Delphi Ventures backs extraordinary founders at the bleeding edge of technology.

Delphi Ventures retweeted
We at @Delphi_Ventures could not be more excited to back @dgmonsoon and @ckxyz_ of @MidcenturyAI After first meeting David and Chetan over a call and being impressed, my partner @ZeMariaMacedo and I flew to New York City to spend time with them in person. We were blown away by their clock speed, clarity of thought and just how obsessed they were with what they wanted to build. As an investor you just know when founders are impressive and David and Chetan blew us away early on Chetan and David came out of Stanford’s AI ecosystem, working across labs led by Fei-Fei Li, Andrew Ng, Michael Bernstein and others, including on early robotics efforts like RoboTurk and RoboNet. They later built AI products at Replit and Salesforce, then became repeat founders together through YC. Today they’re announcing a $15M seed round and are already working with frontier labs across two products: 1/ Real world training data A massive, densely labeled dataset of people actually doing physical work - 2M+ hours of first-person data - 50+ environments and 20,000+ tasks - Hands visible 90% of the time - Manufacturing, construction, warehouses, agriculture and more - Enriched with 3D hand/body motion, object tracking and detailed task labels The point isn’t just more video. It’s capturing what people’s hands are doing, which objects they’re interacting with and how a task gets completed. This is whats important to Robotics labs. 2/ Matrix: Their simulation platform combines classical simulation, learned physics and real world data. Robotics teams can test across thousands of scenarios in parallel, replay failures and turn those failures into new training experience. You can’t efficiently run every experiment on a physical robot. Matrix is being built to scale that testing and learning The end game is getting robots out of controlled demos and into useful work. Robotics needs both the real world examples to learn from and somewhere to practice at scale. David and Chetan are building both. If we want robots working reliably in factories, warehouses and eventually our homes, this infrastructure matters. That’s the ambition we’re backing. We couldn't be more excited to back David and Chetan
Introducing Midcentury. We’re building the data and simulation infra for physical AI. Today, we’re coming out of stealth with a $15M Series Seed to scale robotics beyond polished demos. We’re already supporting frontier labs with: → The world’s largest egocentric dataset: 2M+ hours, 50+ environments, 20,000+ tasks → Matrix: a frontier simulation platform scaled with our real-world data to evaluate and post-train policies at scale
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Delphi Ventures retweeted
Our writing on @SynaptrixAI, a neurotech company at the bleeding edge of controlling things with your brain. We are proud to back @aryangovil and the team in their mission to change lives, starting with those in wheelchairs. members.delphidigital.io/rep…
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Delphi Ventures retweeted
Tori's yield bearing strUSD targeting 12% APY is now live across Morpho Pendle, Curve and Royco the base yield comes from USD-hedged carry in global money markets. strUSD can now also be used as collateral enabling levered loop exposure see @Delphi_Ventures investment thesis here: nitter.net/CannnGurel/status/2069…
We are excited to launch strUSD, a yield-bearing token backed by institutional delta-neutral strategies. 12%* APY, uncorrelated with crypto. Strategies that required eight-figure minimums, now on-chain. Learn more about our day-one DeFi integrations below.
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Delphi Ventures retweeted
Our new report "Closing the Loop: The Self-Driving Landscape" is out now! AI can generate scientific hypotheses faster than laboratories can test them. Self-driving labs are designed to close that gap by automating the full experimental loop. The model chooses the next experiment, and connected laboratory equipment carries it out. The results feed back into the system and shape what it tests next. The stakes are especially high in drug discovery. Lead optimization alone can consume roughly three years. Bringing a drug to market takes 10–15 years, with average out-of-pocket and time costs of $2.6 billion per drug. Self-driving labs target the earlier experimental bottleneck. They could shrink individual cycles from months to days or hours. Running more experiments can also reduce the cost of each run by spreading the upfront cost of automation further. Every completed experiment adds to a structured record of what worked and what did not. That data improves the model’s next decision, creating a continuous learning loop between AI and the physical lab. AI has accelerated the generation of scientific hypotheses. Self-driving labs could accelerate the experiments that determine which ideas are worth pursuing.
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Delphi Ventures retweeted
$Grass's July token holder call has been largely misunderstood because few realize that revenue is seasonal. With that in mind, the growth has been very strong. TLDR -2026 expected revenue of ~$70m -Adjusted FDV at $0.36 is ~$250m, excluding Foundation-controlled treasury supply -That's ~3.6x 2026 expected revenue -H1 '26 revenue grew ~6x over H1 '25 -FY26 expected revenue is ~4x FY25 actuals -Ongoing opex is ~$2.5m/month, implying $40m of operating profit in 2026 The seasonality is the whole misunderstanding. People are comparing H2 2025 ($14.3m) to H1 2026 ($17m), seeing a small step up, and concluding growth stalled. That's the wrong comparison. Frontier labs make their largest data purchase decisions around training cycles, and most of those cycles get contracted in the second half of the year. Compare like for like, H1 '25 to H1 '26, and revenue grew ~6x. Ongoing cash expenses are ~$2.5m a month, mostly infrastructure. On $70m of 2026 revenue, that's ~$30m of annualized cash opex and roughly ~$40m of implied operating profit. Margins should expand as revenue grows because the cost base is largely fixed. They own the infrastructure rather than renting it. "Why don't they return that money to token holders?" For the same reason that no start-up returns capital to early investors. It should be reinvested for growth and profitability. In 2025 they made compute/storage investments that reduced opex by over $1m per month. In addition to the $70m they expect to earn via training data in 2026, they'll also be launching products in the LCR space this summer. I expanded on why LCR is interesting in a previous write up, but the current leading players in the category, Exa and Parallel, just raised at $2.2b and $2b respectively. My summary above is partially sourced from the recap of the call they shared: grass.io/learn/july-7-grass-… Disclosure: Delphi Ventures has held a position in GRASS for approximately two years and holds it as of publication. This is not investment advice and the opinions expressed are my own.
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Delphi Ventures retweeted
Automation. Multipolarity. Demographics. My latest essay from @Delphi_Ventures on the structural themes we will be investing behind in the decade ahead. Links below:
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Delphi is a proud investor in Ambient
Ambient is the open source, proof of useful work AI project the world desperately needs 🌎🤖 I couldn’t be more excited for @IridiumEagle to showcase @Ambient_xyz A few years ago, our team met Travis. He instantly struck our entire team with a sense of extreme technical ability and thoughtfulness in everything he discussed, from open source AI, to crypto and tokeneconomics (both AI tokens and crypto economics). Travis has been on our podcast several times over the years and these are linked at the end. Soon after, he published “Situational Blindness,” a report that was a response to Leopold Aschenbrenner’s “Situational Awareness.” In his Situational Blindness report, Travis argued that Big Tech platforms inevitably drift toward opacity, extraction and lock in because the economics reward it. He posited that the answer is not to trust better executives, but to build systems where behavior is open, portable and verifiable. Open weights are not enough if the serving layer is still centralized, black box and censorable. Ambient is that thesis applied to AI inference. Ambient is a proof of useful work network that rewards miners for hyper serving a few foundational AI models. Miners compete on serving models and get rewarded for doing so. The world benefits this competition in the form of, low latency, low cost, truly open AI infra, with no centralized component. Fast forward to today, Ambient is live and in the open. Today, Ambient makes its public reveal I love bullets to walk through how it works so lets go through the flow 1/ A user comes to Ambient because they want AI inference. They want to hit an API, chat interface, Ambient Desktop, OpenAI compatible workflow, or OpenRouter route and get strong open models like Kimi K2.7 Code and GLM 5.1. They are not buying decentralized compute. They are buying model access at the cheapest and lowest cost from a verified network of miners who hyper compete to serve these models transparently. 2/ The wedge is that open models are now good enough for real workloads. Kimi K2.7 Code has a 262K context window, activates 32B parameters out of roughly 1T total, and is built for long context coding. GLM 5.1 has a 203K context window and is positioned around long horizon coding and agentic engineering. Closed models still win the hardest tasks, but most tokens will route to the best mix of price, latency, reliability, privacy, and quality. I’ve strongly been in favor of this shift and have shared my thoughts here already. nitter.net/Shaughnessy119/status/… 3/ Ambient has to win on hard metrics like cost/latency, not ideology. OpenRouter lists Kimi K2.7 Code at $0.75 per 1M input tokens and $3.50 per 1M output tokens. GLM 5.1 is listed at $0.98 input and $3.08 output. In the provider snapshot, Ambient’s Kimi endpoint was $0.75 input, $3.50 output, 2.08s latency, and 23 tokens/sec and cheaper than most listed peers while still usable. The claim should be: competitive cost today, better market structure over time. Ambient has more usage for Kimi over Moonshot itself, who created the model! Link for this data is here but will change as data changes: openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kim… 4/ When a request hits Ambient, it becomes an inference job: model requested, input size, output budget, latency constraint, price ceiling, and quality requirements. The system can bundle similar requests and run a reverse auction where miners compete to serve the work. A global network of physical miners running GPUs compete to serve the request at the lowest cost and highest quality. 5/ The miners are real GPU operators and they deploy physical hardware. Kimi and GLM have to be hosted in GPU memory. Operators manage batching, KV cache, token streaming, networking, uptime, quantization choices, and serving software. The scarce resource is high-VRAM compute that can keep large models hot and serve tokens reliably. 6/ Miners mostly compete in a global race to serve the same requested model better. They should not win by secretly routing you to a weaker model. They win through lower cost per token, lower latency, higher throughput, better batching, higher uptime, more available capacity, and software optimizations inside allowed quality bounds. This is where useful work becomes real as the network pays the operator who can deliver the requested intelligence cheapest and fastest without degrading the product. 7/ Ambient’s blockchain side is needed because untrusted global hardware needs neutral rules. Without a chain, Ambient is just another centralized router deciding who gets traffic and who gets paid. Ambient’s chain handles job creation, auctions, bid commitments, settlement, rewards, reputation, verifier assignment, and penalties. The chain handles coordination among operators that do not need to know or trust each other in a transparent manner. Net Ambient’s chain is the transparent coordination m,echanism that organizes and rewards miners competing in the global race to serve models better. 8/ Verification is the crucial unlock. Cheap inference markets are rife with cheating. Serving the wrong model, wrong quantization, hidden routing, degraded outputs, fake privacy. Ambient’s Proof of Logits is meant to fingerprint model execution through internal logits so validators can check work without rerunning the entire job. A user doesn’t have to guess or roll the dice on a model provider as Ambient’s network handles verification so a user just comes to the network, gets the benefit of a global race to provide the model the best and they get their request. 9/ This is the proof of useful work component. A user pays for inference. Miners compete to serve it. The network routes, settles, verifies, and rewards miners who serve the model the best. Ambient’s token is the incentive and coordination asset for useful work powering an open source AI network. 10/ The long term open source implication is the big one. Open weights are not enough if serious usage still runs through centralized clouds and black box APIs. Ambient is trying to give open models their missing serving layer: global GPUs, market pricing, verification, payments, reputation, and normal developer access. 11/ Play this out to an extreme and Ambient has the potential to be the coordination network for the world to compete within models and across models to serve the end user the lowest cost and highest quality intelligence. 12/ Why is this necessary? At face value as a user you get reliable/brand trusted inference at low costs. At the extreme an entire world of applications can be built on Ambient’s chain without ever having to worry about the model getting turned off or deplatformed or facing egregious costs given the global race to serve models competitively. It becomes naturally safer to deploy models on Ambient since you know they will persist, you know they can’t be turned off and you know you will always be getting the lowest cost for your service. At @Delphi_Ventures we've backed Travis twice - originally in his pre-seed round and again in their most recent seed round because we feel an immense sense or urgency in the work of tangibly providing the world with a global intelligence utility. At Delphi Ventures we are deep believers in open source AI and backing the most impressive founders we can find and Travis, and his co-founder Max, have checked the boxes for us time and time again. Download Ambient’s desktop app or route your agents or workloads to ambient. Sign up for a subscription and give it a try. Long live open source AI —--------------------------------------------------------- Links Mentioned: - Download Ambient Today: desktop.ambient.xyz/ - Ambient’s Subscriptions: ambient.xyz/pricing - Use Ambient’s API: ambient.xyz/models - Use Ambient via OpenRouter: openrouter.ai/provider/ambie… - Situational Blindness: medium.com/ambient-research/… - Travis on The Delphi Podcast (2024): podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas… - Travis on the Delphi Podcast (2025): open.spotify.com/episode/6yu… - Stay tuned for Travis's next podcast appearance!
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Delphi Ventures retweeted
Tori Pre-deposit Vault opens June 23. • Verifiably delta-neutral yield. • Institutional-grade risk curation by @RockawayX. • Real-time reserve transparency via @AccountableData. • Infrastructure partner @upshift_fi.
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One of our portfolio companies, @testmachine_ai, just topped the EVMBench leaderboard for AI vulnerability detection on EVM smart contracts. If you are building in DeFi and take security seriously, worth a look.
A few months ago @OpenAI and @paradigm released EVMBench to check for vulnerabilities in EVM smart contracts Fast forward and @testmachine_ai's proprietary AI model is #1 on the leaderboard and 8% points above the 2nd best agent If you are a team looking for the literal best smart contract auditors, DM the Testmachine team Rather be safe than hacked by an AI model
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Delphi Ventures retweeted
We recently led the round for @tori_finance, a protocol bringing institutional delta-neutral yield strategies on-chain, unlocking return amplification, composability, and access that traditional finance can't offer. Today we sat down with @0xNox_eth to go deep on the podcast: • How the carry trade actually works and why FX hedging spreads persist. • How positions survive a 30% currency drop. • The security architecture, from NAV oracles to lessons from recent DeFi exploits. • Why this yield was previously gated behind 8-9 figure balance sheets. • How real-time on-chain transparency actually works under the hood. • And how tokenization turns a strong baseline yield into something significantly more powerful.
A new episode of the Delphi Podcast is live! This week we sat down with the founder of @tori_finance to discuss how institutional-grade carry trades can be brought onchain. Watch the full episode here. delphi.link/Toripod
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Delphi Ventures retweeted
Thrilled to speak at the @solana Accelerate AI conference on May 6 in Miami next week! This will be a really good conference and I'm very excited for it. See you there!
The lineup we pulled together for Accelerate AI is borderline absurd. Pound for pound, the most talent-dense group of teams pushing at the frontier of Crypto x AI. Demos, panels, firesides, agents, workshops, robots, food, and more. May 6, The Lab Miami. Invite only.
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Delphi Ventures retweeted
big congrats to @AliHabbabeh and the XO team imo XO is the most serious player yet in user-generated markets if you have a highly engaged audience — sports, crypto, geopolitics, culture, finance, etc. — consider joining their ambassador program if elected, you’ll be able to create your own markets and earn a share of trading volume generated by your audience, giving them interactive content while unlocking a new monetization channel program details: research.xo.market/introduci… (disc. @Delphi_Ventures is an investor)
Habibis, @xomarket just closed a $6M seed to build permissionless conviction markets anyone can spin up a Yes/No market on any belief in seconds. Led by @20vcFund and @picuscap , with @cbventures, and others along with 30+ angels including @patcummins30 Prediction markets cracked this open. We're opening the rest.
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Delphi Ventures retweeted
7 months ago I said YB was imo the most exciting new DeFi primitive this cycle. Bear market just stress-tested it: - 99% TVL retention while defi shed $80b+ - $3.84m in protocol fees to YB lockers - 0 security incidents through a stretch of brutal hacks elsewhere Thesis playing out. GG @newmichwill, @llamaintern and the rest of the @yieldbasis team
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Delphi Ventures retweeted
During our lifetime, the human brain will be confronted with a new interface: the computer I believe that we’ve crossed the reality-chasm and computers for our brain and this is no longer science fiction. Neurotechnology and brain computer interfaces are at the earliest stages of clinical and commercial viability. These technologies are already delivering life-changing clinical outcomes and will reshape how we interact with technology. Today we are publishing our investment thesis for how we’re evaluating opportunities in neurotech: delphiventures.io/writings/n…
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Delphi Ventures retweeted
Thrilled to be a judge for @consensus2026 Pitch Fest on May 6 at 4pm at the Hackathon Stage in Miami! I'll be actively looking for early stage Crypto and AI projects to diligence for @Delphi_Ventures Signup! See you there consensus.coindesk.com/
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Delphi Ventures retweeted
Our new report "Jupiter: A Gassed Up Giant" is Live and Free to read! @JupiterExchange did $184M in protocol revenue in 2025 with no venture funding and a near-zero capital base. JUP now trades at roughly 9x annualized revenue while Aave trades at 20x. The disconnect comes down to categorization. The market sees a cyclical DEX aggregator, but the team has spent the last 18 months shipping 10+ new product lines while defending 80% of Solana spot aggregation. What makes this durable is the product flywheel underneath it. Perps auto-route collateral swaps through the aggregator, generating billions in spot volume as a byproduct. JLP earns yield from perp fees and a third of its AUM flows into Jupiter Lend as collateral. Jupiter ranks as the third-largest perp earner behind only Hyperliquid and EdgeX. When JupNet goes live and GUM opens access to equities, commodities, and forex, every new asset class feeds volume across the entire stack.
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Delphi Ventures retweeted
looking to meet builders working on hard problems at @EthCC my dm is open
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