People will forgive almost anything in AI video except output that still reads as AI-made. We surveyed 243 marketers and creatives who actually use these tools at work. Realism beat brand, speed, price, and editing control as the thing that earns trust. Even the most popular tool in the category hasn't cracked it. And money doesn't fix it: the segments spending the most on video are consistently the least satisfied. Something big is coming from us next month. This research is part of why. ↪ State of AI Video 2026: arcade.software/state-of-ai-…

I'm profoundly grateful to have the opportunity to work with a company with as much ambition and moral clarity as @RainmakerCorp @ADoricko and the incredible team he has built are on a mission to make Earth more habitable, and in the process seek to build a world-class lab at the cutting edge of atmospheric chemistry and physics. Excited for @upfrontvc to co-lead Rainmaker's Series B with great partners at @noavctech @lowercarbon @DCVC & more

Rainmaker has raised $100M to become the world’s best lab for weather modification and atmospheric science. Thank you @noavctech @upfrontvc @DCVC @lowercarbon @DreamVenturesVC and other visionary partners. We are aggressively hiring and scaling our research org to create a flywheel of atmospheric data collection, synthesis, understanding, and intervention. We will solve the weather and we will set the stage for the terraformation of Earth. More in my essay below.

This is one my favorite things that we do as a firm. Would highly encourage any young prospective founder to participate. Feel free to DM if you have any questions.

Incredibly excited for the 2nd cohort of founder fellows! If you’re a recent grad or technical student, highly recommend you apply!

Apply for our second @upfrontvc Founder Fellows cohort! Perfect opportunity for early career engineers, recent graduates, and ambitious technical students to get plugged into the venture ecosystem, hands on mentorship, and early funding if you go on to start a company!

if you're thinking of starting something, this one's for you! @alexmarley and team are absolutely incredible and you get to learn from some of @upfrontvc's smartest founders! thankful to have been part of the first cohort 💙

We had an incredible first cohort of undergraduate Founder Fellows coming from Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Waterloo, Harvard, etc. Multiple have started companies. Applications for cohort 2 is now open!

Applications for Founder Fellows by @upfrontvc are open for our 2nd cohort! If you’re a technical student, recent grad, or dropout who's ready to build a generational company, this one’s for you. 8 weeks. 1:1 mentorship. $75K+ in funding.

AnySignal To Deliver End-To-End Communications for Apex Missions, Building on Flight-Proven Hardware Pairing AnySignal's AnyLink network and hybrid ground segment with Apex's production buses means a customer can design their mission as a single architecture, with one platform provider, from first concept through on-orbit operations. "Apex has been an important partner as we demonstrate the operability and value of AnyLink on orbit, and this agreement is a natural next step as we continue to expand our work together," said John Malsbury, Founder and CEO of AnySignal. Read the full announcement: lnkd.in/g85uke3j

AnySignal has been awarded a U.S. Space Force contract to demonstrate satellite-to-satellite communications on orbit. Moving sensor data across satellites in near-real time, without routing through the ground. This extends our existing USSF work on resilient MILSATCOM and decentralized mesh networking for contested environments. Read the full release: lnkd.in/g_46ihq2 #SpaceForce #MILSATCOM #NationalSecurity

Today we're coming out of stealth with a $10.75M seed co-led by @generalcatalyst and @a16z with support from @mainobjectvc , @xyz_vc , and @upfrontvc. Global internet data moves the same way it did 30 years ago. 95% of intercontinental data runs through subsea cables that take a decade to build and get severed with zero consequence - the Red Sea, the Baltic, Taiwan, over and over. @EndeavorSpace moves terrestrial data across oceans. A beam up to a satellite, a beam back to Earth. Nothing on the seabed. The world has changed, we are building the infrastructure to keep up. We're hiring.

Charlie and Tyler are outstanding, stoked for @upfrontvc to be on the journey with them!

Excited to announce our $18M Series A, led by @msuster and @jdsisteron at @UpfrontVC! Demand for persistent undersea awareness has been strong, and we're growing the team to meet it. Since our seed round we've gone through three major hardware iterations, built 35 new PEARLs, and made massive strides on OBSIDIAN. If you want to work with a cutting-edge engineering team on acoustic sensing, advanced sonar perception, software, hardware, or field operations - reach out. Grateful for this team. The best work is still ahead of us.

Excited to continue scaling our distributed undersea sensing network! Huge thanks to @UpfrontVC leading. We've known @msuster and @jdsisteron for over a year now, and are pumped to have them aboard. Big thanks as well to Valor Equity Partners for joining, and to @CapitalAlso, @FirstRound, and @LongJourneyVC for their continued support. I'm incredibly proud of what the Andrenam team has built, and am super excited to see customer demand rapidly growing. This has been a fantastic journey, and we're just getting started. Stay tuned for more news soon (:

Today we’re announcing our $18M Series A to continue scaling our distributed undersea sensing network. Led by @UpfrontVC with participation from Valor Equity Partners, @CapitalAlso, @FirstRound, and @LongJourneyVC. The undersea domain is becoming more contested, more autonomous, and harder to monitor. Legacy systems remain expensive, slow to field, and dependent on a small pool of specialists. The problem is no longer just access to the domain, but persistent awareness of what is happening there. We exist to close that gap. We build PEARL, a network of passive acoustic buoys that listen continuously, powered by OBSIDIAN, our AI-native software platform that turns underwater sound into real-time maritime awareness. This funding puts more systems in the water and grows the team to meet rising demand.

For the last few weeks, I've been building a new project called Loopy[dot]computer Loopy is an orchestrator for event-driven agent workflows. Simply put, it's an easy way to define agent workflows that should run when your data changes. Loopy is open source, agent-neutral, and code-first. You can version control your workflows, use whatever agent you prefer, and host in infra you control. I've been thinking about the future of agent automations (and loops, much en vogue these past few weeks) for a long time and while my usual method of exploring ideas is to write, it's been pretty exhilarating to be back in the saddle and shipping serious code. It's been a minute. Give Loopy a try. Or even better, lmk if you want to contribute!

Last year's was very oversubscribed, this year we're upping the game with a friendly swinging competition, come join us!

Incredibly excited to continue supporting @zaygranet @sobhan_nejad and the rest of the Blandigans in building the best enterprise AI phone platform on the market. If you haven’t had a Bland experience yet, it’s worth the phone call!

That guy! Excited to double down in the Series C, congrats to @zaygranet and the entire @usebland team, so much more to do on automating complex calls, onwards!