645 Ventures

Today, we're announcing that Variance has raised $21M. The future of investigations will be agentic. Fortune 500s trust our agents to conduct millions of investigations every day across identity investigations, AML compliance, and enhanced due diligence at a scale and level of precision that did not exist a few years ago. Auditability is the one bottleneck to agentic adoption, and our team has built the entire system from the ground up with regulated industries in mind. After onboarding Variance, customers see 1/ Auditable, traceable, and defensible decisions at scale rather than black box scores 2/ 50% more consistent enforcement of policies vs. manual investigations 3/ Evidence gathering for complex cases reduced from weeks to minutes All of this is possible with no complex integrations, thanks to agents capable of browsing legacy tools. This round was led by Ten Eleven Ventures, with continued participation from 645 Ventures, Y Combinator, Urban Innovation Fund, Okta. Grateful to our team, and to our customers for trusting us early. If you're excited about building serious technology, reach out at karine@variance.com

We're thrilled to announce Gimlet Labs' Series A funding, led by Menlo Ventures, and joined by Eclipse, Factory, Prosperity7 Ventures, and Triatomic Capital. Gimlet was founded out of the belief that AI inference would become the decade's defining infrastructure challenge. That challenge has become even more urgent with the rise of agentic workloads. Today, the top model providers are investing significantly in reducing agent latency. To deliver the next step of agent performance that will enable the next generation of software, we need to re-imagine the current infrastructure these agents run on. We designed Gimlet with heterogeneous hardware at its core, leveraging different types of hardware for different tasks, with a software orchestration layer to handle the complexity.  So far, the result is 3-10X speedups on frontier models with large context windows, within the same power envelope. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gxe9j6Vj

On behalf of V11, Namirah Q., Devesh Khilnani and I co-hosted a private DeepTech dinner with 645 Ventures in NYC, bringing together founders building at the frontier of what's physically possible. The conversation started where you'd expect: constraints. What's holding back the future, what's quietly gaining traction, and what each of us is trying to bend into reality. The range at the table was as frontier as it gets. Brain-computer interfaces. Defense & energy tech. Neuromorphic computing. 3D-printed ligaments. New approaches to curing cancer. Every person in the room had chosen a problem most people write off and decided to treat it as an engineering challenge. What struck me was how many of these domains are converging. The lines between biology, computation, and hardware are dissolving. The founders making the most progress aren't specialists in one; they’re translators across all three. And the constraints they're each fighting (signal fidelity, manufacturing scale, regulatory timelines, data scarcity) echo more than you'd expect across wildly different domains. Aaron Holiday shared how he started 645 Ventures, and one perspective he shared on impact reframed the room. Not everything that moves humanity forward ships as a product. Sometimes the highest-leverage thing you can do is build the system that builds the people. Then the conversation took a turn. One question shifted the energy: "Beyond what you're building, what is your dream?" The room became silent. Then very honest. One attendee talked about a self-sustaining farm. Another about the ability to bring their loved ones together at a moment's notice. Someone spoke about simply not taking things for granted. It surfaced a tension that I think every founder carries: Does freedom come from building the most important thing you can? Or does it come from learning as much as you can, whether or not you ever build anything at all? We didn’t resolve it. That wasn’t the point. But the fact that a room full of people engineering the future still wrestles with that question says something worth sitting with. We spend so much time building what matters. The harder question is whether we're building our own freedom in the process. If you could ask a room of frontier founders one question, what would it be? Shoutout to an outstanding group of attendees: Dylan Yeo, Evgeny Kiner, Semih Gultekin, Soham Mehra, Colton El-Habr, Simon Hakimian, Veer Bhatia, and our hosts: Elizabeth Paulin, William Hess, Vardan Gattani, Aaron Holiday, Namirah Q., and Devesh Khilnani

We're hiring a Summer 2026 Investment Fellow in San Francisco 🚀 This is a hands-on opportunity to work closely with our investment team, focused on the AI developer tools and infrastructure landscape: sourcing companies, engaging with founders and researchers, and contributing to real investment decisions. We’re looking for individuals with strong technical or research backgrounds who are deeply curious about where AI is going next whether you’re building, conducting research, or exploring the frontier of emerging technologies. We’re especially excited to connect with graduate students at Stanford, Berkeley and MIT. 📍 San Francisco (in-person) 🧠 Focus: AI / developer tools / infrastructure 🤝 Direct exposure to our Investment & Research team Apply here: https://lnkd.in/g_HefmwC Feel free to share or tag someone who would be a great fit 👇

We're hiring a Summer 2026 Investment Fellow in San Francisco 🚀 This is a hands-on opportunity to work closely with our investment team, focused on the AI developer tools and infrastructure landscape: sourcing companies, engaging with founders and researchers, and contributing to real investment decisions. We’re looking for individuals with strong technical or research backgrounds who are deeply curious about where AI is going next whether you’re building, conducting research, or exploring the frontier of emerging technologies. We’re especially excited to connect with graduate students at Stanford, Berkeley and MIT. 📍 San Francisco (in-person) 🧠 Focus: AI / developer tools / infrastructure 🤝 Direct exposure to our Investment & Research team Apply here: https://lnkd.in/g_HefmwC Feel free to share or tag someone who would be a great fit 👇

Hanover Park just raised $27M to create AI products for investment firms that touch over $100 trillion in assets. AI-native services businesses are the recent model to catch the attention of Silicon Valley, and I got a chance to sit down with Chris Hladczuk to talk through everything he's learned building one from the ground up. I first met Chris two years ago. We didn't know what it would be, but I knew he had what it took to build a generational business. Since then, he recruited Nick Puljic as his co-founder, they built a general ledger from scratch, and have grown to over $15 billion in customer assets on platform. We go inside their Series A, talk about productizing the service layer, helping CFO's use AI, automating onboarding + manual admin work, becoming a customers most important vendor, and why you should always get on the plane. Thanks to Numeral and Flex for sponsoring the episode! Quick preview here, link to tune into our full conversation in the comments.

We are proud to announce our partnership with Wiz as the world's first ADR integration. By integrating Alma’s runtime threats directly within the Wiz platform, our mutual customers can now prioritize vulnerabilities based on active threats and real-time business impact. This collaboration enables organizations to reduce cloud risk and securely protect both critical applications and sensitive data with Alma and Wiz. Read the blog post here: https://lnkd.in/dyWwfM_u Wiz integration page: https://lnkd.in/dB_G-8ng #Wiz #Alma #ADR