Fly Ventures

Patience and the Power Law. From Seed to a $1.05 billion Series C. Our team at Fly Ventures co-led the Seed of Wayve back in 2017 together with Compound. This was at a time where someone opening a call with “AI in cars needs to reason when it’s not sure about something” (yes, that was you Amar) and Alex Kendall speaking about his SegNet paper would make most VCs leave the room. The Wayve team met many VCs in London. Everyone could see that they are brilliant but very few people were ready to make a bet. Today Wayve announced their $1.05 billion Series C led by SoftBank with contribution from NVIDIA and Microsoft. For our small €35M Fly Fund I, this is the Power Law at work. Many VCs, LPs, and researchers love to pontificate about the Power Law on LinkedIn or Medium posts, et al. What gets a lot less coverage is the Patience it requires. It takes a long time to achieve technical breakthroughs. OpenAI was started in 2015, not with the release of ChatGPT in 2022. Wayve was founded in 2017 and only now can deliver an Embodied AI product for production vehicles. If you are embarking on a 7 year “overnight success”, a true hard problem at inception stage, we are always happy to speak gabriel@fly.vc  Links and the many people we have to thank for this in comments.

Massive congrats to team 9fin for their Series B with Highland Europe! We at Fly Ventures got to partner with Steven and Huss back in 2019 and have seen them grow from success to success - while staying away from all the startup noise. Special thanks to my friend Marie Wennergren for sourcing and co-leading our investment at the time. I'm thrilled to finally be on a cap table with the fabulous Irena Goldenberg and Fergal Mullen. Congratulations as well to the other early backers: Seedcamp, redalpine, Spark Capital.

We’re thrilled to announce that NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, has invested in Orbital to advance materials and #climate technologies with #AI. With this milestone, we’ll continue to develop the building blocks of transformational technologies, including better advanced materials for carbon removal, semiconductors and catalysts. Learn more about this investment and how it will help us continue to push the frontier of engineering at the atomic scale at the link below: https://lnkd.in/eJNcJBWy

Incredibly excited to have partnered up with Citi Ventures as part of Lakera's Series A this summer and work with Nick Sands, Matt Carbonara ✅, Blaze O'Byrne, and Avi Arnon on bringing enterprise security to GenAI. Read more about our partnership here: https://lnkd.in/dJCbgMCR Eddy Louchart, Ph.D Sasha Vidiborskiy Harald Nieder Gabriel Matuschka Gianmaria Sbetta

🌟 Binary Stars is Back! 🌟 For those who missed the first edition with Harm de Vries, Paul Lasserre, and Léo Dreyfus-Schmidt, Binary Stars is our virtual conference dedicated to the latest Software Engineering and AI advancements in Europe. For this second edition, we're super happy to partner with Antoine Moyroud (Lightspeed), Roosh Circle, and AI HOUSE to explore AI reasoning in depth. 🧠 AI REASONING 🧠 With Zachary Gleicher (Deepmind), Rolf Pfister (Lab42, supporting the ARC Prize), and a yet-to-be-revealed third speaker, we'll ask the big questions : - What’s objectively achievable by the best AI models regarding reasoning? - Are we stuck with LLMs making basic errors (how many Rs in Strawberry?), or are breakthroughs on the horizon? - While benchmark performances have improved, has reasoning *genuinely* advanced? - What did the Transformer architecture contribute to reasoning problems, and have we reached its limits? - What are the main research avenues pushing reasoning forward today? ... Join us on Nov 8th: register on binarystars.org!

💾 The AI Software Engineer Part 2 is out! What can you expect? 👩💻 We will use four simple examples to display the current limitations of LLMs, preventing them from generating software from a prompt. 🚧 We’ll discuss three main obstacles in the path toward a model-centric approach 🏔 We'll look at the two ways people are tackling this challenge (full mega model and hybrid) 🏅 We'll have a look at the current contenders 🔗 Link: https://lnkd.in/egRxu3A3 This is a super interesting space on the edge of research, if you too are researching it, let me know, and let's exchange!

😅 After dedicating over 50 hours to research, I'm excited to share the results of our deep dive into the intersection of AI and software engineering. 🤖 We'll discuss GitHub Copilot, StarCoder, Devin, Magic, Ring attention, ..., and why I’m betting on a hybrid approach to win this problem space. 🔗 Link: https://lnkd.in/e94bbpUW Thanks to all the people who were patient enough to educate me. This is such a cool problem space, if you care about it from the technical or investing perspective, add a comment so we can chat, I'd love to keep learning

Patience and Rewards: Thrilled to see the $20M Series A at Lakera announced. We had the opportunity to partner with David, Matthias, Mateo in 2021. Lakera is on an important mission as we enter the phase of enterprise deployments in GenAI. The team started working on AI Safety in 2016 - before these two terms were used in conjunction by almost anyone. Their reward today is having the best product in this space globally. As part of their Series A fundraise, the founders also overcame one of the wildest experiences in European venture land I could have ever imagined. For those involved, you know who you are and your reward is that this will be remembered. The team emerged from this stronger and with the best possible partners for their Series A. Welcome to the awesome team Atomico, Citi, Dropbox.

Exciting times for Evidently AI !

💾 The AI Software Engineer Part 2 is out! What can you expect? 👩💻 We will use four simple examples to display the current limitations of LLMs, preventing them from generating software from a prompt. 🚧 We’ll discuss three main obstacles in the path toward a model-centric approach 🏔 We'll look at the two ways people are tackling this challenge (full mega model and hybrid) 🏅 We'll have a look at the current contenders 🔗 Link: https://lnkd.in/egRxu3A3 This is a super interesting space on the edge of research, if you too are researching it, let me know, and let's exchange!