Robert Chatwani

Today Isembard announced a $50m Series A fundraise led by Union Square Ventures, less than a year after Notion Capital led their Seed round. 💥This is a company right at the intersection of AI & supply chain sovereignty & they’re exceeding even our most optimistic expectations. By the end of the year they will have 25 factories across the UK, US, Germany, France & Ukraine. 💥Isembard is rapidly scaling its network of AI-first factories for precision manufacturing at the same time as market demand is accelerating. Macro forces (reshoring, rising defence spend, concentration risk in Asia, and the growth of neo-primes) are structurally increasing demand for fast, local, flexible manufacturing that the current industry is unable to deliver on. 💥The innovation is in the way the company builds and franchises factories as a product with tightly integrated units of machines, software, robotics, & process intelligence that turn design files into certified components with speed & reliability. 💥Their AI software platform, MasonOS, connects all sites into a single operating system, replacing fragmented shops with standardised, high-performance industrial nodes & enabling real-time quoting, predictable delivery, & low defect rates. By owning the full production stack, Isembard delivers premium manufacturing performance with the scalability & flexibility of a software platform. 💥We are at the top of the AI hype cycle and there are understandable concerns about the ROI on the vast sums of money being invested into this new super-cycle. But, the ROI for Isembard is both clear and compelling. They will deliver components 10x faster and at 50% of the cost of current suppliers. They will also build a de-centralised, global network of factories to meet the growing demand for national or regional sovereignty. 💥This is a company with a clear vision to disrupt a massive, fragmented $1.8tn component manufacturing market. Today marks another huge stride towards that vision. And they are only just getting started. We’re thrilled to be on this journey with Alexander Fitzgerald & the team & we’re also excited to welcome Rebecca Kaden & USV into the investor base. Notion Capital Union Square Ventures Alexander Fitzgerald Rebecca Kaden Maximilian Eichler Stephen Millard Britt Mulder

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Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

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In the San Francisco Bay Area, founders are relentless about growing and scaling their companies. They spot opportunity, scale through uncertainty, and create companies that redefine industries. Recently, we gathered a group of founders and tech leaders to discuss the intersection of company growth and long-term personal success. Eric S. Yuan, Founder and CEO of Zoom Communications, shared the inspiring story behind his company’s growth and eventual IPO. Eric reiterated that the founders who create the most impact don’t just plan for an exit – they prepare for what comes after. Too often, personal wealth planning lags company growth, and that gap can become costly at the most pivotal moments. The rest of the evening was focused on closing that gap. Our colleagues in Goldman Sachs Investment Banking, Pawan Tewari and Nick Giovanni, shared a candid outlook for M&A and IPOs in this environment, along with important steps founders should take to prepare for a strategic exit. We ended with a conversation around the key considerations for maximizing founders’ personal outcomes. Pre-transaction planning isn’t defensive - it’s opportunistic. Your company’s exit strategy and your family’s long-term planning work should not be done in isolation. When investment banking and private wealth work in sync, founders can cohesively optimize outcomes on all sides of the equation. To learn more about the practical “do’s and don'ts” for founders, we are happy to share our ‘Goldman guide’ for navigating wealth planning, business exists, and IPOs: https://lnkd.in/ewhEGjV3. Thank you, Eric, and to all the founders who joined us at The Battery in SF. On behalf of Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management and Investment Banking, we look forward to the next conversation.

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Dayna Grayson is a leading VC who has “sat in every chair” at a young age. She founded Construct Capital with Rachel Holt, an early leader at Uber. Together, they are tackling the digitization of industry. Dayna will discuss macro trends, what it takes to be a founder, and the potential for AI. She is one of the few who have successfully blended a career of operations and investing.  Check out our discussion at: https://lnkd.in/eYBUGjbW #leadershipdevelopment

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In an ecosystem flooded with service-first startups chasing scale through funding, Urban Company stands out by doing the hard (and right) thing—building a real business. Their recent shift from being a pure-play service marketplace to developing tangible, monetizable products is a playbook more entrepreneurs should study. Too many service startups stop at aggregation—thinking scale alone will drive defensibility. Urban Company went a step further: ✅ Leveraging deep consumer insights ✅ Creating integrated solutions ✅ Building new revenue lines rooted in real-world usage This is what scaling with purpose looks like. Instead of chasing round after round of capital to keep the engine running, they’re creating sustainable value by aligning product innovation with the trust and access they’ve already earned through services. For founders building in services: 💡 Don’t just deliver the service. Understand the gaps around it. Own the value chain. Monetize where others overlook. Urban Company is showing what it means to evolve with intent. A solid reminder that great businesses aren’t built on burn—they’re built on depth. #Entrepreneurship #Startups #Innovation #BusinessStrategy #ServiceBusiness https://lnkd.in/dzNHtpBS

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As enterprise AI moves from experimentation to deployment, Myriad is helping founders accelerate enterprise adoption by going beyond capital and also providing access to operators who have built, deployed, and scaled systems inside the world’s largest organizations.  That’s always been our belief behind Myriad’s Executive Advisory Board, and today we’re welcoming a new group of leaders, bringing the Board to more than 30 C-suite executives from Fortune 500 and global enterprises. These operators work directly with the founders in our network on product design, enterprise introductions, and proof-of-concept deployments. It’s a proven model that’s already helping portfolio companies reach 119 Fortune 500 deployments and 70 enterprise POCs. Excited for what we’ll build together.    Read the full press release here:  https://lnkd.in/eiBvkSxM

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Owning your narrative is leadership. Last week in San Francisco, we gathered with AAF SF Bay Area to talk about positioning in competitive markets. Three themes emerged: Be memorable. Be clear. Be consistent. The market doesn’t reward talent. It rewards clarity. Grateful to everyone who showed up thoughtfully. #personalbrand #careergrowth #leadership

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