Sound Ventures

We’re excited to continue backing Ayush S and the entire Warp team as they announce their $60M Series B. When we first met this team, what stood out was their bold vision for HR. They believed AI could help take over thr busywork for HR folks so they could spend more time doing what they do best: supporting people. Today, Warp helps automate everything from onboarding and payroll to benefits and compliance, giving HR teams more speed and leverage. It’s been exciting to watch the team move so quickly and deliver real value for their customers. Congratulations to the entire Warp team, and welcome to Battery Ventures and the other new investors joining the journey. Let’s go!

Earlier this month we hosted a dinner with Sound Ventures and a group of enterprise research leaders from companies like Anthropic, Amazon, Salesforce, and Intuit to discuss a simple question: what is the role of the researcher in an AI-native world? One theme kept coming up: researchers are evolving from executing research themselves to orchestrating systems of agents that execute it. As that shift happens, a new challenge emerges around ensuring the work those agents produce is actually high quality. The best researchers have years of accumulated knowledge about their business: what good research looks like, how questions should be framed, what best practices should be applied, what has been learned before, and where teams have gotten things wrong in the past. AI agents start with none of that context. The challenge then becomes translating that expertise into something these agents can actually use. That's a big part of why we recently launched our Research Context Library. It gives researchers a place to encode their methodologies, prior learnings, brand context, and judgment so every project starts smarter than the last. Every day I get to speak with incredible researchers who are figuring out how to scale themselves and their teams in an AI-native world to enable better research, faster decisions, and entirely new ways for insights to shape their organizations. At Knit, we're excited to help researchers and insights teams at some of the world's most iconic brands do exactly that. Thanks to everyone who joined the conversation and a special shoutout to Jillian Puente for organizing such an amazing event!

"Providers have known intuitively for years that the system is rigged against them. What they've never had is the intelligence to prove it." Proud to back Mike Desjadon and the whole team at Anomaly as they fight to correct this asymmetry. They've already recovered tens of millions and counting in revenue for health systems. Read more about the announcement here: https://lnkd.in/eY_uqEA6 And check out this blog from Mike: https://lnkd.in/eykYcKZs

Thank you to all of the founders who came out for our Sound Ventures dinner last night! And a big thank you to our portfolio company Anthropic for joining us. At the start of dinner, we did a little round robin: what can you give to the group, and what do you need help with? A few things jumped out: 1. Everyone wants compute! 2. Hiring is still one of the biggest priorities and hardest challenges for founders. One of the biggest asks in the room was intros to SWEs, PMs, and operators. If you know of good people looking for their next role, message us and we'll do our best to connect them. 3. IRL matters more now than ever before. Getting in front of customers at dinners, trade shows, conferences, and events is crucial. 4. The founder journey can be a lonely one, which is why dinners like these are particularly nice. Great to catch up with some of my favorite folks and grateful for rooms full of smart, generous people helping each other out. Max Brenner, Hassaan Raza, Ilan Zerbib, Ben Broca, Tom Charman, Michelle Marcelline, Kevin Chandra, Zaid Kahn, Moe Katib, Shadiya Refkat, Hannah M., Robert Sebastian, Rayan K., Gary Chen, Clint Ehrlich, Juliette Bolea, Zach Gronfein, Alexandra Burbey

Addition by Subtraction. We'll see you next week at Startup Grind, when Ashton Kutcher joins Ayush Sharma of Warp on stage.

We are thrilled to see our portfolio company, Forethought, join forces with Zendesk, marking their largest acquisition to date! Massive congrats to Deon Nicholas, Sami Ghoche, the entire Forethought and Zendesk teams for this incredible milestone!

"More hard hats than hoodies." Find out where Alexandra Burbey is spending her time, as she looks for tectonic shifts that move the economy. Catch the full conversation with Cristian Raygoza and Rho here:

Today we’re excited to announce our participation in the $20M Series A for Day AI, alongside Sequoia Capital, Greenoaks, Conviction and Permanent Capital Partners. Day AI, the world's first CRMx platform, is now officially available. Traditional CRMs are full of friction - and we've just accepted that. As companies scale, CRMs get harder to use, requiring humans to constantly band-aid their shortcomings. And while today’s CRMs can record data, they lack understanding. All teams have the same questions: What makes our best sales rep so good? Which customers are likely to churn? Traditional CRMs can't answer these. Why? They lack context. Day AI today introduces CRMx. The "x" is for context. It captures the whole story - why the deal closed, what objections came up along the way, which relationships actually mattered - and lets the LLM do the work. You can now stop fighting with your CRM, and just talk to it instead. We've had the pleasure of using this product for over a year, in partnership with the diligent hands of Christopher O'Donnell and team. Having spent a decade as CPO at HubSpot helping build the original CRM category, he’s uniquely positioned to rebuild it the right way. Experience it now: https://lnkd.in/ggKhSNQz