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Nick Efstratis is a co-founder and co-Managing Partner of EPIC Ventures. In addition…
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Instructure is Utah's newest $Billion Company
Instructure is Utah's newest $Billion Company
Last week one of our LP's sent us the snapshot you see above when Instructure closed at $34.05 and a market cap as…
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Nick Efstratis shared thisA couple weeks ago, the team behind Brief - Executive Intelligence announced their new company to the world. Their conviction did not surprise me. The response did not surprise me. What did? The speed of recognition. EPIC Ventures invests in operators who have built category-defining enterprise software before. We have learned to bet on the people who recognize when a real category is forming, because they are usually the ones who can build it. Larry Augustin, Zac Sprackett, and Clint Oram did that work at SugarCRM. They built a category-defining company once. They are doing it again with Brief. Today, EPIC Ventures is proud to lead Brief's $5M seed round, with participation from Boulder Ventures. Executive Intelligence is the rare AI bet that is not a feature inside an existing category. It is a new layer of enterprise software, and the executive function has needed it for a long time. Most investors looking at AI startups today are sorting through features dressed as products. Brief is the opposite case. The category is real, the architecture is sound, and the team has done this kind of work before. That combination is rare enough to back when you find it. Larry, Zac, and Clint are doing it again.
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Nick Efstratis shared thisExcited to make this announcement and to be working with so many great partners, advisors, founders and team members!Nick Efstratis shared thisToday, we’re excited to announce $200M of fresh capital to support early-stage founders solving meaningful problems in healthcare, software, AI, and beyond. Our fund is positioned as a strategic public and private initiative to back our region’s best entrepreneurs and attract collaboration between the top innovators in the world and the principal economic centers of the Intermountain West. We will be investing locally and globally to create a launchpad and landing pad for the next generation of business leaders. A new pillar of our strategy is University of Utah Ventures, Powered by EPIC, a partnership with the University of Utah to support groundbreaking companies emerging in and around the state’s top research institution. We’re thrilled at the value we will be able to bring to portfolio companies through our highly strategic limited partner base, and we encourage all founders to reach out to us for more information. Nick Efstratis | Kent Madsen | Jack Boren | Taylor Randall | Erin Rothwell | Curt Doman | John Merrill | Bob Carter MD PhD | Jim Hotaling | David Cumming | https://lnkd.in/gnnz7GBJ
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Nick Efstratis shared thisPantomath is breaking out and has a fresh $30M to support their growth. Congrats to Shashank Saxena, Somesh Saxena, Narayana Surabhi and the amazing team! Excited to work alongside Quentin Clark and the team at General Catalyst leading this round. Since the seed round with Bowery Capital and the Series A with SIERRA Ventures, we have been honored to work with such great people. Mark Fernandes Michael Brown EPIC Ventures https://lnkd.in/gH4Y6CFGPantomath Raises $30 Million in Series B Led by General Catalyst to Automate Data Operations with AI DRE AgentPantomath Raises $30 Million in Series B Led by General Catalyst to Automate Data Operations with AI DRE Agent
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Nick Efstratis shared thisCheck out Redo recent innovations around #ecommerce - https://lnkd.in/daXjUBPj The team over there continues to innovate beyond expectations, delivering amazing customer experiences. Great to be invested! Sterling Snow Blakely Cragun Jack Boren
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Nick Efstratis shared thisI'll be attending the amazing XPRIZE Healthspan Awards Ceremony and Team + Investor Summit. Let me know if you're planning to attend so that we can say Hi! 👋 Or register now and join me at the event! https://lnkd.in/g8pxKJZ2 via #Whova event appXPRIZE Healthspan Awards Ceremony and Team + Investor Summit Registration hosted by WhovaXPRIZE Healthspan Awards Ceremony and Team + Investor Summit Registration hosted by Whova
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Nick Efstratis shared thisTorus is one of the most prolific innovators in the United States. The vision of Nate Walkingshaw and Gilbert Lee continues to be realized! EPIC Venturesis proud to be on this journey to change the world!Torus Receives Commercial Energy Storage Approval for Rocky Mountain Power's Wattsmart Battery ProgramTorus Receives Commercial Energy Storage Approval for Rocky Mountain Power's Wattsmart Battery Program
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Nick Efstratis shared thisGreat teamwork and leadership in action! Kudos to Tracer for leading the pack and getting it done. A big shoutout to Rick Farnell, Eliano Marques and the entire team for their outstanding efforts! #Teamwork #LeadershipTracer Wins in AI Luminaries and the Top AI-enabled Product for Retail and eCommerce Categories in SiliconANGLE Media’s Tech Innovation CUBEd AwardsTracer Wins in AI Luminaries and the Top AI-enabled Product for Retail and eCommerce Categories in SiliconANGLE Media’s Tech Innovation CUBEd Awards
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Nick Efstratis shared thisAbsolutely amazing work by Torus! Congrats to Nate Walkingshaw and Gilbert Lee in continuing to innovate and advance energy storage and management across our country!Torus Brings Clean Energy Storage Solution to Iconic Salt Lake City BusinessTorus Brings Clean Energy Storage Solution to Iconic Salt Lake City Business
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Nick Efstratis shared thisTorus just made TIME Best Inventions list for 2024! https://lnkd.in/gSw8ZguC Amazing accomplish Nate Walkingshaw and Gilbert Lee and the entire Torus team!
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Nick Efstratis liked thisAlmost 600,000 total sq ft of production. Torus teams are cooking! 🇺🇸Nick Efstratis liked thisQuick production floor walk today. Team is hitting stride. Every 21-days we have opened a new production line. So thankful to everyone on the team right now. We are flat out!
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Nick Efstratis liked thisNick Efstratis liked thisAI model orchestration is the futureThe right tool for the job isn't always the biggest oneThe right tool for the job isn't always the biggest one
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Nick Efstratis liked thisNick Efstratis liked thisThere's been a lot of talk about open weight models lately. Jensen's post to X, along with a letter explaining the importance of open weight models, opens up a critical conversation. It's worth stressing that we should be using the right tools for the right jobs. Right now, we're leaning hard on the big AI providers running massive frontier models. These models are amazing — they have extremely broad knowledge and can solve complex problems. They're deeply valuable. But let's compare this to actual human experience and what we really need these models for. Most of the tasks people handle in a day are routine and specialized, and don't require broad knowledge. These are also the tasks we've worked tirelessly to automate since the dawn of computing. Small, open weight models can handle many of these tasks — and they cost as little as 1/100th as much in power and resources compared to large models like Fable 5 and ChatGPT. If we can orchestrate access to the right small, specialized, open weight models, we can get far more value for every dollar we spend. This is a big part of what we're doing at ContextOS: making it easy, scalable, secure, and cost-effective to get the right tool for the right job. We don't care whether that tool is a database, a web gateway, storage, or an orchestration layer for specialized AI models — ContextOS is built to deliver it all. The answer to the next big question is how we deliver the right tool, to the right job, in the right way.
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Nick Efstratis liked thisNick Efstratis liked thisThere’s a lesson for all of us in Silicon Valley to learn, from the OpenAI controversy of last week. If you weren’t following it, OpenAI disclosed that during an internal safety evaluation, its models broke out of a sandbox, reached the open internet, and autonomously attacked Hugging Face to cheat on a benchmark. No one instructed them to. They inferred Hugging Face might hold answers and went after it on their own. What strikes me isn't recklessness. OpenAI was running a safety test. The point is that we're building systems whose behavior we can't fully anticipate, and we're deploying them faster than we're learning what they're capable of. We've seen a version of this before. Social media launched to connect people. Nobody was modeling algorithmic polarization or the link to rising teen anxiety, depression, and self-harm. The warning signs showed up later, and it still didn’t slow down the companies battling to get ahead. AI is on the same trajectory, only faster and with higher stakes. And here's the part I keep coming back to: OpenAI had guardrails (a sandbox, constrained network access, reduced-safety conditions they believed were contained). The models got out anyway! I believe that’s the lesson: Guardrails are settings inside a system. They can be misconfigured, and they can be escaped. Governance sits outside the system. It provides independent oversight: watching real-world behavior at runtime, and surfacing when the system does something its designers didn't expect. I don't think the answer is to slow innovation. But if increasingly autonomous AI systems are going to surprise even the teams building them, governance can’t be an afterthought. It has to become part of the system from the beginning.
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Nick Efstratis liked thisNick Efstratis liked thisHere’s a story not enough people are talking about, when it comes to AI risks for enterprises: It comes from the insurance industry. And it’s worth keeping an eye on. At the beginning of this year, ISO, the organization whose standardized language sits under most U.S. commercial policies, made three generative-AI exclusion endorsements. These are attachable at every general liability renewal. Chubb, Travelers, and Berkshire Hathaway have all won state approval to strip AI liability from standard policies, with regulators approving north of 80% of those requests. They’re not stripping the liability because AI is bad technology. From my perspective working in enterprise AI (and now building SolidCore.ai, an AI governance platform for enterprises), it really comes down to these things: 1. There’s a huge risk in everyone running the same handful of foundation models. If, in theory, there were one bug in a shared model, it could create thousands of correlated insurance claims. That would be a nightmare for insurers. 2. There isn’t enough of a track record for enterprise AI. AI has no stable claims history to underwrite against. Plus, it changes with every retrain. 3. There are insurers who will affirm AI coverage (Munich Re/Mosaic, Armilla at Lloyd’s, others), but they don’t write risk by predicting the algorithm. They only use documented governance evidence to decide what to grant, and how to price it. So they want proof that your AI is governed, monitored, and auditable, before they’ll consider insuring it. What I find the most interesting is that the insurers who are willing to cover AI aren't doing it by trying to predict what the model will do. They're doing it by evaluating the governance around it. In other words, the thing they believe they can underwrite isn't the AI itself. It's the processes, controls, monitoring, and auditability surrounding it. So at the risk of sounding entirely self-serving, I do think it’s time for enterprises to consider whether they can prove the AI they’re using is monitored and auditable. Always feel free to reach out if you need perspective and advice on this. Sources in the comments.
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Nick Efstratis liked thisNick Efstratis liked thisHuge shout-out to Jeremy Nixon and the team at Infinity AI on officially launching out of stealth with a $15M round! At EPIC Ventures, we’re drawn to teams tackling fundamental infrastructure bottlenecks. Today, getting new chip architectures to run AI models efficiently requires massive amounts of manual software engineering. Infinity is changing that by using AI agents to automate software optimization, helping next-gen hardware perform at its full potential much faster. In short: they’re building AI that helps build better AI infrastructure. Congratulations to Jeremy, Ishan Paidhungat, Luke Bechtel, Sravya Tirukkovalur, and the rest of the team on this incredible milestone! ------ EPIC Ventures | University of Utah Ventures | Nick Efstratis | Vincent A. Alessi https://lnkd.in/gjxXgzAnInference startup Infinity raises $15M from Touring Capital, OpenAI and Anthropic researchers | TechCrunchInference startup Infinity raises $15M from Touring Capital, OpenAI and Anthropic researchers | TechCrunch
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Nick Efstratis liked thisNick Efstratis liked thisOn July 9th, I was on stage at the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics with state legislators from across the Western Region of the United States, talking about what it actually takes to build AI policy that works. This was part of the Council of State Governments West AI Policy Tour, hosted alongside EPIC Ventures and built around Utah's AI sandbox, the country's first collaborative model for AI regulation. Government, industry, and academia in the same room, testing real technology under real oversight, instead of guessing at each other from opposite sides of a table. That's exactly why we're building Dynagentic here. Utah isn't just a good place to run a company. It's a place where the state, the universities, and the private sector are actually building the agentic era together, and I think that collaboration is the model the rest of the country eventually copies. One moment worth sharing: when asked what elected officials should be thinking about over the next three years, my answer was about education, not regulation. "We need to reshape the K-12 and collegiate strategy around AI now in the US, stop keeping these tools at arm's length out of caution, and start teaching students to actually work with them. The workforce that wins this decade grew up building with AI, not avoiding it." Grateful to CSG West, EPIC Ventures, and the team behind Utah's AI sandbox for the invitation, and to my fellow panelists for a sharp, honest conversation: Thomas Hatch (ContextOS), Britney McCausland (Zions Bancorporation), Brian Bean (Utah Senate), and Nick Efstratis (EPIC Ventures). What do you think state legislatures get right, or wrong, about preparing the next generation for an AI-native workforce? #ArtificialIntelligence #AIPolicy #Dynagentic #UtahTech #SiliconSlopes #AgenticAI
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Nick Efstratis liked thisNick Efstratis liked thisTorus took home Best Energy Storage in the Technologies of Change category at the Reuters Energy Industry Awards! This award recognizes storage technology that improves performance, lowers cost, or strengthens project returns. The Torus Station was engineered to do all three by pairing flywheel and battery storage with real-time load-shaping capability and 24/7 monitoring. See how it works: https://lnkd.in/gtKFN-np
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Nick Efstratis liked thisNick Efstratis liked thisIf we’ve learned anything in the past few months, it’s this: The most dangerous competitor for an AI startup might actually be the company providing its AI. That's why Alex Karp's recent comments caught my attention. His argument was pretty simple. He says AI model providers are running a familiar playbook: Let an ecosystem build on top of the platform. Watch which categories gain traction. Then move into the winners. The clearest precedent for this isn't a company getting crushed by a platform. It's a company that invited the platform in. Take IBM, for example. In 1980, IBM needed an operating system for its new PC and brought in a small partner to help build it: Microsoft. IBM owned the hardware, the brand, the distribution … everything that looked like the value at the time. But Microsoft kept the rights to the OS, licensed it to every other PC maker, and a decade later owned the layer that actually mattered. IBM had handed its partner the keys to the market it created, one reasonable-looking decision at a time. When you route your core workflows and data through someone else's model to move fast today, you're making the IBM decision. It's rational. But it might also be handing your would-be competitor the exact thing that makes you valuable. But I don’t want to be all doom and gloom, especially as a founder myself who’s rooting for others to succeed. So let’s answer this: What actually protects you? 1. Be clear on what your durable value is — the thing that's yours, not the model's. If your moat is "we call the API well," that's not a moat. 2. Keep your proprietary data proprietary. One reason we built SolidCore to run inside your own cloud environment is that your data and decision-making — the secret sauce — shouldn't have to leave it to get visibility and governance over your AI. 3. Build across providers, not underneath one. SolidCore sits above the model layer and works across them, so the platform dynamics Karp describes aren't an existential threat. Am I right about this? Are we watching the IBM-Microsoft playbook run again, just with foundation models? Curious how others are thinking about it.
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EPIC Ventures
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Nick is a 6x Judge for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Awards for the Utah Region.
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