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You can’t vibe code a chip. At least not yet. Fortunately there are other approaches to innovating on this layer of the AI tech stack. The team at MatX has been hard at work doing just that - now 100 team members strong and with an additional $500 Million raised in their Series B.

It’s been fun to watch Mike and Reiner make deliberate and aggressive progress since they left Google in 2022 to launch their company. We were honest in our pitch to be part of their first fundraise: you don’t need us to tell you anything about chips and we probably couldn’t answer your level of question anyway, but there are lots of things about company building that maybe we can be useful on. And hopefully every now and then we are!

As Reiner writes in their announcement blog post

Mike and I started MatX because we felt that the best chip for LLMs should be designed from first principles with a deep understanding of what LLMs need and how they will evolve. We are willing to give up on small-model performance, low-volume workloads, and even ease of programming to deliver on such a chip.

If this journey sounds like one you should be on too, they’re hiring.

Business owners are overwhelmed by startups pitching them AI enabled services (so are VCs but at least that’s our main business). What they tell us repeatedly is they want products that solve real problems, can integrate into their current systems, and quickly deliver hard dollar ROI - namely revenue. Slang AI checks all three of these boxes for them, bringing an AI-enabled superhost to their phone systems (and soon beyond). Restaurant operators love Slang AI (2,000+ rooftops Powered by Slang). Which means investors love Slang AI too, resulting in the just announced $36 Million Series B to drive continued product growth and sales.

Alex has built Slang with love in his heart and a chip on his shoulder. The love comes through in their care for the customer, a respect for the hospitality industry, and a strong startup culture. The chip comes from his own personal journey and a competitive nature in a very fast moving market. We love to support this mentality and are pleased to invest again in the company after previously leading their Series A.

If you’re a hospitality owner or executive who wants to learn more about Slang AI for your business please do check them out.

And if you’re also someone with love in your heart and a chip on your shoulder who thinks Slang AI might be the place to accelerate your career, well, they’re hiring.

Many of the text messages we receive from Archimetis CEO Paul Manwell contain zero words. Instead, they’re just a selfie of him in a hardhat (and other protective gear) at an oil, gas or chemical refinery somewhere in the world. And that’s how we know things are going well for the startup.

Homebrew had the pleasure of first investing in Paul and Aaron during their pre-seed and then committing once again in their seed round led by our friends at Inspired. Like many teams working in heavy industry, they’ve kept quiet and focused, just doing the work to help a multi-trillion dollar global market start using artificial intelligence. But now they’re talking a bit more about their mission and progress. In their own words:

Heroic teams, inadequate systems

Archimetis exists to change this. We are an AI-powered operational reasoning system that transforms the performance of energy, chemical, and industrial plants. We elevate every operations and engineering team member with the judgements and instincts of the very best.

And in coverage from Semafor:

Sundar Pichai’s former chief of staff has started an AI company tailored to oil refineries and chemical plants, the latest bet that smaller upstarts can pick off specialized industries left behind by the tech giants…focused on saving companies 10% to 20% of their energy costs.

They’re hiring, working with customers, and eventually fundraising again, so yeah, follow Archimetis for more.

‘Love in your heart, and a chip on your shoulder’ is repeated so often as to be borderline cliche but it is really evocative of a founder type we just really enjoy supporting. VillageSQL’s CEO, Dominic Preuss, is a great example of the combination and led Homebrew to participate in VillageSQL’s funding. Dom and his cofounder, Steve, are both Xooglers - our overlap with them runs deep - and we know their commitment to the MySQL ecosystem extends way beyond business opportunity. They’re building an extension framework which provides a foundation to modernize MySQL for the AI era, an approach that honors the spirit in which the software was originally written.

This week, VillageSQL announced $35 Million raised to date, led by some of our favorite infrastructure investors at FirstMark, Google Ventures and Spark. We’re honored that when Dominic was spinning things up he reached out to us. These days many founders have a surplus of capital available to them and we pride Homebrew on being a flexible piece of their puzzle. Investing our own capital means we don’t have ownership targets and are fundamentally aligned with early stage teams.

If working at a well-funded, technical startup sounds appealing to you, well, they’re hiring.

Better together. Often that’s the case for two startups building in a huge market. And we’re excited that Assembly has been acquired by Quantum Workplace, a leading Talent Management platform. Assembly CEO and cofounder, Jonathan Fields, and his team grew to 500+ customers and millions of dollars in revenue, no small accomplishment in a very competitive space. When the opportunity arose to grow even faster by joining Quantum, we all agreed it was a fantastic outcome for both the team and the cap table.

We’re excited to see what Jonathan and team can do at Quantum and wish them collectively the best of luck!

From the beginning, ‘higher quality code,’ was the mission and rallying cry for the Graphite team. We’ve enjoyed the proverbial front-row seat, having led the company’s seed financing and sat on its Board ever since. And today we have the thrill of seeing the company join Cursor.

In the cofounders own words: “We chose to join forces with Cursor because of the opportunity to create something phenomenal together: the end-to-end platform for building with AI. We’ve long dreamed of connecting the surfaces where we create, collaborate on, and validate code changes, and this deal dramatically accelerates the timeline on which we can make that a reality.”

A journey (and outcome) like this one is what we hoped for when starting Homebrew and there will be more to reflect and write about. But for now, we give Greg, Merrill and Tomas our enthusiastic congratulations; a big salute to the whole Graphite team; a thank you to Peter at a16z and Christine at Accel; and excitement for Cursor, which is bringing on board an amazing organization.

Founder<>Market Fit is something we talk about often at Homebrew. Is there a natural story - in skills, in interest, in mission - between the people starting this company and the problem they’ve chosen to solve? When these line up positively you find startups that have a clear ‘right to win.’ Clarity Pediatrics is an example. And it just raised a $14.5 million Series A to accelerate its journey.

Clarity provides speciality care for chronic childhood conditions - diagnoses that often fall between the gaps of primary care, or traditionally encounter painful delays in navigating the health system. It started with ADHD, expanded to anxiety, and is servicing obesity next. The comorbidity rate of conditions in children is quite high, so expansion isn’t just about business goals, but being able to treat the patient.

When we first met cofounders Christina LaMontagne and Dr. Alesandro Larrazabal their motivations and capabilities for this challenge were clear. And they’ve been able to build a foundation where business goals and clinical efficacy are paired. As they’ve found, “89% of parents who participate in our group behavioral programs said Clarity had a ‘large’ impact on their lives, and 3 in 4 families report that challenging child behaviors improved after only 8 weeks.”

If bringing Clarity to even more kids is a mission you want to sign up for, well, they’re hiring.

And if you’re interested in Clarity for your family, school, patient population, just check them out.

Software can give superpowers to ordinary people. That’s always been a core investment belief at Homebrew. It’s driven many of our commitments to founders looking to deliver benefits not just to the wealthiest consumers or largest corporations, but to individuals, teams, and small businesses. And with Leona Health announcing its $14 million funding, we’re thrilled to put sweat, reputation and capital behind their mission.

Leona is using technology to more effectively connect doctors and their patients - starting with an AI Co-Pilot in LatAm. Part of its development philosophy is to ‘meet people where they are’ which informed their development of a WhatsApp native strategy, the dominant health care communications platform in the region.

Of course it’s never just about the market opportunity at this stage - you have to believe first and foremost in the team. When we met Leona CEO Caroline Merin it was clear that her background in the region via exec roles at Rappi and Uber provided insights that others lacked. And her technical cofounder Tom Chokel was equally well-prepared, having worked in health care and across large technology systems before.

If helping to bring better health care to millions and millions of global consumers is an adventure you’d like to embark upon, well, they’re hiring in San Francisco and Mexico City.

Good people know other good people, so when one of the Habi cofounders told us a good friend of his was starting a new company, we were intrigued. And when we heard more about what they were actually doing, and the team that had assembled to work together, we went from ‘intrigued’ to committed. Shortly thereafter, we agreed to lead Numbi’s pre-seed financing.

Numbi is building the AI-powered G&A engine for LatAm. Business owners can work with them to streamline and modernize their accounting, payroll and legal systems. Giving them more accurate and high quality information to make decisions, and freeing up time to focus on building their companies.

We’re at an extraordinary moment in time where companies of all sizes - and in all geographies - are going to have access to what might have been only available to a few. Join Numbi and become part of the opportunity.

We previously wrote about how Oboe helps you learn with AI, and since that time, many people have taken notice. So it doesn’t come as a surprise to us that today Oboe is announcing a $16 million Series A. Oboe creates courseware to help you get smart about, well, anything.

Besides the thrill of backing CEO Nir Zicherman for a second time, we generally believe in a future where some of AI’s most exciting abilities are to augment human ability, not replace it.

In Oboe’s own words, “People learn best when they’re taught by the best teachers. We’ve rearchitected our generation pipeline to ensure that learning content is approachable, narrative-driven, and high quality. Nothing should ever feel like AI slop.”

What do you want to learn about?

Oh, and they’re definitely hiring.

“Quanta doesn’t sit on top of someone else’s general ledger. It is the ledger.” In most fundraising blog posts the most important line is the capital amount, but in our opinion, this declaration is what makes Quanta’s Series A announcement interesting.

CEO Helen Hastings set out to build infrastructure and Prism, their just launched agentic reporting product, begins to show what is possible when you combine foundation and application layer. Accel recognized this too and doubled down to lead the Series A, giving Quanta the next set of resources they need to deliver full service accounting to modern customers.

If you would like to see what Quanta can do for your business, book a demo.

Or if working at the intersection of AI and fintech with a small close-knit SF team appeals you, well, they’re hiring.

Nava set out to create a modern benefits brokerage, using technology to help companies, plan administrators, and their employees spend less time stressing about programs. And they’ve been doing just that, especially now that AI tooling can make workflows even simpler. With Nava HQ, AI-enabled compliance checking helps automate all the tasks which used to be manual for a company. To that end, Nava recently announced a $30 million Series C raise to supercharge the next phase of their business.

So if you’re running benefits for your company, check out Nava. And if joining a well-funded startup working in a HUGE MARKET, well, they’re also hiring.

There are two ways to collect geographic data. Spend billions of dollars trying to create your own proprietary data set (see Google, Apple, etc). Or develop a novel way to invite the world to do it with you, and Hivemapper’s Bee Maps project certainly qualifies as novel. Using affordable hardware, contributors to the map share in any value the data set creates via the $HONEY token. It’s been so successful that companies like Lyft and Volkswagen are taking note. As are investors -- Hivemapper just announced a $32 million financing to boost expansion.

Want to become a Bee Maps contributor? Read more here.

AI can solve complex problems, it just requires complex data sets to train on. That’s where Datacurve comes in, providing unique and high value proprietary coding data. The foundational model labs have quickly taken note, already Datacurve’s customer list is quite impressive for a young company. And this also attracted investor attention, namely our friends at Chemistry who are leading the recently announced $15 million Series A. We’re thankful that amidst a ton of demand, the Datacurve founders included Homebrew in the round as well, and are excited to get to work on their behalf.

So, if you’re a foundational model company, or otherwise building meaningful capabilities on top of one, you should speak to Datacurve.

And if working at a place like Datacurve sounds right for you, they’re hiring.

AI workflow automation has quickly transformed many of healthcare’s back office functions around insurance, billing, document management, and such. But when you start touching actual patient care you need more than just a ‘mostly correct’ model. Enter Altira Health, a startup run by industry operators to deliver clinical-grade Voice & SMS AI for post-discharge and care-gap follow-up.

Cofounders Levent and Matt met while leading important initiatives at Carbon Health (where Homebrew is also an investor), and we were thrilled to help back their pre-seed round, just recently announced.

Altira is moving quite quickly and already offering demos to interested customers in the healthcare industry.

We’ve been fortunate to have a spot on the cap tables of some great financial services startups, and seeing the growth of companies such as Chime, Finix, Gusto, and Plaid has made us even more confident that there is a next generation coming up behind them. But building in or for FinTech comes with its own set of challenges - industry regulations, lots of PII, multiple stakeholders on the customer side. It takes a special team to crack this nut.

Enter Eloquent AI. These experienced cofounders are already gaining traction with an AI-driven automation platform for operations in the financial services industry. Just as they’ve attracted customers, they’ve also attracted investors, and recently announced a $7.4 million seed round to continue growing the team and building the product. We’re excited to be participants in this fundraise and to support Eloquent.

If you want to check out Eloquent as a solution for your company, you can book a demo. And if working for a well-funded, early YC startup in a huge market appeals to you, well, they’re hiring.

Learn how to learn. That would be advice that a parent gives their child, a teacher gives their student. For some, the rapid advancements in AI might challenge this statement - why learn when AI can answer - or even do it for you? Sure, that’s one approach and it’ll be applicable in many aspects of your life. But what if there was another path? What if AI wasn’t a substitute for learning but actually a partner in helping you learn? About anything.

Hello Oboe! Launching today, Oboe lets you create courses about, well, any topic you want to learn about. Combining pedagogy underpinnings with an AI backbone, you can generate a path to knowledge, even mastery, for just about anything or anyone. And not just in text, but also with accompanying media. In CEO Nir Zicherman’s own words,

With a single prompt, Oboe magically creates a course to teach you whatever interests you. And when I say course, I don't mean something heavy, intimidating, prescriptive, and standard. That's the old way of learning. Oboe courses are lightweight, fast, beautiful, accessible, approachable, fun, and effective. That's what learning should be.

Besides opening today to early usage, Oboe is also announcing its first funding, a $4 million seed round that we were eager to participate in, having previously backed Nir and his cofounder Mike Mignano when they started Anchor (exited to Spotify).

The product is young but being built by a team in New York with all the right goals in mind. Try it out today - what will you learn? Maybe how to make a perfect cup of coffee?

We met Bluejay Founders Rohan Vasishth and Faraz Siddiqi while they were in the midst of YC and were immediately struck by their core insight: the key to widespread enterprise AI adoption is not better models. It's a better test suite.

That started as a product hypothesis, and quickly turned into actual customer momentum. In fact, since they left their teams at AWS Bedrock and Microsoft Copilot in March, they've been doubling their growth every three months and now are working with multinational corporations, Fortune 500 companies, and startups. Bluejay solves the manual testing problem and eliminates non-determinism for voice & text AI agents through human simulation, a new testing paradigm that evaluates your agent's efficacy against 1:1 replicas of your real customers.

Homebrew was impressed! And alongside other investors, committed to a $4 million seed round that Bluejay is announcing today.

If you’re using voice agents and looking to increase the speed and quality of your deploying, Bluejay is here to help.

The universe works in strange ways. LORIS was a recent Wordle answer (it’s a nocturnal primate -- we got it in 3 of 6) and later that same day we received a note from LorisAI CEO Etie Hertz that he had an exciting update for us. Today that news is public: LorisAI has been acquired by Contentsquare!

We’re very excited to see the companies join up and believe there is even more great news to come from Contentsquare. Thank you to Etie and the LorisAI team for all the hard work. Onward!

“You’re going to LOVE these founders” is always a great message to receive from folks who know us well. Typically it means that regardless of *what* they’re working on and how *hot* the deal is (or not), we’re going to learn something from talking with them. We’re going to be impressed not just by what they’re building, but how and why. And we’re going to leave the conversation thinking about how we might be able to help, even before an investment has been made. This was the case with Scrunch, which just announced its $15 Million Series A.

What does Scrunch do? It helps brands (and other website owners) prepare for a future where agents are visiting their pages as much, or more, than humans. To do this they’re launching AXP, the Agent Experience Platform, which creates a parallel AI-ready version of your website, optimized for LLMs and served invisibly to AI agents. Smart, right? You can learn more about Scrunch AXP at their website (video demo and sign up ready!).

If building the future of AI-enabled web infrastructure sounds exciting to you, Scrunch is hiring.