Joshua Levy

Today, we’re thrilled to publicly launch Phoebe and announce $17M in seed funding, in rounds led by GV and Cherry Ventures. We are building the immune system for software: An AI agent platform that continuously investigates live data, diagnoses emerging issues and generates preemptive fixes. As AI accelerates how software is built, reliability must keep pace. Phoebe started with faster troubleshooting, and our aim is to prevent the overwhelming majority of emergent problems before becoming customer-impacting failures. Huge thanks to the hundreds of early users at customers such as Trainline and PPRO. Thanks to our investors, including 20 CTOs and tech veterans joining as angels. And of course, thanks to the small and mighty Phoebe team! This is just the beginning! 🚀 Shoutout to Mark Kleinman at Sky News for breaking the news this morning (linked in the comments) Some of the many backers we're grateful for 🤗 🙏 GV (Google Ventures), Cherry Ventures, Anthony Danon, Carmen Alfonso Rico 🍫, William Gaybrick, Shola Akinlade, Yaron Shaer, Christian Dorffer, Tom Stafford, Thomas Wolf, Andrew Tan, Victor Riparbelli, Harsh Sinha, Jeanne DeWitt Grosser and more

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After an incredible trip to San Francisco, it's evident that fostering a closer relationship between the public sector, venture capital, and the startup ecosystem is crucial. This synergy will drive the adoption of cutting-edge technologies that are essential now, not just what we perceive as necessary. Collaborating on building and iterating processes alongside the private sector is key. Reflecting on the insightful discussions from last week, it's clear that there's untapped potential in bringing key stakeholders together. Venture capitalists can play a significant role in bridging this gap and facilitating meaningful collaborations.

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"AI companies are really buoying the American economy right now, and it’s looking very bubble-shaped." Chatted with Michael Hiltzik over at the LA Times about GPT-5, AI hype, and the growing bubble. https://lnkd.in/gAhnNkzV

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A nice summary here from Messari on what we're up to at VeChain. The TL;DR is: We're showing up other L1s when it comes to real, mass adoption. In Q2, two of our VeBetter applications, GreenCart and Mugshot, each surpassed one million users, offering real proof that web3 can support everyday sustainable behavior at scale. The Stella Pay Visa Card now allows users to spend their VeBetter rewards at more than 130 million vendors around the world. You do something good, you earn something real, and now you can use it all over the world. This is what Web3 should be about. Bringing positive change to millions of people. No crypto native knowledge required. Messari's full report: https://lnkd.in/gTmkg7dw 

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The application layer the new security battleground, not the OS. Today, applications are ever-changing ecosystems made up of code packages, plugins, extensions, and increasingly, AI models. The software surface area of many organizations is 10x larger than it was before, yet companies have less visibility and control than ever. The insane part is that pretty much no one recognized the magnitude of this problem, except for the team at Koi Security. In just eight months, they’ve built a platform that delivers full visibility and control over this new application layer—detecting everything running on every endpoint and giving organizations the ability to actually enforce policies and remediate risk. And they're scaling incredibly fast. We are excited to co-lead their $48M Series A round. Here's what we saw in them: https://lnkd.in/dbrT4yRV Amit Assaraf 🎏

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We made a big upgrade in our extraction product 💫 - view confidence scores in the UI! LLMs are cracked at document parsing, but sometimes certain pieces of the document are too hard for both LLMs (and sometimes humans) to understand. It is unrealistic to expect that agentic automation will be 100% accurate all the time. In order to bring this up to 100% while still saving a ton of time, you need confidence scores and HITL. You can set a confidence threshold and view low confidence items in yellow to quickly validate which results might be incorrect. Check it out: https://lnkd.in/gvXEEzqq

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Elie Schoppik has spent his career at the intersection of education and engineering. He built early ed-tech tools that helped people actually retain knowledge, founded a Bay Area coding bootcamp that trained thousands of developers through practice and feedback, and now leads Technical Education at Anthropic. Despite all that experience, Elie says most teams are using AI wrong: they’re treating it like an all-knowing oracle instead of a tutor. This is why Elie designs prompts, examples, and workflows that treat AI as a teacher, instead of a shortcut. In our conversation, we discuss: • Why relying on AI for “fast answers” erodes judgment and verification • How to turn prompts into guided lessons • Why context engineering is the most underrated skill in 2025 • Practical exercises any team can run tomorrow to raise AI fluency • What leaders should steal from Anthropic’s approach to technical education  Episode is live now — full conversation linked in the comments.

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Flint has come out of stealth mode with $5 million in seed funding to develop an AI platform for autonomously building and updating websites. The funding round was led by Accel Flint, co-founded by Michelle Lim and Max Levenson, aims to create websites that optimize themselves, perform A/B tests, and learn from market trends, although the technology is not fully developed yet. Read more: https://lnkd.in/ehk3qf6z 📰 Subscribe to the Daily AI Brief: https://lnkd.in/eq56P3bj #ai #artificialintelligence #ainews #aistartup #aifunding

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🚀🚀 AI is rewriting the rules of startup success. In our latest Crunchbase piece, Noah Lin and I dive into how we @ defy.vc have seen AI-first companies scale smarter with value model tactics—leveraging predictive power and network effects to reshape industries. From defying traditional metrics to building data moats, these strategies are a game-changer for founders. 💡 Stay tuned for a deeper follow-up where we’ll share actionable tactics for founders to scale their AI ventures! Full article 👇 #AI #Startups #Innovation #VentureCapital

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