4 Felicis companies named top 2024 inventions + supporting the Arc Institute

As the year ends, we've been heads down and busy:

• Our annual meeting brought together LPs and founders with the broader Felicis team
• Four Felicis companies ( Canva , Runway , Column Tax , and Guardant Health ) were listed on the “Best Inventions of 2024” by TIME 
• Three Felicis companies were named Top Startups by LinkedIn News ( Tines , Midi Health , and Sona (getsona.com) )
• We shared videos of two of our founders: Kevin Hu from Metaplane and Conner Sherline from Disco
• We became a donor to The Arc Institute, a multidisciplinary biomedical science organization founded to study complex diseases like cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and immune dysfunction

News about Felicis companies

• poolside announced their $500M Series B, which we participated in after having led their Series A last year
• Wherobots raised a Series A, which we led. Felicis founder and Managing Partner Aydin Senkut and Deal Partner Gabriella G. shared why we invested, and Fortune has more about the company
• We led the seed round in Pharos to bring AI to hospital reporting, and TechCrunch wrote about the company's mission
• Third Dimension came out of stealth with a round that we led to build 3D worlds with generative models
• We led Moondream’s seed round; the company builds smaller AI models for devices at the edge; Venture Beat had the story, and Vik Khyatk shared more about their vision
• We participated in the Series C of Radiant Nuclear to build portable nuclear microreactors; General Partner Niki Pezeshki shared why
• We participated in the latest funding round of Pantheon AI — a team that’s building a generative AI platform for architects and builders
• Letta created a course on Agent Memory in partnership with DeepLearning
• Skild AI released ManipGen, a model that can help robots handle complex tasks like organizing shelves and tidying cluttered tables, just from a text input
• Astranis won a DoD contract to design next-gen resilient GPS satellites
• Runway introduced Act-One, a new way to generate expressive character performances (no motion capture required)
• KiwiCo announced crossing $1B of lifetime revenue with a great profile in Fortune
• Chris Gibson from Recursion joined the board of Cellino, another Felicis company
• MotherDuck released the prompt() function, letting their customers use the power of LLMs with SQL 

Exits

• Dedrone’s acquisition by Axon has been finalized

Felicis insights

A 5% margin improvement could blow past AI’s $600B value gap

• What if the best companies gain a 5% net margin improvement across the board thanks to AI? This could happen through automation savings, greater sales efficiency, increased productivity, and more. Aydin Senkut shares more in this thought exercise.

The agent economy

• We are entering the agent economy. AI Agents will begin to impact every industry and nearly every role.

The three components of the unstructured data stack

• General Partner Astasia Myers details how data extraction and ingestion, data processing, and data management derive value from unstructured data in the age of AI.

Recent events

• General Partner Astasia Myers spoke at KubeCon about the latest in cloud-native tech
• Partner Tobi Coker appeared onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt with Kevin Hu from Metaplane

Jobs at Felicis companies

• Letta - Founding Staff/Senior Software Engineer [SF]
• Canva - Strategic Partnerships Lead [SF]
• Notion - Head of Technical Recruiting [SF or NY]
• MotherDuck - Product Manager, Data Warehouse [Seattle]
• Vannevar Labs - Cybersecurity Researcher [Remote]