A’s

This is going to be a fun convo.

Excited to announce that Jeff Pinner has joined Exa as CTO! Jeff was formerly CTO of Robinhood, a distinguished engineer at Cruise, CTO of Lyft, and way back a systems engineer at NASA. We have humongous engineering and research to do at larger-than-google-scale and we need to do it quickly. Pinner has scaled massive ML systems before, super excited to work together on this one.

Real-world problems can’t be vibecoded. When it comes to AI companies, the tech doesn’t have an impact without the services built around it. We at @Felicis invested in a healthcare delivery platform, @joinadaptive, that understands this priority. They’re obsessed with solving the problem of how home health is delivered to patients. Companies can’t just rely on their tech alone without going the last mile. I discussed this on the More Or Less Pod hosted by @lessin, joined by friends @wolfejosh, @RachelJHolt, @scottbelsky, @SAStanford Check out the full podcast on YouTube: piped.video/XySpdJ6UPkQ

What makes Ion special? He's deeply in the details. In the office every day, these days. Writing PRDs like an IC PM. Ion loves the game. Nothing/no-one is below him. Nothing is taken for granted. Here he is next to me, working on Arena, literally right now. A true 🐐

Tackling an age-old problem while breaking massive rev goals is an incredible thing. Congrats to @paraformtalent for crossing $100M AR in 2 years!

What began as a UC Berkeley research project has become one of the fastest-growing and most trusted AI infrastructure companies in the world. This week, the vision set forth by Arena founders @infwinston and @ml_angelopoulos reached another remarkable milestone: @Arena announced it has surpassed $100M in annualized revenue run rate just eight months after launching its enterprise offering, while growing to a community of more than 10 million users helping shape how frontier AI models are evaluated. In the @Felicis profile on the company, Wei-Lin and Anastasios shared how they approached building a platform rooted in scientific rigor, neutrality, and community trust; principles that have become even more important as AI capabilities accelerate. We've been true believers in Arena since Seed. felicis.link/lDzsSiy

🚀 Pretty incredible. Congrats @ml_angelopoulos @infwinston @istoica05 and the entire @arena team!

A new internet economy, built for agents: Agents break the old economics of the internet - when everyone has an AI assistant consuming and taking actions, what happens to ads? Exa Connect is a step toward a new internet economy built on data, not ads. It's a marketplace where data providers choose what to charge for their data, and developers choose which data providers their agents use. We feel this is the right economic model -- market-based, transparent, value-aligned, and as agent requests scale >1000x over the coming years, will be a more valuable market for providers than the ad market is today. This is also a good path forward for the internet. It's one that monetizes transformer attention, not human attention. We don't know exactly what that great intercontinental information exchange called the internet will become, but it's going to change, and we think very much for the better.

Combine abundant power, free cooling, and nearby fiber, and entirely new infrastructure becomes possible.

Tomorrow is Humans in the Loop, and we @Felicis are thrilled to featuring @extradotemail on stage as one of the companies pushing what's possible in consumer AI. @ngavini, is an n=1 leader: one of Pinterest's earliest and most tenured product execs, who helped build the company from a small startup to a public company that's defined a new kind of consumer interface. With Extra, Naveen is doing it again, but this time building an inbox for your life, starting with email. Extra takes a widespread pain of keeping up with your personal inbox and turns it into something intelligent and delightful. And today, Extra is launching "handle it". Now, you delegate tasks to Extra - whether that's scheduling a meeting, confirming an appointment, or coordinating with friends, Extra will handle the back and forth. Extra is your life’s inbox and your life’s assistant. They are also removing the waitlist; Extra is now available on iOS and web. Extra will be one of 20 companies taking the stage at Humans in the Loop in a rapid-fire demo showcase of some of the most creative, ambitious early-stage startups, all nominated by all the cohosting VC firms. Join us on June 10th! humansintheloop2026.com/

Two in five home health patients get turned away, not because care isn't available, but because the admin overhead costs more than the agency gets paid. $40B in referrals are rejected every year. That's the problem @AlexRWendland and Ryan Tolsma are rebuilding from scratch with @joinAdaptive. AI-native operations. 100K+ visits delivered. 4.9% rehospitalization rate vs. 12.9% state average. @Felicis investors @Pxd and @EricFlaningam sat down with Alex and Ryan to discuss the future they're building with Adaptive.

Excited that Arena.ai can now do a lot more!

“How badly do you want this deal?” Ryan, our general counsel, called me while I was at dinner. Turns out @joinAdaptive redlined the term sheet we sent them to lead their Series A, and they put in a clause that gave me second thoughts. For context: I’m a die-hard @49ers fan. Beating the Cowboys is always a good feeling. Winning the last 4 games against the Dallas Cowboys including 2 playoff games? The best. The clause they inserted was a tough one to accept. We ultimately agreed that when the company reaches a significant revenue milestone, @Felicis board members will attend a Cowboys game in Dallas with the founding team… in full Cowboys gear. Today, over 40% of patients referred to home health don’t get the care they need. Adaptive is using AI to help home health agencies serve more patients, reduce overhead, and expand access to care. AI has been transforming the digital world, but is only just beginning to change the physical world. Home health is the fastest-growing outpatient sector, on pace to nearly double over the next 5-6 years. The current foundation of fragmented small home health providers is not ready for that influx. Adaptive is rebuilding from the inside out to lay a foundation for an industry positioned to scale. I’d prefer to keep my 49ers loyalty intact. But if wearing a Cowboys jersey is the price of helping build a company that improves healthcare for millions of people, I’ll survive. To @AlexRWendland, @ryanatolsma, Logan, and Hunter, I’m rooting for you...but not your football team.

Two in every five patients referred to home health care in America never get the care they need. Not because clinicians aren't available. Not because the patient doesn't qualify. They get turned away because the paperwork costs more than the visit pays. Roughly $40B in referrals get rejected this way every year. So the agency says no, and the patient ends up in a nursing facility or gets sicker at home until the ER takes over. We led @joinadaptive's Series A because they stopped trying to sell better software to broken agencies and became the provider instead. AI runs the intake, scheduling, prior authorization, documentation, and billing that traditional agencies burn $.60 to $.90 of every clinical-labor dollar on. When those costs collapse, the patients who would have been rejected instead get the care that they deserve. So far in Adaptive's first market: Patients served by Adaptive have a 4.9% rehospitalization rate compared to the 12.9% Texas state average and 10.2% national average. More than 95% of patients see improvement in ambulation, meaning they are back on their feet, no longer homebound, compared to an 89.5% national average. Patients are set up with a home care provider extremely quickly, with 99% of patients admitted within 48 hours of referral. They have a 4.5-star CMS quality rating against an industry average of around 3. Hear from co-founders @AlexRWendland and @ryanatolsma on the future they're building with Adaptive. 👇 cc: @pxd @EricFlaningam ordnl.link/8R805uM

The @joinadaptive team is tackling one of the most important, under-the-radar problems in the American healthcare system, and we at @felicis are excited to be leading their $50M Series A.

1/ Today we're announcing Gigascale Capital's $250M first institutional fund to back early-stage founders rebuilding the physical economy.

The best part of being at a generalist firm is the freedom to refresh your mental model for where the world is going without being constrained by a predetermined worldview. The most interesting companies right now don’t fit neatly into a single category. They blur the lines between software, services, infrastructure, consumer behavior, and the physical world. Today we're publishing the @Felicis Forecast: nine themes we keep coming back to and that keep showing up in the companies we're most excited about.

Industrial-scale science. Coming to a lab near you this summer.