Yue (Jane) Fu

Calendar → Planner → Projects → AI employees. Motion is rebuilding the SMB productivity stack for an agentic world.  Stacey Bishop and I are thrilled to share our investment in Motion. They raised $60M, powered by an oversubscribed $38M Series C led by Scale Venture Partners. Harry Qi, Ethan Yu, and Omid Rooholfada are at the heart of it, driving the change every SMB has been waiting for. AI is reshaping business at a speed we've never seen. But for most SMBs it’s still out of reach: too complicated, too expensive, and way too much overhead. The Motion team is breaking down those barriers by replacing the productivity suite with a set of out-of-the-box AI employees, ready to work on day one. A 25-person accounting firm in Kansas City can now have AI teammates handling client follow-ups, prepping docs, updating records, scheduling meetings - the tedious, time sucking stuff that gets in the way of actual work. The team has built a single platform where humans and AI genuinely collaborate. Motion is following a GTM playbook that has led to some of the most significant business outcomes in SaaS: start with a wedge, win the SMB market, then expand across categories and upmarket. We’ve seen this across SaaS giants and within our own portfolio. Box defined content, HubSpot defined inbound marketing, and BILL defined Accounts Payable. They all began with focused products that evolved into comprehensive suites. Motion’s agentic productivity platform is already reaching 10k+ SMBs and is just getting started. The future of agentic work is here, and I can’t wait to see what this team accomplishes! Read more about the story here: https://lnkd.in/dvwkazfK

90

4 Comments

Many healthcare interventions look successful early. Engagement is high. Patients show up. Metrics move in the first few months. On paper, the program “works.” The problem is that we often stop measuring too soon. From a finance and capital allocation perspective, this creates a quiet distortion. Capital flows toward interventions that show fast signals of effort, not those that produce durable outcomes over time. The former look cheaper. The latter look expensive. But that’s usually because we’re measuring the wrong thing. Sustained outcomes are harder to achieve, slower to show up, and more demanding to support. They require different economics, longer time horizons, and patience from operators and investors. The irony is that over the long run, durability is often the more capital-efficient choice. In healthcare, what looks costly upfront is frequently what prevents much larger costs later.

34

8 Comments

"Build the event you wish existed" That's what we at Monadical did last week at #NYTW. We wanted an AI Engineers discussion for Engineers. There's always a lot of events out there for VCs to network, or for startups to learn about G2M, but very little on lessons learned from actual engineers in the field. So that's the event we hosted. Big thank yous to our awesome panel, Roy Pereira, Ben Cohen and Corey J. Gallon. Here's the key takeaways and the AI tools we're using. 🚀 All three panelists independently called AI Agents the most transformative LLM application they’ve used. They specifically called out Claude 3.5 Sonnet for its accuracy and reliability. 🪨 We dug into how LLMs are “jagged”, not general. They can be shockingly good at some tasks and completely fail at others. Everyone agreed: good evaluations are critical (and hard.) 🧪 Corey noted how public benchmarks and reality are two different things. Most public evals are saturated or gamed. ♊ Ben emphasized that AI projects are actually two projects: building the tool and building the evaluation process. 🧱 We explored how falling dev costs may impact startup defensibility and labor demand. Roy shared that founders are already shifting strategies in response. ⚒️ In a world of daily AI launches, the panel discussed how they decide what’s worth attention, and what’s just noise. They called out tools like Goose, Aider, Claude Code, and Monadical’s own Cubbi, which helps run agentic workflows safely in dev environments. (links in the comments). CTA: What would you want to hear in an AI Applied Engineering talk you attended?

33

5 Comments

San Francisco-based Flint, co-founded by CEO Michelle Lim and CTO Max Levenson, raised $5 million in seed funding led by Accel, with participation from Sheryl Sandberg’s Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners and Neo. The company plans to use the capital to expand its design and applied AI engineering teams. Flint’s platform enables autonomous websites that can rewrite, A/B test, and optimize themselves in real time based on visitor behavior and market dynamics—empowering growth teams to scale their web presence while maintaining brand control. Clients like Cognition, Modal, and Graphite already use Flint to generate high-performing, on-brand landing pages with significant SEO and conversion gains. FOUNDERS: Michelle Lim & Max Levenson INVESTORS: Accel, Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners & Neo ROUND: Seed AMOUNT: $5,000,000 HQ: #SanFrancisco #California #VentureCapital #Flint #Accel #SandbergBernthalVenturePartners #MichelleLim #MaxLevenson #Neo #TradedVC

3

1 Comment

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

71

3 Comments

I’m thrilled to share that White Star Capital is backing AMI - Advanced Machine Intelligence in their historic $1.03bn seed round 🚀 - Led by the legendary Yann LeCun and Alex LeBrun. AMI isn't building another LLM, they're building World Models. Why this matters: *Beyond Text: Grounded in JEPA architecture to solve physical-world problems. *Global Powerhouse: A dream team from Meta FAIR, OpenAI, and DeepMind. *Sovereign Tech: A credible European-led alternative to US Big Tech. Excited to be part of this journey along with the rest of the WSC team Eric Martineau-Fortin, Matthieu Lattes, Bérénice Moustial and Victoria Pozzi Rocco Belforti. 🌍✨ https://lnkd.in/eiCKZKSQ #VentureCapital #AI

85

2 Comments

I’m lucky to work alongside colleagues like Richard Fruehauf, who constantly push my thinking. His latest piece unpacks why U.S. robotics and drone manufacturing faces uphill economics, and how public policy can help turn the tide. One key takeaway: 232 tariffs on robotics imports could help reset the economics that are holding back U.S. investment and production. It’s a sharp perspective on how policy can shape the future of advanced tech here at home. Well worth a read: https://lnkd.in/edMPTQPQ Richard Fruehauf, Robert J. Szczerba, Michael Lutzky, Edward Ovando, Karl Sanchack, Herman Herman, Jeff Legault, Phil English, Richard Fruehauf, Ryan Aument, Michael Guido, Sheila Fitzgerald Sterrett, David McCormick

19

2 Comments

From Mundane to Meaningful: Why AI Might Just Be Your New Favorite Teammate We all have tasks that drain energy instead of adding value. So… what if AI could take a few of those off your plate? In the latest Revving Up episode, Quang sat down with Tom Murtaugh to talk about the shift from busywork to better work. From automating photo cleanup to streamlining content, we explored how AI isn’t here to replace talent—but to unleash it. We covered: ✔️ What should actually be automated ✔️ How to make space for strategy and creativity ✔️ Why the smartest operators are using AI as leverage—not a crutch This one’s for anyone looking to trade burnout for better output. 🎧 Full convo → https://lnkd.in/gcAjKTGh 💬 What’s one thing you’d love AI to handle so you can focus on bigger things? #RevEng #RevvingUp #AI #Automation #WorkSmarter #TechInWork #FutureOfWork #LeadershipInTech #B2BProductivity

1

Honored and excited to partner with Drew Baglino and the incredible team at Heron Power as they re-imagine the electric grid for the modern world. Power in America is not zero sum. We deserve access to cheap and abundant electricity and we should win the AI race. And we must build the capacity to manufacture critical technology here at home. When faced with existential challenges, we deploy technology against them. And we win.

54

1 Comment

Very excited to announce our investment in Charta Health today! At Madrona, we believe the most impactful AI companies don’t just speed up existing workflows — they reimagine them from first principles. Charta Health is building an AI-native platform that transforms chart review from a labor-intensive, error-prone process into a real-time intelligence layer — improving care quality, billing accuracy, and provider efficiency. Karan Mehandru and I have had the pleasure of getting to know founders Justin Liu, Scott Morris over the last couple of years and we’re thrilled to be partnering with them and the entire Charta team — alongside Bain Capital Ventures, SV Angel, Refract Ventures, and South Park Commons! More on why we invested below! 👇 https://lnkd.in/druSN-Na

137

9 Comments

Grr-ithm, Inc. is partnering with goML to build Mira's Generative AI Development and Deployment. Mira is a multi-agent system designed to simulate Whole Body Intelligence. Stay Tuned for more exciting announcements as we gear up for launch. https://lnkd.in/gjTdUsdx

8