- Gradient
- Posts
- Gradient February Roundup
Gradient February Roundup
Hello! Lots of exciting news from the portfolio and our team – let’s get into it:
Recent Funding
Venn gets $15 million in fresh funding to expand its all-in-one financial platform for Canadian businesses (Axios)
Patlytics raises $14 million for its AI-powered patent technology (TechCrunch)
CTGT lands $7.2 million to help enterprises build AI they can trust (Business Insider)
Firstwork raises $5 million to revolutionize frontline workforce management (Axios)
Portfolio Spotlights
Lambda co-founder and CEO, Stephen Balaban discusses the growing demand for AI infrastructure on Bloomberg:
Gradient in the news
Eylul Kayin discusses investing in AI startups with TechCrunch
Featured Blogs
Market Perspectives
What Does it Take to Win in Enterprise AI?
Cloud rewrote the enterprise software playbook. Now, AI is doing the same – but faster. In Gradient Partner, Eylul Kayin’s first post in a three-part series, she shares key insights from our portfolio companies and the market on building and scaling AI applications for the enterprise. She explores why complexity isn't always your friend in enterprise AI solutions, how the "Forward Deployed" model is making a comeback (and why that's a good thing), why being first-to-market isn't enough in the AI era, and how successful companies are navigating the reliability challenge in enterprise AI. We're seeing a fundamental shift in how AI companies need to approach building for and selling to the enterprise. The winners won't just have access to the best models, they'll excel at translating abstract use cases into production-grade solutions that deliver real business value.
Investment Theses
Our Investment in CTGT
Despite the promise in introducing foundational models across an enterprise software stack, studies have shown that 91% of enterprises don’t feel very prepared to do so responsibly and 71% of senior IT leaders are concerned with generative AI safety risks. Some undesired outcomes for foundation model response generation can potentially be gated with guardrails, firewalls, and prompt engineering toolkits but the combination of interpretability and control presents an exciting opportunity to invoke a new first line of defense. A second problem that interpretability could help with is in reducing the compute cost for models which 63% of executives cite in a recent study as a top concern during adoption.
We were fortunate to meet Cyril Gorlla and Trevor Tuttle at last year’s PyTorch conference. They shared with us details on the research they had been doing at UC San Diego inspired by the path forged in model interpretability. Their newly formed company CTGT had started to build a model toolkit to customize, train, and deploy AI models in a safe and cost effective manner. The team has made significant progress as we’ve known them and have landed enterprise customers who rely on CTGT software to leverage Foundation Models within their organization.
Our Investment in Concierge: Unifying Tool Fragmentation through its AI Assistant
Most knowledge work today is fragmented across countless SaaS tools. We’ve grown to accept constant context switching and manual effort to complete simple tasks. Need to follow up with a prospect? That means bouncing between CRM, old email threads, Slack conversations, and maybe an internal team wiki. Want to create a new feature ticket? That requires diving into API docs, past engineering discussions, and project management platforms. Concierge is the first connected AI assistant that can read and write to users’ favorite SaaS apps in real-time. Concierge talks to various tools (like Gmail, Jira, Notion, Slack, Linear, Confluence, Hubspot, Attio, or Google Drive), conducts deep research on the web, and leverages customizable "skills" to craft the perfect deliverable for users. We can finally delegate complex tasks to AI.
Our Investment in Firstwork: Workforce Ops for the Industries that Keep the World Moving
We’re thrilled to announce our investment in Firstwork, a company that’s tackling the chaos of frontline workforce management with the kind of efficiency that makes you wonder how we ever survived without it. At the heart of Firstwork’s approach is a simple but powerful belief: well-designed components build well-designed systems. Every feature, every module, and every line of code is crafted with precision and purpose, ensuring that the platform isn’t just functional but smart, scalable, and resilient.
What we’re reading
Simple test-time scaling (arxiv)
Portfolio opportunities
Benepass is on the hunt for a Design Lead who is eager to play a pivotal role in building the product’s future. Apply here.
CentML is looking for a highly-driven Enterprise Account Executive to join its sales team. Apply here.
Collective wants a Senior Software Engineer who will be a key player in building their product and internal system. Apply here.
Gigs is hiring a Founders Associate to the CEO who will help scale the company post-Series B. Apply here.
See you next month!
Gradient