m in seed funding to build the world's first AI managed entity platform, led by Pelion Venture Partners and Bling Capital, with participation from Urban Innovation Fund, 1517 Fund, Boost VC, Former Yelp CFO Rob Krolik from Burst, Marcelo Lebre and other angels. 22% of companies that sell on Stripe see the majority of their activity outside their home country, and global hiring and selling platforms have shown that there is enormous pent-up demand for good solutions in this space. We have already helped 500+ companies expand overseas seamlessly, including TRX Training, Exa, Remote, Razorpay, AVEA, and more. Our solution lets companies like these incorporate entities in 74 countries and keep them automatically compliant across all of their filing obligations. We are building freedom technology, which means that we are attacking it from both ends: 1. By solving the services piece with an end-to-end automated solution, companies that previously could not afford a fully managed solution are now able to. 2. We are building the largest index of government regulations and tax rules in the world, spanning every tax category and corporate statutory requirement. We believe there are trillions of dollars in GDP which are currently pent up by the burden of overregulation, and our mission is to unlock that growth for the good of all free and open societies. 1517 Fund Boost VC Urban Innovation Fund Burst Capital John Backus Abhay V. Michael Tan Raymond Russell
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Love ccMarvin, thank you for building this Michael Stoppelman! Really useful in particular as an investor to track our portfolio, or to track other companies of interest. I used to try to do this manually with potential customers and partners using google alerts and it was hard and too noisy. This is a great use case for AI to sift through the noise and tell me what is actually going on.
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Mike Ghaffary liked thisMike Ghaffary liked thisNew look, who dis? We’ve refreshed Ritual Capital’s brand and launched a new website that brings more of its personality and purpose to life. To help, I called one of my oldest friends, Kurt Parker. We’ve known each other since high school and college, and while he’s spent his career working on brands like Nike and lululemon, I’ve spent much of mine investing in startups. I figured we’d start with logos, fonts and colors. Instead, Kurt gave me homework: write the word “Ritual” 100 times, by hand. At first, I overthought every letter, trying different R’s, spacing and angles. Eventually, I stopped trying so hard and my hand found a rhythm. Kurt circled a few versions, and one became our logo. As we kept working, the conversations moved beyond design to what I wanted Ritual to stand for: staying small by design, investing early with conviction, and helping founders with the things we’re good at, particularly storytelling, marketing and recruiting. That means being present when things are hard and knowing when to stay out of the way. The process also brought me back to the name. Rituals have intention behind them, and the best founders I’ve worked with bring that intention to the daily work of building a company. We celebrate launches, financings and IPOs, but those moments usually come from thousands of smaller ones: another customer conversation, another product revision, another call to the candidate who said no. That became the idea at the center of our refreshed brand and new website: Greatness begins with rituals. Kurt’s described the handwritten logo as “practiced into confidence,” which feels like a pretty good description of building a company, too. We started out refreshing the brand and ended up putting clearer words around what Ritual has always stood for. Check out the new site: www.ritualcapital.com
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Mike Ghaffary liked thisMike Ghaffary liked this“When will Baseten offer sandboxes” has been a common customer question. And we’ve taken a huge step in answering it: Baseten has acquired Blaxel. The nature of the median inference call has changed in the past year. Models stopped just answering questions; they act now. A coding agent writes a patch, runs the test suite, reads the failure, and tries again, dozens of times to close a single ticket. Every one of those loops needs somewhere to execute code. And the agent itself needs its own runtime. And so do RL rollouts. The list goes on. Running some code in a container isn’t hard. The hard problem is storage (state), networking (milliseconds-long cold starts), and security (VMs). That's what Blaxel has built: stateful, pause/resumable, VM-isolated sandboxes that scale to thousands of instances in seconds. Zooming out, tomorrow’s cloud isn’t one of inference, training, or sandboxes. It’s one where these 3 primitives come together cohesively to meet users where they are and to unlock value that’s greater than the sum of the parts. That’s been the north star that Baseten and Blaxel share (they were in fact going to build inference and training). I couldn’t be more excited to do it together with Paul Sinai and team. Welcome 💚 https://lnkd.in/gVEF68bGBlaxel is joining Baseten to build the future of agentic infrastructureBlaxel is joining Baseten to build the future of agentic infrastructure
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Mike Ghaffary liked thisMike Ghaffary liked thisI'm excited to annouce ccMarvin is being relaunched today as a news tracker for investors. Add your portfolio companies or create a custom newsletter with your own prompt, and get an email on schedule. Marvin the AI agent will scan, X, YouTube, traditional media, and the web for you. As you might know I’m a super angel, I’ve invested in over 300 companies (Vercel, Baseten, Onebrief, Benchling, Chai Discovery) over the last 9 years as a solo investor. So with hundreds of investments and being a software engineer at heart, I had to naturally build tools for yourself. One of the first vibe coded tools I made was a portfolio tracker for my venture investments. This helps me stay on top of questions like in my portfolio like: who’s breaking out? Who’s raising a round? Who just did a big product release? Did one of my companies just acquire a competitor? With this information I can help entrepreneurs in my portfolio more proactively. I wanted advanced Google Alerts for my portfolio. Nothing existed that I thought was great for private investors so I built my own. Now I’m sharing that with my fellow colleagues. How Does It Work? You start by first signing up on ccmarvin.com, after that you can add your portfolio or individual companies you’d like to track, we’d recommend tracking at least 10 things for a reasonable tracker. Behind the scenes ccMarvin is connected to Youtube, X, and other news sources (via keenable.ai). Everyday we’ll take that set of companies and previous news we’ve found, and have an virtual editor and reporter AI agent scour the internet for new stories about your companies. We deliver that to you via email every morning. What If I want to Track People or a Specific Topic? After setting up your portfolio tracking, you can also create custom newsletters, which was another popular feature from our first release. You can give ccMarvin a prompt like: - "Keep me up to date with all things related to data center build outs in the United States" - “Monitor all your sources include Youtube for any AI researcher talking to the media, and summarize it.” - “Monitor X for anyone important from the AI labs talking about GPUs or big compute”. - "Summarize everything going on with UAPs and UFOs today 👽 " You can get a lot out of newsletters. Please give this new version of ccmarvin.com a try. Special thanks to my early users: Samuel Woldenberg, Andreas Biebl, Emre Murray Mangir, Mike Ghaffary, Jackie Xu, Guido Gabrielli, Wendy Lim, Geoff Donaker, James Carlin, Yair Riemer, Tanai Kamat, Gil Elbaz, Eytan Elbaz, Jayni Shah, Jason Mack, Apoorva Pandhi, Amit Gupta, Alyssa Wallack
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Mike Ghaffary liked thisMike Ghaffary liked thisJust got back from one of the most engaging events I've been to this year, where Tripleseat hosted Hostie as their partner to help restaurants better connect with their guests. What stood out most was how fully locked-in the attendees were, all the while simultaneously hustling from afar to coordinate live events back at their own venues. You could feel the collective empathy everyone in the room had for one another. You'd think getting to hear from Danny Meyer would have been the sole highlight. Candidly, he was incredible and shared some fantastic wisdom. (Danny, you've got me thinking about how I might need to change my grip!) But what was just as magical was witnessing the Tripleseat team in action. They were energetic (maybe it was the coffee?!), engaging, and deeply committed to seeing their users win. On top of that, they extended incredible hospitality to us as partners and made us feel so welcomed. Truly, thank you. To all of the restaurant sales folks we spent time with - thank you! And to those we weren't lucky enough to meet yet, we'd still love the chance to connect. Lastly, to our small Hostie team that was lucky enough to attend, I thank you. I'm so proud to work alongside you Hayley Foppiani Sandra Mullen - Pezzetta. We had a Wicked Good Time!
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Mike Ghaffary liked thisMike Ghaffary liked thisGrateful to have sat down with Alex Barreira at the San Francisco Business Times to talk about the last few years building Hostie, and the years before, running Back to Back with my sister in the same Nob Hill space where my parents once had a restaurant (and yes, our mom tried to talk us out of it – we clearly didn’t listen). Most questions kept circling back to the same thing: relationships. The connection that got us our first pilot at Trick Dog. The demo with Flour + Water Hospitality Group that turned into one of our best partnerships. None of it happens without people showing up for each other first. Proud of what we've built: nearly 1,000 restaurants trust Hostie now, from independents like Harborview Restaurant & Bar and Wayfare Tavern to groups like Flour & Water and Bacchus. Thanks to everyone who's taken a chance on us. It really does start with one connection. Full interview linked in the comments.
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Mike Ghaffary liked thisMike Ghaffary liked thisBig thanks for Mike Ghaffary for the insightful discussion. Mike Ghaffary is a General Partner at Burst Capital, a venture capital firm specializing in early-stage investments in marketplace, software, and AI companies. With an impressive background spanning roles at Canvas Ventures and Social Capital, as well as co-founding Stitcher, he has been instrumental in the growth of companies like Yelp and Eat24, demonstrating his expertise in scaling businesses. Mike has a background in computer science and holds both a JD and MBA from Harvard, and he’s invested in high-growth companies like Strava, Superhuman, Faire, and Optimizely. Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Mike Ghaffary, General Partner at Burst Capital, about how AI will fuel job creation and transform Main Street. Mike also shares insights on scaling Eat24, landing a game-changing partnership at TrialPay, and why the future belongs to software-powered small businesses.
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Paul Wellons
Today we’re sharing some big news. Ando raised a $4M seed round, led by Slow Ventures, with participation from Blitzscaling Ventures, Zero Capital, Monochrome Capital, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Fireroad, and additional investors. Hourly work powers a huge part of the economy but scheduling is still a mess. Too often, staffing doesn’t match real demand, shifts change at the last minute, and workers are left trying to juggle childcare, commutes, school pickup, and second (or third) jobs. That chaos is expensive for businesses and brutal for workers. Ando exists to make hourly work more predictable. We use AI to forecast demand for each location and help teams build schedules that fit real people. We’ve been in the field with enterprise customers for over a year, and the early traction is encouraging: - 90%+ daily demand accuracy - 100% conversion from presentation → pilot → paid platform - 100% retention so far In some locations, customers have seen $60K–$80K in incremental revenue (results vary and aren’t solely attributable to Ando) Most importantly, this is about treating workers’ time like it matters. If you’re working multiple jobs, a last-minute schedule change isn’t a small inconvenience, it can blow up your week. This funding will help us expand our forecasting and scheduling platform and scale deployments with enterprise customers. Grateful to our investors, advisors, customers, and team. And if you’re an operator or leader living this problem every day, I’d love to connect. Full release below. https://lnkd.in/gyYjqmts #Ando #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #WorkforceAI #FutureOfWork #LaborTech #RestaurantTech #RetailTech
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Keval Desai
- Can we scale the startup funnel by funding more companies at the top and expect more companies to emerge at the bottom as category leaders? - How can one identify whether a founder will scale from inception through an IPO? - Can small & big (funds) co-exist or has VC changed forever? The great folks at Uncovered Media shared our conversation on these topics & more on their recent podcast. If you get a chance to listen (link below), please share your thoughts as well. Thank you Sean Lindy Brandy Whalen & team! cc SHAKTI
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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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