Bain Capital Ventures (BCV)

AI makes it easier than ever to build, and easier than ever to get copied. At Step yesterday, I had the pleasure of exploring this alongside Anders Ranum, Anurag Goel, and Mariane Bekker. A few things really compound and build sustainable moats: Customer obsession. Knowing your customer is Company Building 101, but in AI it matters even more. A deep understanding of a specific problem will outlast being first. The team itself. Especially at the pre-product stage where I often invest, I’m always asking: were you put on earth to build this? Deep domain expertise paired with an entrepreneurial spike is hard to find, and even harder to replicate. How you use the model ecosystem. Models are getting better and increasingly moving up the stack, but application companies have a unique advantage: they can pull from a growing breadth of models and infrastructure, then choose what works best for each query, workflow, and customer need. The routing and orchestration layer can matter just as much as the underlying model.

Sam Kececi founded The Sentience Company to build a digital twin of the human mind. As AI starts to standardize how we think, Sam saw a different path: scale what makes each of us unique. With Partner Kevin Zhang, they get into what can happen when AI learns from you, instead of the other way around. https://lnkd.in/gDd63f4e

Business Insider asked Amanda Huang and other investors to name the most promising robotics startups of 2026. Amanda’s pick: Sunday Robotics. Their robot, Memo, folded laundry in an unfamiliar home, succeeding more than 99 percent of the time. Founder Tony Zhao called it a breakthrough that will shrink the timeline for autonomous home robots "in a very drastic way." https://lnkd.in/gxx9Ewdt

Looking forward to joining RetailClub's Founding Class ahead of their AI Festival this September. Retail goes through a major platform shift every decade or so. My bet is AI will be the biggest one yet. At the festival, I'll talk about what’s changing, what’s working, and where I think retail leaders should focus next. See you there.

Rillet is quickly becoming the choice for enterprise finance teams and we’ve seen the shift firsthand. Now, we’re joining their $100M round at a $1B valuation. With 600+ customers and growing adoption across the enterprise, Nicolas Kopp, Stelios Modes, and the team are building toward accounting superintelligence. This is the future of finance. https://lnkd.in/graM6wmE

Loyal is working to prove lifespan extension in dogs and what they learn could reshape how we understand human aging. Dogs develop many of the same age-related diseases as humans, but on a much shorter timeline. Founder Celine Halioua and her team are using that timeline to test ideas that could eventually reshape how we treat aging in people. https://lnkd.in/egaa5ziz

In our latest newsletter: a founder who tried to disprove his own startup idea, a $200M Series B five months in the making, and the hottest physical automation company currently hiring. Go beyond the briefings and dive into the new edition of the Outlier Insider. Out now.

Today, Osmo Studio announced the availability of its video platform and a $5M funding round that we are proud to lead. The team’s production studio has created more than 50 films for companies including Cognition, Physical Intelligence, and Gumloop. This gave them the experience to spot where AI could aid in the creative process. Instead of generating fixed AI outputs, Osmo creates editable code, giving teams more control over every element of the creative process while significantly reducing production time. Congratulations to Chris He, Will Hoppin, Basil Alfaro, Oleksandr Shevenionov and the entire Osmo team on giving every storyteller the power of a production studio.