Scale Venture Partners

SDR leaders,?let's meet in person. Join the Scale Venture Partners team at our #Dreamforce GTM lounge. The lounge is open all day from 10AM to 6PM. Stop?by anytime to connect with others, do some work, or just escape the craziness of Dreamforce. Register here. https://lnkd.in/gjG_RQcF

Like AI, the field of robotics has historically belonged to research scientists and science fiction writers. With the advent of robotics foundation models, robotics is poised to follow the same path as AI, from academia to purpose-built products to broadly valuable horizontal companies. While we're still in early days, RFMs change how we can build and sell robotics by getting us closer to the holy grail: generalization in robots. With this change comes new paths to commercialization—plus some really cool tech. Read more from Juliette Chevallier on how we got here and what the future looks like for robotics in the wake of RFMs. https://lnkd.in/drbV4USR

The first cohort of generative AI applications has relied on foundation models hosted in the cloud. Javier Redondo offers insight into the next wave of innovation: on-device AI. Check out his post on The New Stack on what will take to succeed in this new era. https://lnkd.in/g6mBpqS6

Congratulations Dr Chris Mansi, CEO and co-founder of Viz.ai, for being recognized as an Innovator on the #TIME100AI!

We're excited to announce that we led Cortex's $60 million Series C! Cortex was started after a simple realization: engineering teams have no system of record. Sales teams have Salesforce. IT managers have ServiceNow. HR has Workday. Yet somehow, engineers have... spreadsheets? With their Internal Developer Portal (IDP), Cortex solves two mission-critical issues for engineering teams: centralizing the information needed to understand, operate, and build new software, and creating a culture of engineering excellence and continuous improvement. Read more from the Cortex team and from Eric Anderson on our investment at the links below.

Tune in tomorrow for Eric Anderson's perspective on investing in AI, security, and infra!

According to Ed Sim's latest newsletter, AI augmented testing tools are booming. Gartner predicts that within five years, enterprises with AI augmented testing will go from 15% to 80%!?I've been discussing this with our portfolio companies for a while. Here's what they have been saying: ?? Honeycomb CEO Charity Majors wrote a thread how LLMs challenge how we think about coding https://lnkd.in/gfmH3NZ8 ?? QA Wolf digs into how they built their?a multi-agent system for automated test maintenance?https://lnkd.in/gbAAJM8r?

We're excited to announce our investment in?Bland AI. Bland allows enterprises to securely build, test, and deploy their own AI phone calling agents. These agents, powered by Bland’s proprietary models, can hold non-scripted conversations at a human-equivalent cadence. Their Zapier-style flow builder, Pathways, allows non-technical users to build their own custom voicebots. Early customers have been thrilled by what Bland's technology can do. Read more about Bland ?

Median round size from seed to Series C has picked up again, according to analysis from Gené Teare at Crunchbase. “Valuations are slowly starting to creep up across the board. Certain sectors, like AI and security, are seeing disproportionately high valuation inflation," says Scale partner Ariel Tseitlin. "For the rest, there’s a flight to quality — companies with high growth and strong efficiency are getting bid up to a level not quite but approaching what we saw in 2020 and 2021.” Read the full article ?

SaaS businesses derive their revenue from a mix of new business, renewal, and expansion revenue. Despite these different revenue sources, sales and marketing leaders often view their pipeline as a single entity and miss key opportunities (and therefore their revenue numbers). In this edition of How we scaled this, former Scale EIR Tricia Gellman breaks down how to optimize marketing's involvement in the entire sales funnel to predictably hit revenue targets and increase deal velocity.