GV (Google Ventures)

I'm excited to announce Snorkel AI's $350M Series E at $3.5B, led by Insight Partners and S32. We've grown 18x+ in the last 12 months since launching our Data-as-a-Service offering, passing $375M ARRR this week. As AI advances to superhuman capabilities, AI data & environment development must advance with it - and basic staffing and crowdsourcing approaches are not enough. AI progress now requires deep research and technology work that combines human expertise with specialized AI in compounding ways. Snorkel AI is building the RSI data engine and frontier data lab for this next phase. We're honored to have the support of existing investors Addition, Lightspeed, Greylock Partners, GV (Google Ventures), Prosperity7 Ventures, Factory, Wells Fargo, Walden Catalyst Ventures, and new investors Third Point LLC, March Capital, Blumberg Capital, Allegis Capital, Frontline Ventures, and Standard VC. – Snorkel AI started as a research project a decade ago at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). Our thesis was simple: AI progress would become increasingly data-centric – and therefore data development should be studied as a true research and technology problem, not just a staffing and crowdsourcing one. Today, as AI capabilities verge on superhuman, building the data and environments to safely measure and train AI is becoming too hard for even the smartest human experts to do alone. Only humans and AI agents, collaborating together in compounding ways, can meet the accelerating needs of the frontier, and keep humans in the driver’s seat of AI progress for decades to come. At Snorkel AI, we are building the data lab to define the shape of this new “Data 2.0” frontier, and the new paradigms of human-computer interaction needed to advance it. Our key focus is building the RSI engine for data, where specialized AI models accelerate and improve human expert output, and in turn, scaled human supervision is used to continuously evaluate and improve these models – creating a powerful compounding loop to keep pace with an accelerating RSI frontier. With this round of funding, we are also doubling down on our commitments to support data development for open benchmarking and evaluation (more news here soon!); an increasingly diverse ecosystem of general and specialized intelligence; and a path to safe, well-aligned AI built on robust training and evaluation data. Data development will guide and drive the next stages of AI – and must do so in a human-centric, AI accelerated, open, diverse, and safe way. We are excited to support this mission in the next decade of research ahead at Snorkel AI. More thoughts here: https://lnkd.in/gWjpQuPE

Farah U. and I went on Bloomberg TV to discuss the rise of AI slop, the future of consumer shopping and personal agents, and what brands need to be doing to sell at scale 🔥 Nectar sees 20M+ brand <> consumer and creator conversations a week and has attributed $150M+ in revenue back to those touch points. From that seat, three shifts are already done: 1/ Trust has moved. Farah watched it inside Meta scaling Facebook Groups to billions: people started spending more time in private spaces and started trusting strangers with what to buy. Your customer isn't in a friend network anymore. Strangers don't buy on reach. They buy on trust. 2/ Slop changed the job. We've observed AI content is up 500% in a few months. The question for a brand flipped from "how do we post more" to "who here is real, and who vouches for us?" 3/ Discovery left the feed. Consumers ask ChatGPT what to buy. Meta shipped Muse. Instinct starting rolling out personal agents. Soon every consumer has an agent, and that agent cites sources like YouTube or Reddit based on what it deems authentic. What matters? A wave of brands folded overnight when Meta CPMs spiked. Solid margins, great teams, good products. What they didn't own was a single customer relationship. Every one lived on Meta's platform, at Meta's price. When the rent went up, the customers went with it. The old playbook was: borrow reach, pay the auction, hope the channel holds. Today it's Reddit. Tomorrow it's TikTok. The channel will change again. The new playbook is an agent on the brand's side that sees everything and acts on it: finding the customer before they ask, recruiting the creators who already vouch for you, knowing what content will land before you make it, and putting the next dollar where it converts. On every surface, including the consumer's own agent. Consumers have an agent that shops. Replit, Unilever and e.l.f. have one that sells. Thank you Romaine Bostick, CFA and the Bloomberg team for having us! Full interview in the comments 👇

Nearly half of all cancer drugs require biomarker screening. Yet outside academic medical centers too few cancer patients even get screened. That’s why it’s a huge deal that Memorial Sloan Kettering is opening up its voluminous data on genetic variants of cancer and their treatments thru OpenEvidence Even more intriguing: OpenEvidence plans to use the data combined with its doctor network to start building out a pipeline of drugs with a focus on rare cancers. NEW for Forbes

Faster. Bigger. At Scale. We are excited to announce a $205 million funding round co-led by Riot Ventures and Atreides Management, LP. This investment will push our serial production of FRAME satellites further, producing standardized 200kg, 500kg and 1-5ton satellite fleets with the repeatability and volume of drones rather than one-off bespoke builds. Re-industrialization of the EU and US is at the core of EnduroSat's efforts. We are building a new high-volume manufacturing facility in the USA and developing the EU's largest space and defense hub. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/dH9GBaNu #spaceiscloserthanyouthink

Just released an interview with Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, Co-Founder and CEO of Zipline. Zipline is the biggest drone delivery startup in the world. A few weeks ago, Uber Eats partnered with Zipline to deliver 1 million packages a day within the next 2.5 years. This was significantly more demand than Zipline was planning for, so now they’re trying to rapidly open new factories and scale drone production. Link to interview on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gwCu48_T