Bain Capital Ventures

Diffusion models now dominate generative AI, powering MidJourney, DALL·E, Ideogram, Stable Diffusion, and more—but just a few years ago, they were an obscure research idea. Slater Stich spoke with Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, the researcher behind the foundational 2015 paper that introduced diffusion as a generative model.

There's a saying in venture: it's great for a startup to be early, but not too early. No company has done a better job of striking that balance than Moveworks, which ServiceNow acquired today for approximately $3 billion. Thanks to Enrique Salem, Bain Capital Ventures partnered with the Moveworks founders, Bhavin Shah, Vaibhav N., Varun Singh and Jiang Chen, at Series A in 2017 (before I joined the firm). It was three years before OpenAI's GPT3 showed the potential of autoregressive models, and five years before ChatGPT. But the founding team saw genAI as the future and built ahead of its arrival. In many ways, you could call Moveworks the OG AI-app! As context, Moveworks built a "system of intelligence" for IT service management (think: IT support). Its insight was to automate the actual work being done, using AI, rather than just capturing the workflow in a system of record, like ServiceNow. That was much harder to pull off before LLMs. In those early days, Moveworks was ML-based and, through skillful design, was able to fully resolve 30-35% of tickets, which was a huge breakthrough at the time. So when LLMs came along, and it became possible to resolve 90%+ of tickets automatically, the company was perfectly placed to roll-out GenAI -- for IT support, enterprise search and more generally. Huge congrats to the entire Moveworks team! Our thanks and immense gratitude to the founders, early customer and team-member Yousuf Khan, and our friends and co-investors Arif Janmohamed at Lightspeed and Mamoon Hamid at Kleiner Perkins. More on the acquisition from Fortune and about the path to this milestone below in comments. https://lnkd.in/ggBZ_mRh

SF friends: Join BCV for an exclusive pre-release fireside chat with Patrick McGee, the author of one the most anticipated books of 2025. Review from Chip War author Chris Miller: "deeply researched, disturbing and enlightening." Details in comments.

Just returned from an incredible three days in Vegas for the inaugural HumanX conference! My biggest takeaway: businesses are looking for real solutions to real problems. The hype around AI is peaking, and enterprises don't have much patience left to see real ROI. Some highlights from conversations I had this week: - Build AND Buy: The decision is no longer build vs buy. Enterprise AI teams are looking to build custom solutions to capture differentiated value while also buying powerful platform tools to accelerate their time-to-value. - Transparency is paramount: AI will make mistakes. Enterprises need to know how to deal with those mistakes with easy-to-use checks and audit trails. - Speed is everything: No one wants to be left behind. - Hype vs reality: The pace of innovation and attention-grabbing AI announcements is overwhelming, and it's hard to keep up. Enterprises are looking for trusted partners and vendors with opinionated roadmaps that they can follow along. Thanks for having me and see you at next year's event in San Francisco! #HumanX2026

🚀 Really excited to launch #AgentX competition hosted by Berkeley RDI University of California, Berkeley alongside our LLM Agents MOOC series (a global community of 22k+ learners & growing fast). Whether you're building the next disruptive AI startup or pushing the research frontier, AgentX is your launchpad. Two tracks: - Entrepreneurship: Build agent-powered products & startups - Research: Explore the frontiers of LLM Agents technology 📅 Registration opens TODAY! Submissions due end of May 🏆 Winners showcase at our Agents Summit to industry leaders and VCs in August University of California, Berkeley! 🌟 🙏 Tremendous thanks to our incredible sponsors Amazon Hugging Face Lambda Mistral AI Google Groq Schmidt Sciences; proud to partner w. leading VCs in the space Accel Bain Capital Ventures Bessemer Venture Partners Lightspeed Mayfield New Enterprise Associates (NEA)! Stay tuned—more sponsors/partners AND exciting prizes/credits/resources info will be announced soon! 🚀 ⏰ Register now at https://lnkd.in/ec4AWFbs and join us in shaping the future of AI! #AgentX #AI 🧠 Sign up for the Advanced LLM Agents MOOC: https://lnkd.in/gu5fbk_a Join the LLM Agents MOOC Discord: https://lnkd.in/eRKbqJ8q

A lot of startups try to solve top-of-funnel problems with bottom-of-funnel tactics. What do I mean by that? A case study isn't likely to get a customer interested in you. Neither is a demo video. Same goes for most webinars. If your core problem is that no one is knocking at your door, make sure the music playing inside is very alluring. Don't: - Try to explain the product in detail - Aim to be comprehensive - Do the same things everyone else is doing Do: - Be intriguing, interesting, unique - Draw them in - Leave them wanting more You'll sell them later. Make sure they're listening first.

Last year, when Brian Curran told me he's launching an AI conference in Vegas that would to gather thousands of people, I had my doubts. I was wrong! HumanX has been a wonderful forum for exchanging ideas. Thanks to Gené Teare at Crunchbase, Cassie Young at Primary Venture Partners and Leigh Marie Braswell at Kleiner Perkins for an engaging panel discussion. Fun to meet the audience afterwards and find so many new ways people are building with AI. Also a treat to bump into so many old friends, who I don't see enough in the Bay Area. Next year, HumanX is coming to San Francisco. I'd recommend holding time on your calendars -- well worth the investment!

We welcomed Amit Zavery to Moveworks HQ, only for him to start with a twist: "Welcome to ServiceNow!" My journey at MW since 2017 has been full of excitement, challenges, and plenty of surprises. The team is still digesting the news of our acquisition. We would have never given up on the dream of ringing the NYSE bell on our own for a partner less worthy! Today, we stand hand in hand to lead the future of AI in the enterprise space. Chang Liu Ivy Wang Yi Liu Ankoor Shah Karey Shi Lucas Liu Matt Mistele Cody Kala https://lnkd.in/gfexw8q9

I’m excited to officially welcome Gary Olson as Chief Revenue Officer and Crendal Kear as Chief Business Officer to Sysdig. I’ve had the pleasure of working with both Gary and Crendal in the past at several companies, including Zscaler, and I know firsthand the experience, leadership, and customer-first mindset they bring to the table. Gary’s deep expertise in building high-performing revenue teams, combined with Crendal’s proven ability to scale global operations and align teams around customer outcomes, will help position Sysdig for our next phase of growth. With the rapid adoption of Sysdig Sage™, the expansion of our global install base, and continued innovation across our platform, this is an exciting time for Sysdig, our customers, and the broader cloud security community. As we continue to scale globally, having the right leadership in place to drive customer success and operational excellence is critical. Please join me in welcoming Gary and Crendal to the Sysdig team! https://lnkd.in/gV7zxzCF

A few thoughts on early-stage AE compensation planning. Many of BCV's talented founders and sales execs like Evan Cassidy, Chloe Ho, Justin Liu, and Sophia Goldberg are designing comp plan for their early AE cohorts; from conversations with them and others, we put together this quick guide (h/t to Annie Clark, our design lead I am lucky to call a colleague).