What’s 🔥 in Enterprise IT/VC #417
What happens when hundreds of thousands of agents with read/write access run amok in an enterprise - "like hornets fleeing a nest" according to Bill McDermott
I always ❤️ spending time in the bay area with friends, portfolio company founders, and new startups. After each visit I return energized, simply 🔥 up about the future. This past week, every conversation I had ended up with a focus on one central theme - AGENTS.
From large strategics to F500s to startups - that’s all folks were talking about. It’s not just that we are getting started with the agentic revolution, but also we need to think about the second order effects when you have 100 to 1000 agents for every employee. How do you manage, deploy, and secure them at scale? There is a whole ton of infrastructure that will need to be rebuilt to provide dynamic access at scale and to monitor and manage heterogenous bots running around an enterprise.
Funnily enough as I was reading ServiceNow’s earnings call this morning, here’s Bill McDermott talking about this exact topic. FWIW, I don’t see ServiceNow being that platform to manage these bots.
Bill further adds:
As an aside, one reason we don’t see many 🦄’s going public now is because public investors can buy at scale public companies like ServiceNow which grew 23.5% YoY, has a strong AI story, and is delivering the Rule of 50 (growth + profitability). That’s an insanely high bar for many privates to warrant going public and having investors excited about growth.
Continuing this agent theme, I’ve been fortunate enough to have a front row seat in the rapid evolution of agentic workflows since my firm boldstart led the Inception round for CrewAI back in February of this year. For those who don’t know, CrewAI is the leading multi-agent platform that allows enterprises to easily build, deploy, monitor, and iterate teams of agents. 100,000,000+ multiagent crews already run on the platform. I have not seen an adoption curve 📈 like this in my 28 years of investing. This week was a huge week for CrewAI as it made several huge announcements.
First, there’s no better way to learn about agents and more specifically teams of agents doing work autonomously then by taking the second free course from Andrew Ng and CrewAI.
Secondly, CrewAI also announced that it recently raised $18M of total funding with a Series A led by Insight Partners and an Inception round led by my firm boldstart ventures. Other investors included Craft Ventures, Blitz Ventures, Earl Grey Capital and influential leaders like Dharmesh Shah and Andrew Ng.
This excerpt from TechCrunch gives you an idea of the growth and of some of the real production use cases for agents.
To its credit, CrewAI, which is currently valued at around $100 million, has managed to attract a sizable number of customers — 150 — in its first year. (CrewAI launched in January.) And it’s angling to land more with Enterprise Cloud, a new managed subscription plan.
Built on top of open source components CrewAI has released over the past year, Enterprise Cloud provides additional access controls and analytics to help secure and audit automations. Subscribers also get “VIP” support and templates for workflows.
“We are seeing 100,000 groups of multi-AI executions per day across hundreds of different use cases,” Moura said. “Given our current pipeline, we could be cash-flow-positive by next summer.”My partner Eliot Durbin wrote about how we met CrewAI and why we invested here.
Finally, if interested in learning more, watch the latest Software Snack Bites, a podcast from my Partner Shomik Ghosh, with guests Joao Moura from CrewAI and Eliot Durbin, my boldstart partner who is on the board. They cover everything from what an AI agent is, to real world production use cases, and why they believe we are just getting started.
As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues.
Scaling Startups
#go big or go home - in post-ZIRP era much of this driven by the mega AI rounds…Peter Walker from Carta, click for comments 👇🏼
#this is what it takes to close enterprise deals as shared by Dakota McKenzie, formerly EndGame, Segment and Databricks - deconstructing why a deal slips or did not close also helps you think about the right processes to begin with
#super fun collaboration with U & I, Protect AI and my firm boldstart ventures
Enterprise Tech
#always ❤️ reading the Radar from Thoughtworks to know what’s trending with developer and infra community
Here’s an excerpt:
#Computer use from Anthropic is going to blow up the RPA space when added to agentic workflows - watch and imagine the future - think about how much drudge work out there to automate -
We’re also introducing a groundbreaking new capability in public beta: computer use. Available today on the API, developers can direct Claude to use computers the way people do—by looking at a screen, moving a cursor, clicking buttons, and typing text. Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the first frontier AI model to offer computer use in public beta. At this stage, it is still experimental—at times cumbersome and error-prone. We're releasing computer use early for feedback from developers, and expect the capability to improve rapidly over time.
Asana, Canva, Cognition, DoorDash, Replit, and The Browser Company have already begun to explore these possibilities, carrying out tasks that require dozens, and sometimes even hundreds, of steps to complete. For example, Replit is using Claude 3.5 Sonnet's capabilities with computer use and UI navigation to develop a key feature that evaluates apps as they’re being built for their Replit Agent product.
and how about this for personal automation, your very own Jarvis one day - watch 👇🏼
#consumer vs enterprise 💰 for foundational models 👇🏼
#👀 Perplexity AI search, now going after enterprise and Glean as well, rumored to be raising at $8B, up from $520M valuation just in January - estimates are at $50M ARR run rate, up from $10M in March (WSJ)
#enhanced security for open source AI on Hugging Face - congrats to portfolio co ProtectAI and Hugging Face for making the world safer!
#Keybanc Sapphire 15th Annual SaaS Metric Survey result here
#our dystopian future is coming (not very good now but it will get better) - watch
#not to be outdone, Microsoft launched its agent builder this past week
#Bridge is being acquired by Stripe for $1B to provide an API for stablecoin payments - yes, crypto folks super excited and this frankly is one of the best use cases - instant, cheap cross border transactions
After launch, we quickly saw inbound interest from cross-border payments companies. People talked about stablecoins for x-border money movement, but we didn't understand the space or need.
These developers onboarded, showed us what was possible, and Bridge quickly started to scale.
After that, we had government entities onboard with us to disburse aid, fintechs build US dollar-based savings and spending products, SpaceX to manage their global treasury, and many others.
Our belief that stablecoins could be a new payment platform started coming true. Developers worldwide were dreaming up new stablecoin-enabled financial products and coming to Bridge to bring them to life. And each new use case was larger than all of those that came before it.
Today, we’re moving many billions in payment volume. Our business has grown >10x this yr. But more importantly, we’re now helping 100s of developers all around the world. And their products are giving millions of consumers and businesses more economic choice.
A lot has changed (and improved) over the past 18 months. But we’re still incredibly early.
Stablecoins represent an entirely new payments platform. Realizing the potential of this platform will be a decades-long journey.Markets
#State of the markets
Per Gartner, AI is heading into the trough of disillusionment. And you say you've never seen any uptake this fast. And you say "I have not seen an adoption curve 📈 like this in my 28 years of investing." Somebody's right.