Bain Capital Ventures

🗓️ Book a meeting with our leadership or technical teams to learn more about next-gen AI for software engineering → poolside.ai/reinvent

Slush last week was such a special, unique experience. Picture all of the good vibes and earnestness of the U.S. tech world of 15 years ago meshed with the dark, industrial aesthetic of the European club scene as 12,000 guests met, mingled, pitched and sauna'd. Saanya Ojha shared her insights on growth stage investing on a panel (notes on her page), and I prioritized meeting with a number of early stage martech founders. I also met up with fellow Mixing Board member Colin Crowell for drinks while slush was quite literally pouring out of the sky. When in Finland, it seemed a shame not to see the country a bit, so I tacked on two days up front in Lapland and was able to see the Northern Lights just in the nick of time before the 2nd night was over. It feels far for U.S. teams to attend Slush, but as a student-led show that has grown into one of the biggest tech conferences in Europe, I highly recommend it. It's extremely well-run and a great way to meet with the who's who in European startups in a compact few days.

Imagine: You're sitting around the table enjoying a family holiday meal and fully present during the conversations, merriment and memory-making. Meanwhile, an #AIAgent is actively shopping for you -- finding and securing all the #BlackFriday deals within reach (& budget). Sounds too good to be true, right? Good news: It's not a dream, it's becoming reality. BCV's Scott Friend unpacks why #Commerce x AI Agents = the ‘Agentic Commerce Era’

Wed., Dec. 4th 12 - 1 pm: Reflections from an Engineer, Entrepreneur, Public Company CEO & Venture Capitalist Join the MIT Sloan Alumni Club of New York Mind and Hand speaker series on Wednesday, December 4th from 12 - 1 p.m. ET as we welcome Noah Breslow, Operating Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, to draw upon his extensive experiences as an engineer, startup founder, public company CEO and venture capitalist to share lessons learned and his vision for the future. Learn more and register: https://lnkd.in/etiJBWQp #venturecapital #startup #IPO #mitsloan #VirtualEvent

#Startups at 50 employees or less typically employ recruiting & #HR generalists. Cool. But somewhere between employee 50 & employee 300, it’s time to hire your first People leader. Bain Capital Ventures' Leslie Crowe & Laura Hilton offer a handy map for #founders & startup leaders in #hiring mode👇💼👍 (full POV in comments)

Last week, we launched a new BCV Labs initiative, AI Research Roundtables. During the event, we read and discussed MLE-Bench, a paper released by OpenAI this past October. This paper evaluates how well AI agents perform on 75 MLE-related Kaggle competitions using different frontier models and open sourced agent scaffoldings. It also examines eval results given different forms of resource scaling and potential pre-training data contamination. AI agents that can autonomously solve ML-related challenges can lead to significant accelerations in LLM agent capabilities (even enabling them to recursively self-improve) so careful understanding of model progress is critical to deploying safe models. We were joined by one of the authors, Neil Chowdhury, for a discussion with a group that included folks across research / product / engineering at Harvey, Scale AI, Databricks, Anyscale, New Computer, Bedrock Security, Crux, Uber, DoorDash, Salesforce and more. Neil was previously a MTS on OpenAI’s preparedness team and a researcher at MIT CSAIL. He’s currently a founding member of Transluce, an independent non-profit research lab. You can check out some of his recent work on automated capability elicitation of language models here: https://lnkd.in/g-yMBN_W Following our launch and spirited discussion with Neil, we will be bringing research-minded folks together once a month to discuss a relevant AI/ML paper with one of the authors joining for an open discussion. The goal is to create a space for people to exchange ideas on the implications of the paper’s findings for both research and commercial settings. This event would not have been possible without my lovely cohost, Amy Deng. Amy was previously a MLE at Martian, and currently a ML research engineer at METR, a nonprofit research lab focused on model safety. If you’re a builder or researcher interested in joining one of these roundtables in the future, please reach out to me or William Eleazer (another key person behind the success of this event)! 

Halcyon Closes $100M Series C Funding Round at $1 Billion Valuation Halcyon closed a $100M in Series C funding led by Evolution Equity Partners with participation from Bain Capital (BCV), SYN Ventures, Harmony Partners, Corner Capital Management, Dropbox Ventures, ServiceNow Ventures and existing investors. Halcyon is the only organization devoted specifically to defeating #ransomware through a unique combination of prevention and resilience by way of a proprietary technology that captures encryption keys and enables organizations to recover from attacks in minutes without ever paying ransoms. The round brings the total amount raised to $190M and values the company at $1B. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gvT7Mnvc #infosec #security #cybersecurity #cyberattack

Announcing Cafe Compute: Holiday Edition 🎄 We are back by popular demand! Round 2 of SF's only late-night, pop-up coffeeshop with a free coffee cart, hot chocolate bar, and more. Come co-work or hangout! Who's in? https://lu.ma/kz8sb9bf Presented by the Cerebras Systems and Bain Capital Ventures fellows program.

Last week, I had the privilege of speaking at Slush, where Helsinki’s snow turned the city into a literal slush fest—a fitting metaphor for the current state of growth investing. Messy, slippery, but still charged with opportunity if you know how to navigate. 🌨️ I had the chance to sit down with Frederic Court from Felix Capital and Alex Lim from IVP to discuss the state of the growth markets, where we unpacked where we’ve been and charted what’s next. The energy at the event was electric—founders, investors, and operators refusing to let a little snow (or a lot of market uncertainty) dampen their drive. 3 key takeaways I shared with the audience: 1️⃣ Growth markets are finding their footing. The pandemic boom, followed by a rapid cooldown, left us in uncharted territory. Now, we’re seeing signs of normalization and a return to activity. Growth is back—but it’s disciplined, not reckless. 2️⃣ The 2021 hangover isn’t over. For companies that raised at sky-high valuations, the reckoning continues. There are three doors ahead for these businesses: 🚪Door 1: Down rounds. Tough, but survivable. Data shows ~20% of priced US rounds on Carta this year have been down rounds—double the historical average. 🚪Door 2: Acquisition. Sometimes a soft landing, sometimes an exit at a fraction of the dream. 🚪Door 3: Shutdown. Brutal, but inevitable for those who can’t find product-market fit or sustainable unit economics. 3️⃣ Eyes on the exits. Private market investors are watching public markets like hawks. ServiceTitan's S-1 filing last week is a beacon—if they nail their IPO next month, it could signal a path forward for others in 2024. A win for one is a win for many. As we close out the year, I’m cautiously optimistic. Growth investing may feel as messy as navigating Helsinki in a snowstorm, but the path is becoming clearer. With the right perspective, this period of recalibration could set the stage for extraordinary things.

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