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I invest mostly in infrastructure software and hardware, from three solo-GP funds with ≈…
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Salil Deshpande shared thisUncorrelated may have one exit per month for the rest of the year with 4 in the last 3 months (Promptfoo by OpenAI, Eigen AI by Nebius, Orb by Adyen, and today MEXT by AMD) plus 3 more in the works. Mext targeted the largest cost in the datacenter: server memory (DRAM), where prices have surged as AI workloads eat up computing supply. From being on the board of Redis for twelve years, I learned a lot about the various aspects of this problem and approaches to solving them. Mext found a breakthrough, using new ML 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. The technique allows applications to either run using less DRAM or keep their DRAM footprint but do more with it. It was a joy to be on a super collaborative board with OGs Gary Smerdon, Chris Rust, and Steven Schlenker. https://lnkd.in/gdZz4qsJAMD Stock Soars. It’s Buying MEXT to Fight Memory Shortage.AMD Stock Soars. It’s Buying MEXT to Fight Memory Shortage.
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Salil Deshpande shared this#Uncorrelated invested in Orb entirely due to the kindness of Sri Pangulur and Navin Chaddha of Mayfield. Having invested in prior-generation company Aria and almost in Zuora, I’d learned that as products got more intelligent, billing systems would need to handle not only seats and subscriptions but also usage, tokens, agents, outcomes, and other concepts that don’t even exist yet. I would’ve loved to invest more in an independent Orb, but my Zen sensei reminds me to practice gratitude--and not complain about 60%+ IRRs. Orb starts with a flexible data model that ingests all usage events (not just the ones you’ve already decided to bill on) so that commercial teams can iterate on pricing and packaging without needing to file engineering tickets. Customers like Vercel, Replit, Supabase, and Glean didn’t just save engineering time by using Orb. It changed how they thought about monetization, with billing becoming a growth lever. Congrats to Alvaro Morales and Kshitij Grover.Salil Deshpande shared thisWhen we at Mayfield led Orb's Series B, our people first bet was on Co-Founders Alvaro Morales and Kshitij Grover going after a market in transition. They understood that revenue workflows were becoming a strategic layer of the software stack in the AI era, and we believed AI would fundamentally change how software creates and captures value. Every major platform shift creates new infrastructure categories. AI is building extraordinary products, and entirely new requirements for how those products get monetized. For two decades, pricing meant seats and subscriptions. But as products get more intelligent, adaptive, and outcome-oriented, those models break down. Companies now need to price on usage, tokens, agents, outcomes, or concepts that don't even exist yet. That flexibility is hard to build, and too many teams burn engineering cycles maintaining monetization infrastructure instead of shipping products. Alvaro and Kshitij saw this early. They assembled a team and built a platform that turns raw usage data into pricing that evolves as fast as the products it supports. That's what makes today's acquisition by Adyen so significant. The future of monetization is end-to-end. The systems that decide what a customer should be charged and the systems that collect that revenue are becoming one workflow, pointing to revenue infrastructure that’s more automated, adaptive, and intelligent. Congratulations Alvaro, Kshitij, and the entire Orb team. It's been a privilege to be part of the journey, and we can't wait to see what you build next at Adyen. Saam Motamedi Greylock Partners Naomi Pilosof Ionita Tim Tully Menlo Ventures Salil Deshpande Zero Prime Ventures Pete Soderling alana goyal basecase capital Buzz Black Alan Bressers AXOM Partners
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Salil Deshpande posted thisAfter 12 years on the Forbes Midas List, I'm #100 this year — the only schmoe with a 3-digit rank and just barely hanging on, apparently. In case I fall off next year, now is the right moment to do something I've never taken the time to do: thank the founders whose performance entirely made up mine. In deliberately scrambled order: Greg Schott, Ross Mason (MuleSoft) Yiftach Shoolman, Ofer Bengal, Salvatore Sanfilippo (Redis) Chase Lochmiller, Cully Cavness (Crusoe Energy) Sumit Gupta, Rohit Jain (CoinDCX) Ry Walker (Astronomer) Renaud Laplanche (Lending Club, Upgrade) Robert Wenig (Tealeaf) Michael Lazerow (Buddy Media) Bernd Greifeneder (Dynatrace) Greg Duffy, Aamir Virani (Dropcam) Rod Johnson (SpringSource) Graeme Rocher (Groovy, Grails) Jevgeni Kabanov (ZeroTurnaround) Billy Bosworth (DataStax) Nikola Bozinovic (Frame) Jeff Lunsford (Tealium) Loris Degioanni (Sysdig) Jae Kwon (Cosmos) John Gedmark (Astranis) Dan Pinto, Valentin V. (Fingerprint) Mario Ciabarra (Quantum Metric) Edward Woodford (Zerohash) Eric Simons (Bolt.new) Ryan Hanrui Wang (Eigen AI, now Nebius) Ian W. (Promptfoo, now OpenAI) George Dochev, Peter Thompson (LucidLink) james hawkins(PostHog) Piotr Tomasik (TensorWave) Sim Desai (Hiive) Ben Forman (ParaFi) Edward Tian (Railbird, now DraftKings) Bhanu Kohli (Rail, now Ripple) Marc Asch (Hidden Road, now Ripple) Robert Leshner (Compound Finance) Ankush Gera (Junglee) Jason van Zyl (Sonatype)
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Salil Deshpande shared thisI hadn't heard of Eigen AI. MIT PhD recent-grad AI whiz-kids, how would I know them? Fortunately MIT prof Matt Rhodes-Kropf (Tectonic Ventures), a dear friend and #Uncorrelated LP said, “Hey, you should take a look a this super cool seed deal I’m doing.” I love it when people say that. I committed after the first meeting. Six months later they get bought for $643M. Kudos to Ryan Hanrui Wang and the amazing team, and thank you Matt!Salil Deshpande shared thisToday, we're announcing that Eigen AI is joining Nebius (NASDAQ: NBIS). From day one, our mission has been Artificial Efficient Intelligence — building the world's most efficient engines for generating intelligence. With Nebius, we're working toward the best AI cloud, uniting Eigen's industry-leading AI model customization and inference software, with Nebius's global hardware and infrastructure footprint, so any developer or enterprise can run the best models at the best price, with no capacity ceiling. After close, Eigen's optimization stack will be integrated directly into Nebius Token Factory. The entire Eigen AI team is joining Nebius in full, establishing Nebius's engineering and research presence in the San Francisco Bay Area. To our customers, our team, our investors at Tectonic Ventures, E14 Fund, Uncorrelated Ventures, and AGI House Ventures, our angel investors, advisors, mentors, and supporters — and to the Nebius team for the conviction and partnership — thank you. Ryan Hanrui Wang, co-founder and CEO of Eigen AI, said: “We’re proud to join Nebius and work alongside the Token Factory team to push the boundaries of inference performance. Nebius has built a world-class AI cloud with a deep engineering culture that perfectly aligns with our own. Together, we are removing the friction of AI model customization and deployment so developers can run models reliably in production without managing the underlying infrastructure.” Full announcement at: https://lnkd.in/gqpJKBvH
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Salil Deshpande shared thisGlad that #Uncorrelated was able to join Bessemer Venture Partners in preempting a $20M round in HockeyStack. https://lnkd.in/gTfP67ib HockeyStack’s key thesis was that Salesforce's data model was too restrictive, so much so that sales and marketing could never properly be unified. And since Salesforce educated the industry on what a CRM should be, all its competitors, such as HubSpot, copied their data modeling errors; thus it’s impossible to fully unify sales and marketing using those tools (e.g., for full end-to-end attribution).Salil Deshpande shared thisWe raised $50M to build the World’s First AI Revenue Agent: It runs New Business, Expansion, and Prospecting 24/7. AI is changing the world, but Sales teams still run on tribal knowledge, gut calls, and fictional CRM stages: - Your best rep closes 2-3x more than your median. Nobody knows why. - Pipeline reviews are guesswork, and forecasts break every quarter. - Every tool tells you what happened. None of them close you more business. HockeyStack’s Revenue Agents fix this in 3 key ways: 1. Build your winning Blueprint: HockeyStack reverse-engineers every deal you've ever won or lost and extracts the exact path to win, by motion and segment. This becomes the brain for Revenue Agents. 2. Clone your Top reps: Your top performers run plays that live in their heads. HockeyStack finds and deploys them across your entire team. 3. Deploy Revenue Agents: Dedicated Agents monitor every deal and account, execute the right moves autonomously, and flag risks. A Revenue Agent spots your $550K deal about to stall, identifies a new champion, gets the intro, and preps your rep. All before morning coffee. 300+ Enterprise companies run revenue on HockeyStack, including Microsoft, 8x8, and Yext. On average, teams close 48% more deals using the platform. If you have 30+ reps, HockeyStack will 2x their output. If you don't see it in a pilot, I'll donate $10K to a charity of your choice. Book a demo here: https://lnkd.in/gpDVQ4Wm Everything in my life has led to this moment: I grew up middle-class in Turkey, made $350K when I was 18 with my first SaaS, and dropped out of college after 3 months to build a generational company. Today, we are an 8-figure business. Fortune 100 companies trust and love us, and 90+ of the smartest people in tech joined our team last year to build the Agent that Revenue Teams deserve. Thank you to: Our investors who tripled down (Bessemer Venture Partners, Y Combinator, Alexandra Sukin, Jeremy Levine, and Salil Deshpande), customers, team, and my co-founders.
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Salil Deshpande shared thisExcited to receive OpenAI stock in the all-stock acquisition of Promptfoo (#uncorrelated). Much gratitude to George Mathew, Ian W., Ganesh Bell for allowing Uncorrelated to invest early. https://lnkd.in/gTpaBXmUOpenAI acquires Promptfoo to secure its AI agents | TechCrunchOpenAI acquires Promptfoo to secure its AI agents | TechCrunch
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Salil Deshpande shared thisThe code reviewer from CodeAnt AI (#uncorrelated) found 87 zero-day vulnerabilities across npm, PyPI, Maven, and NuGet. This is #1, the most rare and severe: a CVSS 10.0 vulnerability (the highest possible severity score), a critical authentication bypass hidden for six years in pac4j-jwt, a widely used Java security library.Salil Deshpande shared thisCodeAnt AI’s code reviewer just found a CVSS 10.0 vulnerability. CVE-2026-29000. The highest possible severity score. The vulnerability had been sitting in pac4j, one of the most widely used Java authentication libraries, for nearly 6 years. No static scanner caught it. No human reviewer caught it. Our AI code reviewer did. This was a complete authentication bypass caused by a logic gap between the JWT specification and the implementation in `pac4j-jwt`. What does that mean in practice? An attacker can craft a malicious authentication token and log in as any user, including an admin. - No password - No credentials - No stolen session The only thing they need is your server’s RSA public key, which is publicly available by design. The root cause: the library accepts a class of token that the JWT spec technically allows, but that should never bypass signature verification. When pac4j receives that token, it skips signature verification entirely and creates an authenticated session from attacker-controlled claims. We’ve shared the full technical write-up and working PoC in the links below. We don’t publish random code review benchmark claims. We publish CVEs. This is one of 87 vulnerabilities we’ve uncovered so far, including issues affecting packages with 500M+ weekly downloads, many of which are currently in responsible disclosure with maintainers. Kudos to Patrick Garrity and team at VulnCheck to expediting the CVE assignment process.
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Salil Deshpande reposted thisSalil Deshpande reposted thisYour AI agent just wrote a Terraform change that touches 6 services. It has no idea. This is the reality most platform and infra teams are walking into. Agents have no awareness of cross-service dependencies, compliance requirements, or the blast radius of what they're proposing. They're generating change at a volume and speed that existing review processes were never designed to handle. Cory O'Daniel will sit down with special guest Kelsey Hightower to talk about what's actually broken in how most teams are approaching agentic infrastructure today: • Agents generating change at speeds humans can't review • Zero awareness of blast radius or compliance requirements • The validation layers that have to exist before agentic infra is safe to ship If your team is responsible for keeping production stable, this one's for you. 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗷𝗼𝗶𝗻: Send 1–2 questions you want Cory and Kelsey to answer in the chat below, or email them to Luis@massdriver.cloud — we'll send you the link to register. Hope to see you there!
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Salil Deshpande shared thisAs 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/gXe9GCeEWelcome! You are invited to join a webinar: RAM Prices Are Surging—What's Happening and What To Do. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: RAM Prices Are Surging—What's Happening and What To Do. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.
Salil Deshpande replied to a comment
3mo
As a Purdy fanboy I'm flattered. He often forces the long ball though, and I seem to take the checkdowns more reliably.
Salil Deshpande replied to a comment
4mo
Thank you Trevor Kienzle – that means extra coming from someone who crunches so much data and tracks VCs’ performance.
Salil Deshpande replied to a comment
4mo
Vlad Ilyushchenko I'm counting on you and your cohort, to stay on!
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Salil Deshpande liked thisOn stage at Colorado Startup week yesterday Dan Caruso graciously passed the torch to me and Chase Lochmiller as founders of the most valuable technology company in Colorado history - a pretty special moment for this simpleminded geologist from Denver. Proud to have kept a lot of the economic activity and jobs here in Colorado even as the company has grown globally.Salil Deshpande liked thisCrusoe, the data center developer and AI infrastructure provider, has reportedly raised $3 billion at a $30 billion valuation in a round co-led by Atreides Management, LP and Valor Equity Partners, with participation from Mubadala Capital. The raise comes just 10 months after Crusoe secured $1.38 billion at a $10 billion valuation and follows a $13 billion, five-year cloud infrastructure contract with Jane Street, as the company continues expanding beyond its origins as a crypto mining operation into hyperscale data centers and AI cloud services for customers including Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI. FOUNDERS: Chase Lochmiller & Cully Cavness INVESTORS: Atreides Management, LP, Valor Equity Partners & Mubadala Capital AMOUNT: $3,000,000,000 VALUATION: $30,000,000,000 HQ: Denver, Colorado #VentureCapital #Crusoe #ChaseLochmiller #AtreidesManagement #TradedVC
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Salil Deshpande reacted on thisSalil Deshpande reacted on thisNonchalance is dead. Wanting things out loud is the new cool.
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Salil Deshpande reacted on thisSalil Deshpande reacted on thisIt was a morning full of insights at VC Unlocked Stanford University , featuring Salil Deshpande of Uncorrelated Ventures —the world's second-largest "Solo GP"—and Ashmeet Sidana , who aside from a great personal and professional story, recently oversaw the exit of WideField Security to Cisco through his fund, Engineering Capital. Both share a grounded nature and a distinct, enjoyable approach to their business. Some takeaways: -Becoming a successful GP is as difficult as making it to the NBA... but the reward is amazing. -Humility and continuous learning are essential; past success as an investor is no guarantee of future success. - Don’t micromanage your portfolio companies Two successful figures in Silicon Valley who define success in terms of happiness and the well-being of their loved ones.
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Salil Deshpande liked thisSalil Deshpande liked this📢 Exciting announcement here at Bridge! Harte and I have spent several years lending to CPG suppliers. Somewhere along the way it clicked that our data and technology gave us a real edge in evaluating these brands. Using AI, we can use structured and unstructured data through our models to evaluate credit differently than a traditional lender can. At the same time we kept watching strong brands get turned away from existing lenders. Not because they were bad businesses, but because almost nobody does production financing. The lenders just aren't there. In LuminArx Capital we found a partner who would put their capital behind our underwriting, our data, our retailer partnerships and our technology. Last week we announced the answer: a $500 million partnership to finance CPG brands and retail suppliers filling orders for the country's largest retailers. All of us are buying more small batch, more independent, more interesting products than we were five years ago. But that independent brand needs capital to buy raw materials, hire people and actually deliver the order. Taste is changing faster than the credit market is. We're here to help. If you're building one of those brands, reach out at bridge.co Emily Reeves, Sam Wiser, Cletus McKeown, Mike Gelb, Derek J. Manuge, Donovan Campbell, Bridge - Financing for Consumer Brands
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Salil Deshpande liked thisSalil Deshpande liked thisWe raised $75M from Battery Ventures, NewRoad Capital Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, PSP Growth, NewBuild Venture Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures and Iron Pillar. The bigger story: enterprises spend $2T+ a year on their supply chains, yet manage this critical business workflow on legacy software and outsourced labor. Freehand replaces this labour intensive stack with AI Agents that decide, act, and take accountability for outcomes. Freehand's agents pay invoices - accurately, consistently and with deep audit traces at the world's largest brands today. Our story got featured on Forbes, Crunchbase, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune and many other publications today - shout out to our journalist friends! Here's Forbes on how we're building software that IS the user, not just software FOR the user 👇 https://lnkd.in/dHtMrKRd
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Salil Deshpande reacted on thisSalil Deshpande reacted on thisI had a conversation last week that I have not been able to shake. I wrote this for anyone who has ever felt like they stumbled into their own life.
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Salil Deshpande reacted on thisSalil Deshpande reacted on thisFinishing up my master's degree. Here is what I think the work is actually for.
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Salil Deshpande reacted on thisSalil Deshpande reacted on thisI am finally saying the quiet part out loud: Venture Capital is dead. Quite the topic for the first edition of Liquid Thinking, my newsletter about the future of Venture Capital. See you in the comments.
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Salil Deshpande reacted on thisSalil Deshpande reacted on thisI spent a week building autonomous military drones at a hackathon. Here's what nobody tells you about government sales, geopolitics, and the future of warfare.
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