@LongshotSpace is building a cannon that launches payloads to orbit. SPC members spent an afternoon at their facility. Welcome to the future of space launch.

Why you’re more likely to find something worth building in a group than alone.

Excited to share @profound has raised a $180M Series D, co-led by @sequoia and @kleinerperkins. Winning in AI Search requires an inhuman amount of work. That is why we are building the AI platform for marketers, underpinned by two things: 1/ Your AI Marketer, a marketing expert that proactively investigates your data, identifies opportunities, and then does the work while you stay in the loop. 2/ Context Manager, a living synthesis of your meetings, email threads, and brand data powering this new teammate. As your brand evolves, so does your AI Marketer. AI labs are pushing the frontier in fields like engineering, law, and finance. But marketing, one of the economy's most complex and consequential applications, has received far less attention. That’s why we’re expanding our applied AI research team. We’re bringing together research scientists, engineers, and IOI medalists to advance AI for marketing. Their focus: post-training models for marketing workflows, and building the world's first AI benchmark for real-world tasks in the field.

Excited to share @profound has raised a $180M Series D, co-led by @sequoia and @kleinerperkins. Winning in AI Search requires an inhuman amount of work. That is why we are building the AI platform for marketers, underpinned by two things: 1/ Your AI Marketer, a marketing expert that proactively investigates your data, identifies opportunities, and then does the work while you stay in the loop. 2/ Context Manager, a living synthesis of your meetings, email threads, and brand data powering this new teammate. As your brand evolves, so does your AI Marketer. AI labs are pushing the frontier in fields like engineering, law, and finance. But marketing, one of the economy's most complex and consequential applications, has received far less attention. That’s why we’re expanding our applied AI research team. We’re bringing together research scientists, engineers, and IOI medalists to advance AI for marketing. Their focus: post-training models for marketing workflows, and building the world's first AI benchmark for real-world tasks in the field.

We’re excited to share that @nuance_ai has raised a $50M Series A led by @lightspeedvp, joined by @Accel, @spc, @nvidia, and @definevc! Much of human communication happens beyond words. Before we can speak, we learn to read faces, return smiles, follow gestures, and sense when someone is listening. That visual and emotional vocabulary stays with us for life. At Nuance Labs, we’re building a foundation model that understands and responds to the full spectrum of human emotion. A single full-duplex audio-visual model that sees, listens, and responds in real time, with the natural give-and-take of a conversation with a friend or colleague. We believe the best interface with a machine is the one we’ve practiced since birth. Join us!

One of the greatest examples of human-oriented technology is @Waymo. But it took a long road to get here. @dmitri_dolgov joined Google's self-driving project in 2009. He's now leading Waymo as co-CEO. He's coming by @spc this month.

Local minima are extremely rare in high dimensional spaces, so if you ever feel stuck in a rut it’s probably just because you aren’t considering a wide enough set of orthogonal options