Upfront Ventures

A big thank you to everyone who's donated to The LA Tech Community Cares Fund! 100% of the funds raised will go directly to people in need across LA who were affected by the fires. If you missed the chance, you can still donate here: https://lnkd.in/gc4Kc_kv (any amount helps!) And a special out to the CoEfficient Labs team for helping us create this video to raise awareness during the Upfront Summit -

We’re proud to announce that Pragma received a $12.75M strategic investment from Square Enix, Greylock Partners, Upfront Ventures, Insight Partners and others! At Pragma, our mission is to build best-in-class technologies for game developers so they can focus on what they do best — creating incredible games. This investment is a major milestone that enables us to keep refining our core solutions, like the Pragma engine, and help studios fully realize their vision. Furthermore, we will continue expanding our capabilities, as seen in our recent acquisition and launch of FirstLook.gg — our new playtesting and community management tool that’s now powering +30 communities/studios since launching a couple months ago. Over the last 5 years, it’s been amazing to see the adoption of Pragma and to see us transition from a 2 person startup to the de facto AA/AAA PC/Console backend. We’ve powered over 40+ studios representing thousands of game developers, millions of players and we have even more in store for 2025 and beyond. We want to thank all our partners that we worked with, especially Hide Uehara at Square Enix, Kevin Zhang of Upfront, David Thacker of Greylock, and Nikhil Sachdev of Insight. Thank you for believing in the Pragma vision and team. Together, we are paving the way forward by empowering game studios to unlock their creative potential and build amazing games. If you’re interested in learning more about how the Pragma engine, FirstLook.gg or our co-dev team can help your game, let's connect! For more, see VentureBeat's coverage. Thanks Dean Takahashi! https://lnkd.in/gfpFSi7Z

🚀 Next Speaker Reveal! 🚀 Peter Zakin, Investor at Upfront Ventures, is joining Shift Miami 2025! 🎤 With a keen eye on AI startups and the future of developer tools, Peter will share insights into what investors look for in AI-driven innovation. 📅 May 6–7, 2025 📍 Miami, FL 🔗 Tickets: https://lnkd.in/djhxnFXh More announcements coming soon. Stay tuned! 👀 #ShiftMiami #Startups #AI

Super fun to dive into deeper discussion onstage last week at Upfront Summit with the ever-thoughtful Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, a portfolio company at Kindred Ventures! Among AI-native companies, there are still only a handful of products that have found great adoption today. Perplexity's answer engine for both in-the-moment information and deep research is one of the few to scale globally clocking at over 500M queries per month, and growing in adoption with both consumers and businesses. During our talk, Aravind announced the launch of Enterprise Pro version of Deep Research, which solves the more complex business, technical, and scientific analysis needs for knowledge workers. We also covered topics including open vs closed source models, the advantages of building products leveraging multiple AI models, and his personal journey as a first-time founder and CEO. Excerpts below: Regarding open source LLMs: “In today's political climate, open source models are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they allow anyone to download, fine-tune, and deploy the weights on any data center, regardless of where it came from. On the other hand, there are concerns that open source is dangerous and can fall into the wrong hands, especially if exploited by competitive countries.” – Steve “If something is really dangerous, you probably want more eyes on it, not fewer.” - Aravind "A lot of the technology that powers our phones, laptops, and the internet is built on open-source software. If it works for the foundations of the digital world, it should work for AI, too." - Aravind On building products with unique customer value and trust in mind: "Only two features really help build trust with the user: source citations and a completely transparent reasoning trace. We are the only product that actually does both." - Aravind “For enterprises handling sensitive proprietary data, trust is everything. Having an abstraction between the model and the application layer ensures data security and control–far beyond what’s written in a boilerplate terms-of-service. This is where companies like Perplexity stand out." – Steve "Everything is a wrapper at some level of abstraction. The real question is: Can you deliver real value to the end user at scale?" — Aravind Regarding AI compute and inference: "The cost of intelligence is going down 8x per year. That means serving 50x more users at the same cost. That’s a massive shift." — Aravind "Model labs are spending billions on data centers. But do you even need that much? Open-source models challenge that assumption." — Aravind What's your own personal feature request for Perplexity? “My one feature request for Perplexity is for it to incorporate all your context–the ability to answer questions around your flights, upcoming travel, meetings. It needs to have more context to become a more useful assistant. We’re working on that." - Aravind Thanks again, Mark Suster and Upfront Ventures!

It was a real treat to join so many of you at  #UpfrontSummit last week. From the in-depth conversations about the state of AI and the future of venture capital (not to mention seeing two Princes ‼️), this year’s summit had a specific throughline: innovation is full steam ahead! 👏Kudos to the Upfront Ventures team for masterfully curating the event! It’s a conference I love to attend and look forward to every year! Great to see so many friends - and make so many more. Mark Suster, Aditi Maliwal, Kobie Fuller, Andre Charoo, Annie Luchsinger, Sarah Smith, Erin Harkless Moore, CFA, Manan M., Brian Garrett, Paul Arnold, Ben Choi, Marlon C. Nichols, Barbara Piette

🚀 Behind every great startup is a journey to product-market fit—and we’re pulling back the curtain. In the latest HR Technology Trailblazers episode, Aditi Maliwal (partner at Upfront Ventures and Clair’s early investor), sits down with co-founder Nico Simko to break down Clair’s path to exponential growth. Don't miss this conversation!

Today we're announcing a HRTech Trailblazers podcast about... Clair! The host: Aditi Maliwal. Aditi has been our Seed investor, advisor, Board member for Upfront Ventures at Clair so we felt she would be the best person to help me tell our story. She took the host seat to help unveil our path to product-market-fit and exponential growth. We hope you'll enjoy it. Here's a sneak peak:

The path to AGI runs through software. Last week, Felicis founder and managing partner Aydin Senkut was onstage with Jason Warner at the Upfront Summit to discuss: 🏊 What separates poolside from other models and apps 🧑💻 How to win battles for AI talent 📦 Why great distribution partnerships are essential 🧠 What happens after we hit AGI for software Video of the discussion is coming soon! Thanks for hosting us, Kevin Zhang, Mark Suster, and the Upfront Ventures team!

Last week, Aditi Maliwal and I had a conversation about AI at the Upfront Ventures Summit. I shared a few stories, including: 1. Arcade's successes and failures with AI. This will not surprise many, but I strongly believe AI is only successful as starting with the customer need. For example, we heard for a long time as a customer request to incorporate sound into the Arcade user experience. When we built voiceover AI into our product, it was one of the most highly adopted use cases. We're about to announce something that has contributed to record number of Arcades published :) 2. Other companies' successes and failures with AI. I heard about an instance in which the customer fired the company's product because of a data error with the court date. AI is on the hook for quality, but it's only so good as the right auditing and processes. On top of that, I see success in many vertical applications seeing success here, including Jump - Advisor AI, Tennr, and many others. 3. My hot take is that "AI wrappers" companies are proving quite successful despite the skepticism from the market. One our side, we've been thoughtful about when to build vs. buy AI technologies. By "buying" and building on top of existing LLMs, it can speed up development. Competitive edge can be the datasets as well as the vertical specific use case. We're announcing a few things on this front, so stay tuned :)

The importance of help—both asking for it and providing it—cannot be understated. We saw this firsthand as the fires devastated so many in LA. However, incredible individuals like Paris Hilton and Tim Cadogan along with the GoFundMe platform, played a vital role in supporting those in need during a moment of crisis. It was a privilege to have them join the stage at Upfront Summit to share their stories—how they were personally impacted yet fully committed to helping the community, driving over a quarter of a billion dollars to those in need. The rebuilding effort is just beginning, and it’s not too late to contribute if you feel called. I know I’m just getting started! #LASTRONG Upfront Ventures