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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
Mike Ghaffary commented on a post
4d
Let’s gooooo!
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3w
Congratulations Hostie team, really excited to see your momentum!
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Mike Ghaffary liked thisMike Ghaffary liked 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 liked thisMike Ghaffary liked 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 liked thisMike Ghaffary liked thisFlowspace turned 9 last week, and I keep thinking about a breakfast a few years back - stack of pancakes with Jason Harbert and Sarah Gardner, and an idea that fulfillment shouldn't be hard for growing brands. I don't think any of us at that table would've guessed we'd end up here: an NPS of +94, more than 100 points above the industry average. Fulfillment centers running across the US and in Canada. An amazing team. And great brands I’m happy Flowspace can support in their growth. Grateful to everyone at Flowspace who helped turn pancakes into something real!
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Mike Ghaffary liked thisMike Ghaffary liked thisRandall Hom didn't discover the problem Hostie solves through market research — he lived it, running his own restaurant, Back to Back, in San Francisco. His AI concierge startup just closed a $12M Series A led by Obvious Ventures, bringing total funding to $16M, after a year of 10x revenue growth and hundreds of restaurant partners nationwide. Here's the founder story behind one of hospitality tech's most operator-credible bets. Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/gKNek4NK #RestaurantTech #HospitalityTech #StartupFunding #SeriesA #FounderStory #AIStartups #RestaurantAI
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Mike Ghaffary liked thisMike Ghaffary liked thisFriends! I’m excited to announce I’m joining Pear VC as a partner focusing on pre-seed! I first met Pear while building Sidecar, and came away impressed with their ability to quickly understand my business in a way only other founders can. After winding down sidecar, I called Mar and Nathan on advice on what to build next...and I came away so excited about their ethos and vision that I decided to join the VC side instead. I’ve loved being a founder, and now I’m excited to work with and empower the next cohort of founders building $10B companies. We invest early! If you’re currently exploring an idea, or thinking of starting a company, feel free to reach out!
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Jeff Perry
Seth Levine nailed it! The concentration problem isn't just a GP pain point... it's choking innovation. When capital pools around the same 20 funds, emerging managers and founders get shut out. Love that he's using his platform to call this out. Foundry has backed 50+ emerging managers. That's the diversification the ecosystem needs. This is exactly why Carta exists — making capital allocation visible and accessible. Capital Evolution hits at exactly the right moment. Thanks for having us Daniel Dart. Team Carta loves the community of FUTURE TITANS you have built 🚀
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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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