Vertex Ventures US

The future of observability is predictive, not reactive. 💥 I sat down with Rob Strechay and Paul Nashawaty at theCUBE SiliconANGLE Media to break down the biggest shifts in software infrastructure from Day 1 at KubeCon London 🇬🇧: 🚀 AI is disrupting platform engineering - The rise of the AI engineering is reshaping developer workflows (h/t Gitpod, Northflank) 🏗 Enterprises are standardizing data infra - Iceberg, S3, and vertically, OTel are becoming the norm for better control, lower costs, and AI-ready foundations. 🔍 Observability is evolving fast - We’re meeting lots of new companies in London helping shape where it’s going next RunWhen, Dash0, Parity (YC S24), Phoebe, SigNoz, Axiom ++ At Vertex Ventures US we’re laser-focused on infra founders building in these spaces. If you're working on this, let’s chat. 📩

Highly recommend coming to Founders You Should Know's NYC showcase featuring Dominic Vitucci from SPRX!

Don't miss Grace Gong's great interview from Tuesday morning with Vertex investor Simon Tiu on the future of AI agents, the secrets of M&A, and how AI is upending enterprise software. Watch below:

When you're building something really cool, it's only natural that you want to tell everybody. But as Phillip Liu, CEO of Trustero, warns in this new video: Innovation takes time, and it's often better to stay in stealth mode until your product is truly ready to be marketed. Watch more: #founders #startups #startupadvice #marketing

Last week, Vertex Ventures US and CreatorsCorner co-hosted a hackathon for enterprise AI agents. First, thanks to everyone who participated: 48 self-organized teams presented their multimodal AI agents to our panel of volunteer judges, competing for over $50,000 worth of prizes from our generous sponsors, including Google, Windsurf, and Cloudflare (which graciously also made its headquarters available for the event). In this week’s newsletter, Vertex's Simon Tiu recaps the event, and what he learned by being surrounded by so many inspiring AI builders. #ai #aihackathon #aiagents #startups #founders

Friends often ask me something like, "Hey, I have this AI startup idea. Do you think it's a good one?" Here's a simple framework to help systematically identify fertile ground for AI-native startups. I call it the Critical Frequency Matrix. Big thanks to everyone who provided thoughtful input along the way. A special shout out to Haley (Muhlestein) Tiu, Sam Bhagwat, Mustafa Neemuchwala, In Sik Rhee, Jerry Ting and Erasmus Elsner who kindly suffered through multiple drafts and challenged me to think more rigorously about what makes AI-native startups truly compelling -- your comments have been invaluable!

In a new blog post, Vertex investor Simon Tiu / addresses a surprising roadblock to modern startup creation: In an era when AI seems to make everything possible, it can be challenging to choose to do…anything. That’s why Simon presents the Critical Frequency Matrix, his framework for thinking about identifying the right problems to solve at the right time. It’s a matter of identifying the intersection of what a business needs and what current technology can support, in the name of finding hidden AI opportunities deep within enterprise workflows. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/g4jD7q_A #ai #artificialintelligence

Last month I attended a Machine Learning event at Microsoft where I had the pleasure of hearing Simon Tiu speak about the evolving economy of agentic AI. Simon expertly condensed complex information (from business models, risks, scalability and etc) into a well organized presentation, discussing the shift from the #SaaS business model to #agent_based models, potential charging mechanisms, integrations, and much more. I was Impressed by his insights, so I approached him after his talk, and he generously agreed to join our upcoming event in April. Simon will deliver a keynote on the topic of agentic AI, diving into how venture capitalists view the current dynamics and their investment strategies. Don’t miss this opportunity. Register for the event using the Luma link below: https://lnkd.in/gFZ-ZUF6

The brightest infra minds in NYC took over Datadog HQ last night to debate some of the hardest systems challenges that are still unsolved today 🚀 Is Spark's reign about to fall? DataFusion and Ray could be its killer 🧨 We heard from three incredible speakers dropping 🔥 insights: ⚡ Sesh Nalla (Datadog) – DataFusion and Ray vs. Spark… 6x performance improvements?! 🤯 Get involved here https://lnkd.in/d8hkC9nc (h/t Robert Tandy) ⚡ Stephanie Wang (MongoDB) – The curious case of OOM kills… and, in perfect timing, another talk’s demo OOM’d 😂 ⚡ Josh Ferge (Sentry) – Embeddings similarity search in production—putting real ML features into production to improve core alerts💡 If you're leading eng teams, scaling complex systems, or building an infra startup, you need to be in this room next time. Sign up: https://lnkd.in/dPD3buAf

In this week's Vertex Angles newsletter, Simon Tiu tells the story of Google Translate -- and how it proves that when it comes to building complex AI systems, scale will trump human expertise every time. Read more below: #AI #artificialintelligence #startups #startupadvice #venturecapital