Wing Venture Capital

In my role as a partner with Wing Venture Capital, I've been hosting some phenomenal dinners across the country with CIOs, CISOs, and other senior technology executives. The conversations we've had about the challenges and opportunities in today's tech landscape, and the influence of AI, have been eye-opening. It occurred to me that some of what comes up during these conversations might be interesting to my broader network. So to that end - and in full compliance with Chatham House Rule - I’m planning to share here some anonymized things I’ve heard over the last few months. One quote that stuck with me recently came from a CIO who said: *** "We’re all focused on AI for driving more productivity. But if AI can eliminate a lot of manual, boring work, no one is talking about how that improves the employee experience so much that we can avoid losing talent. That’s a big enough benefit to really factor into the ROI for these tools!" *** This sparked a lively discussion about how the many second-order effects of AI transforming the workplace. It isn't just about efficiency in the jobs we do today, but also how that changes individual employee experiences, the relationship between technology and business teams, and the totally new roles that will emerge in the coming months and years. In the coming days, I'll share some of the other insights I’ve heard at these events, and hope they kick off some conversation here. To get it started: IT and security leaders, how has an AI-driven technology made your job a little more delightful in the last year? P.S. thanks for playing photographer, Andrea Farris!

I was lucky enough to invest in Voyage AI along with Fusion Fund. Voyage AI just raised $28M in Series-A led by CRV, with continued support from Wing Venture Capital and Conviction. Also, both Snowflake and Databricks came in as strategic investors. tl;dr - - Voyage builds #embedding and #reranking models tailored to specific domains, such as coding, finance, legal, and multilingual applications. - These have best-in-class retrieval accuracy, which maximizes the end-to-end response quality of #RAG systems. - Over the past year, the company has acquired 250 customers, including Harvey, Vanta, Replit, and SK Telecom. - Anthropic recommends Voyage AI's embedding models by default. - Founded by Stanford professor Tengyu Ma in 2023, Voyage has about a dozen employees. When both Databricks *and* Snowflake want to invest in you, you know you are building something unique! Congratulations to Tengyu Ma and the Voyage AI crew!

Thrilled to announce that AirOps has raised $15.5M in Series A funding! 🚀🚀🚀 Together with Alex Halliday, Matt Hammel, and our amazing team, we’re on a mission to help marketers turn their most ambitious ideas into massive growth outcomes. The world of growth has changed, and this funding marks a pivotal moment for us to double down and scale even bigger. Huge thanks to our investors—Unusual Ventures, Wing Venture Capital, Founder Collective, Xfund, and Alt Capital—for believing in our vision. Most importantly, to our amazing team: your dedication and hard work make everything we do possible, and I couldn’t be more grateful to be on this journey with you. This is just the beginning, and I can’t wait to see how we’ll continue to empower marketers to bring AI-driven growth to the core of their business. Onward and upward!

It's an honor working with Alex Halliday, Matt Hammel, Berna Gonzalez and the rest of the AirOps team. We (Wing Venture Capital) led the seed round and are excited to work with Sandhya Hegde at the Series A and beyond. AirOps is growing ~10x y/y and defining a new category of AI-powered growth tools focused initially on content marketing. Customers love the product and are expanding rapidly. AirOps has helped another company I work closely with, Deepgram, massively scale their organic traffic growth and SEO. No brainer to double down in the Series A. Watch this company!

We have exciting news to share! AirOps has raised $15.5 million in Series A funding to help marketers turn moonshot strategies into massive growth. This milestone is a testament to everyone in the AirOps community. We're excited to use this funding to continue improving AirOps, developing powerful new features to help you turn your most ambitious moonshots into incredible growth. A massive thank you to the investors who've backed us on this journey: led by Unusual Ventures, and including Wing Venture Capital, Founder Collective, Xfund, Alt Capital, and angel investors Lauryn Motamedi (Isford), David Rogier, and JD Ross. It's been an incredible journey! We've had an amazing year of growth, but nothing inspires us more than seeing ambitious marketers bring their boldest ideas to life on our platform. Last but not least, a massive shoutout to our team for their dedication in helping customers succeed every day! We are just getting warmed up. Read more about our vision and what's next in our announcement post (link in the comments).

AirOps has raised a $15.5 million Series A, lead Sandhya Hegde at Unusual Ventures, to help marketers turn their boldest, most ambitious ideas into massive growth outcomes. Over the past year, growth and marketing leaders have leveraged AirOps to achieve what was once thought impossible in organic channels. Their ambitions and successes inspire us daily, and we're excited to use this funding to help more of you bring AI-powered growth strategies to core of your business. We're at a pivotal moment. At OpenAI Dev Day this week, it was clear to all that models are reaching a tipping point—evolving into increasingly powerful and autonomous systems—the leverage available to the most creative minds has never been greater and is about to 10x. Disruptive moments like these bring both anxiety and excitement, but they also open doors to immense opportunities for those who lean in and have the right tools. After 15 years in startups—from MasterClass to Bungalow—part of me wishes I were building growth teams right now. But I'm even more thrilled to be creating the tools that empower those teams to reach their full potential. A massive thank you to everyone in the AirOps community, our incredible team, and the investors who've backed us on this journey: the whole team at Unusual Ventures, Zachary DeWitt at Wing Venture Capital, Micah Rosenbloom at Founder Collective, Patrick and Brandon at Xfund, Jack Altman at Alt Capital, and angel investors Lauryn Motamedi (Isford), David Rogier, Hillary Bush and JD Ross. We're just getting started, and I can't wait to see what you'll build on AirOps. Article below.

Congrats Alex Halliday, Matt Hammel, Berna Gonzalez and the entire AirOps team! 🎉🎉 https://lnkd.in/eihPAqQG

I love working with Tengyu Ma and the Voyage AI team. Tengyu is a special talent who is one of the leading minds in AI. Voyage is building world-class embeddings models and rerankers that significantly improve retrieval accuracy for AI systems. We (Wing Venture Capital) co-led the seed with Sarah Guo (Conviction) and are doubling down in the Series A alongside Murat Bicer (CRV).

Breakdown of OpenAI and Anthropic's revenue. OpenAI is ~5x larger than Anthropic, but the API revenue is much closer between the two, while OpenAI's ChatGPT is much bigger than Anthropic's Claude. Full piece with more details here: https://lnkd.in/eJ_2xi7C

We are thrilled to announce the close of Billables AI's $3.9m seed round, with participation from a leading group of VCs and AI expert investors in Silicon Valley. While this is a great milestone, what’s even more exciting is what this funding helps us accomplish. “How will you use this investment?”, you ask? Let me break it down with a handy lil’ acronym - C.R.E.A.M. (😉): Cultivating more advancements in AI including more personalization to make your billable reports yours. Releasing more integrations to help firms streamline their workflows. Enhancing our user-first, design-driven experience to deliver the most beautiful timesheets you ever did see. Adding more productivity features including reporting and budgeting tools. Maximizing our presence in market. If I’ve already been annoying you to date, just you wait (and apologies in advance). --------------- Thank you to our investors at Wing Venture Capital, f7 Ventures, SignalFire, Alumni Ventures, Darkmode Ventures, our partner law firms… and of course, The Wu-Tang Clan.