Sunshine Lake is an early stage fund backing n-of-1 breakout global founders reimagining systems worldwide

San Francisco, CA
Sunshine Lake retweeted
Looking for a Research Lead to build with us in SF @trytalp. The dirty secret in AI simulation right now is that almost everyone is selling theater. Clean demos, zero proof. Nobody has published real benchmarks, confidence intervals, or calibration against actual human behavior. The team that turns this from vibes into an actual science wins the category. What I'm looking for: 1) You know what’s actually happening under the hood. You didn't just pick up ML from Twitter threads or high-level APIs. You respect sound statistics, live in PyTorch/JAX, and have real intuition for how models break at the edges. 2) You despise fake progress. If an experiment shows a 5% bump, your first instinct isn’t to celebrate—it’s to hunt down the eval leakage or sampling bias. You’d rather kill your own favorite idea than ship a hallucinated win. 3) You care about production, not paper count. Academic rigor matters to us, but pure ivory-tower research is boring. What counts is whether the system survives contact with messy enterprise data. 4) Extreme autonomy. You don’t wait around for someone to write you a ticket. You look at an ambiguous problem, figure out what question actually matters, and go get the answer. 5) You raise the bar for everyone around you. You’ve led technical work before, you have taste in talent, and you know how to build a culture where sloppy work has nowhere to hide. Hybrid in SF · $200k–$300k + real equity (raised $2.2M, backed by Formus, Sunshine Lake, Aito vc, a16z Scout Fund). If you want to take a real swing at this, shoot me a DM or drop an email to baran@talp.ai with a few things you’ve built or broken.
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Sunshine Lake retweeted
We’re happy to support SHIPYARD as @trytalp 🚀
BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: 🚢 Registration is now open for the first SHIPYARD Hackathon 2–21 November, London. One theme: AI agents that make money. What you get: → Credits from @ElevenLabs, @tavilyai, @daytonaio, @trytalp → Workshops from their teams → Cowork in Soho or build from anywhere → Live leaderboard: agents ranked by what they earn → Demo day at Encode Hub What's up for grabs: → £10,000 prize pool → Special prizes from partners → Demos in front of VCs and press 📍 London and online 🗓️ 2–21 November 👥 40+ teams Free to enter. Link to sign up ↓
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Sunshine Lake retweeted
Most hospitality robots are built to complete a task. Most animatronics are built to perform a predetermined sequence. @dynamicreatures is building mobile characters that respond in real time. We’re emerging from stealth as @BostonDynamics’ official entertainment and hospitality partner. Read more: dynamiccreatures.com/news. #Robotics #AI #EntertainmentTechnology
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Sunshine Lake retweeted
42 is the answer to everything. This is @EntireHQ’s answer to Git in the era of agents: fast, independent, distributed. Mirror your GitHub repos, let your agents clone and pull from the region(s) of your choice, and…we're open sourcing it. 🤖
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Finding founders before everyone else is a mindset, not a process. @donnystalter on that and building in the age of AI at @PanatheneaFest in Athens with @ashtom.
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Sunshine Lake retweeted
Berlin showed up. Yesterday, The Pitch by Deel came to one of Europe's most ambitious startup cities, and the energy in the room reminded us why we built this: founders with bold ideas deserve a real shot at funding. Startup founders from across the region took the stage. Judges were sharp. The pitches were sharper. Up to $50,000 in SAFE investment was on the line for regional winners, and the best will go on to compete for $1,000,000 at the global finale. Next stop: London. If you're a pre-Seed, Seed, or Series A founder with a product worth scaling, this is your moment. The Pitch is open to startups from any industry, anywhere in the world. Applications take minutes. Global startup funding tournaments don't come around every day. London does. Apply now → deel.com/the-pitch-by-deel/ 🧵👇
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Sunshine Lake retweeted
Congrats to @astorinvest on their $5M seed! They're building an AI investment advisor for everyday investors. It connects to your brokerage, analyzes your portfolio, and delivers personalized recommendations. Less than two months after launch, thousands of users have already connected over $200M in assets to the platform. fortune.com/2026/04/23/jjjj/
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We raised a $5M seed led by Monashees, with participation from Goodwater, Gilgamesh Ventures, and other incredible investors. In less than two months after launch, thousands of users have connected over $200M in assets to our platform. We're just getting started.
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Sunshine Lake retweeted
We (@astorinvest) raised a $5M seed led by Monashees, with participation from Goodwater, Gilgamesh Ventures, and other incredible investors. In less than two months after launch, thousands of users have connected over $200M in assets to our platform. We're just getting started.
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Astor is finally live on the App Store. We're here to end vibe investing.
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Sunshine Lake retweeted
MCP is a pain in the ass. To fix that, we’re launching DAuth: the first secure, multi-tenant MCP auth solution. OAuth isn’t enough. It doesn't support dynamically passing API keys, and you can’t trust passing credentials to non-OAuth servers, since secrets are exposed. This forces existing MCP marketplaces to be OAuth-centric and single-tenant. But OAuth is annoying to implement and assumes security expertise. DAuth works for every auth case. We encrypt your credentials on the client-side, guaranteeing MCP servers never see them. You can finally ship agents with peace of mind. For the first time, MCP is ready for takeoff 🛫
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Sunshine Lake retweeted
I don't share my personal story often, but we really get into it on this podcast. My story is one of being a forever outsider - 1. I moved to the US at 16 - not an easy age to try and learn English. But, my accent is daily reminder of how far I've come, and why setbacks shouldn't outweigh the benefits of a global team. 2. Got into MIT, but spent my entire 1st semester hospitalized after a bus accident. It's also what inspired me to get into robotics, building exoskeletons for the US military. 3. And eventually, the robotics experience led me to founding my first company. After school, I built & sold hardware company against all conventional odds. 4. Got into YC, just to pivot 3 times, get rejected by every VC fund in seed round, and have to raise from angels. Today? Deel is valued at $17.3b. 5. @Bouazizalex and I didn’t know anyone in Silicon Valley when we first arrived, but we turned our outsider status into an advantage. We just thought different than peers. We weren't insular and always believed global talent was worth exploration. That's how we tackled a decades-old system with a global-first mindset. 6. When the world changed, we changed the world. When the pandemic meant widespread chaos and business uncertainty, we jumped in to help companies hire global talent, unlock economic mobility, and navigate complex regulatory systems to take advantage of the changing work landscape. 7. Deel pioneered seamless global payroll, operating in 165+ countries, used by 37,000 businesses, and paying 1.5 million people every month.And that's just to date. We're always pushing ourselves to think outside of the box, because of who we are. Let's see where being different takes us now.
My first interview with Shuo Wang (@shuooo), Co-Founder & CRO of @Deel. 1:08 Designing Deel To Scale Quickly 3:28 Why Companies Should Go Global Early 7:30 Building Deel’s Sales Team 10:33 Why Shuo Loves Sales 14:44 Pivoting 3 Times During YC & Being Shameless 19:06 Dreaming About Intercom 22:04 Solving Payment Delays Early On 25:11 Joining YC As A Crypto Payment Platform For Content Creators 32:37 How To Make Decisions Before You Have Data 36:30 Why It Was So Painful To Open Corporate Entities During Covid 39:57 Thinking Outside The Box 44:15 Why Covid Was “A Lifetime Opportunity” For Deel 46:11 Deel Speed 47:55 Argentina & Brazil 50:07 Interviewing Deel’s First 400 Employees 51:33 Screening For Happiness 52:59 Creating Ghost Busters (Special Projects Team) 59:16 Having A Co-Founder You Can Rely On 1:03:31 Why Offsites Are Important 1:06:07 Torturing Yourself Into Greatness 1:07:20 Learning How To Run A Business From Her Mom 1:11:26 Growing Up In China With Her Grandparents 1:15:51 Moving To The United States At 16 1:24:13 Building An Air Purifier Company In China 1:30:18 Being An Outsider In Silicon Valley 1:31:08 Focusing On One Product vs. Building Multiple Products 1:32:46 What PMF Was Like At Deel 1:34:46 How Shuo Thinks About Risk 1:37:18 Understand The Problem, Not The Solution 1:42:08 Creating An 11-Star Customer Experience 1:43:44 What Makes Alex Special 1:46:00 Poker 1:46:43 Always Look At The Positives Even In Tough Situations
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Sunshine Lake retweeted
Starting today, the Dedalus SDK now supports any external MCP URL.
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Sunshine Lake retweeted
Introducing the Dedalus TypeScript SDK: the simplest way to build complex AI agents with native MCP support in TypeScript.
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Sunshine Lake retweeted
Today, we're adding three new powerful models to the Dedalus API: Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, and GPT 5.1.
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Slush 2025 ❄️ Honored to share that Sunshine Lake has been selected as one of 20 funds to take the stage in Helsinki for the @SlushHQ x @raiseconference later this month. See you in Helsinki!
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Sunshine Lake retweeted
Super excited that @SunshineLakeVC is an early supporter of @itsCathyDi and @WindsorNguyen as they build @dedaluslabs . Huge congrats to the team on announcing their $11M seed round and continuing to push the boundaries of how developers build and deploy agents.
We just raised an $11M seed to help developers build complex agents across any model and any tool in 5 lines of code. Our round was led by @KindredVentures (@stevejang) and @saga_ventures (@maxaltman, @braveben, @itsthomson). At @DedalusLabs, we believe the future of AI agents isn’t linear or deterministic. Agents should know when to stop, when to branch, when to reattempt a task, and when to pause and ask for context. As a developer, we make your job simple: define the prompt, select the right tools and guardrails, and let your agent run. We were tired of writing hundreds of lines of code and battling Dockerfiles and infra—all for a spaghetti agent that breaks under stress. With Dedalus, you don’t have to do things the hard way. Our open-source SDK supports vendor-agnostic model handoffs, chaining both local and hosted (MCP) tools, and streaming across any provider—all in 5 lines of code. Plus, our cloud infra lets you deploy an MCP server in 3 clicks so anyone can equip their agent with your tools. Let us do the heavy lifting so your agents can fly 🪽 Thank you to our incredible team and our early supporters: @c10n, @habibh from @e14fund, @YazanElBaba from @emergencecap, @donnystalter from @SunshineLakeVC, @karrwinn from @transposevc, @liquid2V, @fpvventures, @forwarddeploy, @AntWilson, @iamcal, @Thom_Wolf, @ashtom, @HazanPrinceton, @tri_dao
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Sunshine Lake retweeted
We just raised an $11M seed to help developers build complex agents across any model and any tool in 5 lines of code. Our round was led by @KindredVentures (@stevejang) and @saga_ventures (@maxaltman, @braveben, @itsthomson). At @DedalusLabs, we believe the future of AI agents isn’t linear or deterministic. Agents should know when to stop, when to branch, when to reattempt a task, and when to pause and ask for context. As a developer, we make your job simple: define the prompt, select the right tools and guardrails, and let your agent run. We were tired of writing hundreds of lines of code and battling Dockerfiles and infra—all for a spaghetti agent that breaks under stress. With Dedalus, you don’t have to do things the hard way. Our open-source SDK supports vendor-agnostic model handoffs, chaining both local and hosted (MCP) tools, and streaming across any provider—all in 5 lines of code. Plus, our cloud infra lets you deploy an MCP server in 3 clicks so anyone can equip their agent with your tools. Let us do the heavy lifting so your agents can fly 🪽 Thank you to our incredible team and our early supporters: @c10n, @habibh from @e14fund, @YazanElBaba from @emergencecap, @donnystalter from @SunshineLakeVC, @karrwinn from @transposevc, @liquid2V, @fpvventures, @forwarddeploy, @AntWilson, @iamcal, @Thom_Wolf, @ashtom, @HazanPrinceton, @tri_dao
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