Ascend

Eleven Ascend portfolio companies earned a spot on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of Pacific Northwest startups. The region continues to be a major engine for innovation, and the data backs it up. Thanks to GeekWire for tracking the momentum. Congrats: Overland AI, Wrench, Inc., WhyLabs, Outbound AI, Crowd Cow, Vouched, Taqtile, Yoodli AI Roleplays, Groundlight AI, Recurrent, and avante!

I've been editing "Token Talk" by Thomas Stahura for Ascend. Each week, he distills AI trends from a hacker lens. This week’s focus, in part, was looking at vision bottlenecks. AI agents process language with precision but struggle with the ability to see. Vision-language models (VLMs) should bridge the gap, yet they sometimes fail at something as simple as clicking an icon. Current general models can describe what they see but lack the spatial precision to interact with interfaces reliably. Here's how Thomas explains the problem: "Vision is another bottleneck. For example, if an agent decides it needs to open the Firefox browser to get online, it first needs to move the mouse to the Firefox icon, which means it needs to see and understand the user interface (UI). Thankfully, we have vision-language models (VLMs) for this. The thing is, these VLMs, while they can caption an image, do not understand the precise icon location well enough to provide pixel perfect x and y coordinates. At least not yet to any reliable degree." To prove it, he ran a VLM pointing competition, testing GPT-4o, Sonnet-3.5, Moondream 2, Llama 3.3 70B, and Molmo 7B. The results confirm that AI’s vision remains imprecise in many cases, limiting its ability to interact autonomously. :-) Check out the full blog here and subscribe: https://lnkd.in/gBJdtUvt

Startup founders flush with fresh cash face a whirlwind of priorities — milestones to hit, engineers to hire, and a product to build and polish. But a practical, often overlooked question looms: where should that cash live, and who can be trusted to manage it? To get answers, we spoke with Minh, Managing Director at Stifel Bank and a veteran startup banker in Seattle. With two decades of tech banking experience, he has guided startups from their earliest funding rounds to successful IPOs. Along the way, he’s been a trusted advisor, securing lines of credit to help companies navigate turbulent times. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/gXDYGzkQ

Today, Ascend is excited to announce our investment in Oumi, an open-source AI platform. Venrock led the $10M Seed round, joined by Plug and Play Tech Center and Obvious Ventures. AI is at a crossroads. Proprietary systems like OpenAI’s $500B Stargate initiative are driving the industry toward closed ecosystems, centralizing resources and limiting access. Even so-called “open-source” efforts like DeepSeek and Llama fall short, offering open weights but withholding essential elements like training pipelines, preprocessing code, and data provenance — key to reproducibility and innovation. A step-change is needed to redefine what open-source AI can and should be. Oumi is tackling this challenge by building a fully open-source platform for large foundation models that spans the entire AI development lifecycle: data preprocessing, pretraining, fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment. With complete access to every component, Oumi empowers researchers and developers to collaborate and innovate without restrictions. Oumi has partnered with 13+ universities, engaged 36 AI researchers, and built a team of 10 top-tier builders to bring its vision to life. As DeepSeek and Moondream AI shows us, the economics of AI development have shifted significantly. GPU arbitrage, open frameworks, and pre-trained models have slashed barriers for new entrants. Fast followers can achieve frontier-level model performance without relying on the deep pockets of the early movers. Our conviction in Oumi stems from conversations with CEO Emmanouil (Manos) Koukoumidis, who combines leadership experience at hyperscalers like Google, Meta, and Microsoft with academic excellence as an MIT and Princeton PhD. Open collaboration at this scale demands technical brilliance and strong leadership. He's joined by Oussama Elachqar and seven exceptional co-founders — a rare team to back on day one. Kirby and I write more thoughts in our blog, linked in comments. :-)

On the heels of OpenAI's Stargate announcement, Thomas writes about model scale and the promise and perils of decentralized compute. This is the latest edition of Token Talk, a new weekly bite-size blog on all things AI. https://lnkd.in/g7s_35AP

Matthew Achak built a $140M business selling services to Silicon Valley startup heavyweights. He has tips on how founders selling into startups can achieve growth, as well as outlooks on the future of customer service in the age of AI. Really excited for this Ascend AMA, moderated by Kirby — and it's open to everyone. Spend your lunch with us on Wednesday: noon to 1PM. See you soon :-) Register here: https://lu.ma/1pinmheb

Ascend is sponsoring HumanX, the premier AI conference for business leaders, at Fontainebleau Las Vegas, March 10-13. With nine tracks, 300+ expert speakers, and countless opportunities to connect — the 3-day marathon is stacked. To name a few speakers I'm excited to see present: Vinod Khosla, Founder at Khosla Ventures Kevin Weil, CPO at OpenAI Arthur Mensch, CEO at Mistral AI Sarah Guo, Founder at Conviction Sheila Gulati, Managing Director at Tola Capital Come say hi at VentureConnect Meeting Pod 1. Kirby, Jen, Thomas, and I would love to hear your thoughts on the future of AI and tell you what we’re building at Ascend. Hope to see a strong Seattle AI presence in Vegas. ☔🔥☔ For discounted tix, use our code hx25_ascendvc for $250 off. Here’s our link: https://lnkd.in/gFSaKCmZ

Join us for an AMA with Matthew Achak, former co-founder of FCR, a top provider of outsourced customer support for tech companies, and now Principal and Co-founder at Non-Linear Venture Partners. Matthew will share his journey, insights on scaling businesses, the evolution of customer service, and how AI is reshaping the industry. Bring your questions, and sign up here! Link: https://lu.ma/1pinmheb

🤖🤖🤖☔️🔥☔️🤖🤖🤖 happy new year to all Seattle AI founders, and the local and global investors who back em! here’s 100+ of our favorites in our brand new (and afaik the most comprehensive extant) Seattle AI market map from Nate Bek …

🚨🚨🚨 founders: Jonathan Becker has spent $4 billion on performance marketing. When top VC firms need help lighting a fire for their portfolio companies, they call Jonathan. His agency, Thrive Digital, has helped companies like Uber, Asana, Square, and Coinbase achieve escape velocity. We're incredibly stoked to host Jonathan for a no holds barred AMA at 12pm PT Wednesday October 30. We're opening this up to all founders, not just our portfolio. You won't be sorry you spent your lunch hour with us - it might just unlock your next phase of growth. Sign up link below in comments! KW