Kindred Ventures

First fully autonomous clinical encounter in the end of 2023, to 3 million autonomous clinical conversations with patients... in 2.5 years. Incredible speed, pulling AI care delivery future into the present. The "co-pilot" to "autopilot" transition is underway in specialty care, and we're thrilled to continue supporting Insight Health AI, Inc. as they partner with our friends at Standard Capital in their Series A. Onwards Jaimal Soni, Pankaj Gore, MD, Saran S., and Eric Stecker!

Last week, our partner Kanyi Maqubela took the stage at ViVE to discuss the emerging changes in Specialty Care in the Modern Era. The panel discussed the coming changes from Medicare via the ACCESS program, and how it is a great opportunity for true innovation in digital health, even with low rates to begin. They touched on the models that use virtual care to create continuous and comprehensive care experiences for underserved conditions like autoimmunity and chronic health management. And finally, they discussed the promise of AI in specialty care: the need for auditability and reliability, the power of novel user experiences, and the incredible pace at which AI has already begun to impact people’s lives. Thank you to Lucia Savage of Omada Health, Darshak Sanghavi of Machinify and Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), and Payal Bhandari M.D. of Thymos Health for joining Kindred Ventures on stage!

The way we game is changing. On March 11th, Kindred Ventures is hosting an evening event during GDC Festival of Gaming in San Francisco, bringing together founders and technical leaders from fal, Iconic, Mem0, Overworld, Kotoba Technologies, Inc., Dedalus Labs, and more for conversation, live demos, and a panel discussion on how AI is changing the way games and media are built, experienced, and scaled. We'll dig into how generative models, agent architectures, and persistent memory are unlocking new gameplay mechanics, development workflows, and entirely new categories of interactive experiences. Space is limited and registration approval is required. Register to attend: https://luma.com/z1wtesph

If your team is still managing visas in spreadsheets and email threads, this is for you. Immigration shouldn’t live in your inbox. Today, we launched Ellis: the first AI-powered immigration platform built for high-growth teams. Starting at $2,000/month, companies can file unlimited H-1B, TN, H-1B1, E-3, and J-1 visas — with attorney oversight, real-time tracking, automated workflows, and built-in compliance controls. Over the past year: – 200+ customers – 400+ cases filed – 99.4% approval rate We ensure your international hires arrive on-time, stay compliant, and feel valued from Day 1. s/o to Pavithra Mohan and Fast Company for covering our launch 🙏

We are hiring! We are looking for two Research Analysts to join our San Francisco team. ➡️ Research Analyst, AI & Frontier Tech For candidates with deep technical expertise in AI and emerging technologies who are excited to translate research and applied development experience into investment insights. This role focuses on evaluating new models, technical architectures, and frontier technology opportunities shaping the next generation of companies. ➡️ Research Analyst, Technology & Markets For candidates who bring strong perspectives on technology markets, startup ecosystems, and business model evolution. This role focuses on analyzing emerging sectors, company formation trends, and market dynamics to complement our technical research and inform investment decisions. Both roles sit at the center of Kindred’s investment process, working closely with our Partners from initial thesis development through investment, portfolio support, and publishing research that helps define new technology frontiers. We are looking for individuals who are deeply curious, rigorous in their thinking, and excited to engage directly with founders and builders pushing the edge of what is possible. 📍 Full-time, in-office in San Francisco 📩 More Info: https://lnkd.in/gM2Q_skr

We are hiring! We are looking for two Research Analysts to join our San Francisco team. ➡️ Research Analyst, AI & Frontier Tech For candidates with deep technical expertise in AI and emerging technologies who are excited to translate research and applied development experience into investment insights. This role focuses on evaluating new models, technical architectures, and frontier technology opportunities shaping the next generation of companies. ➡️ Research Analyst, Technology & Markets For candidates who bring strong perspectives on technology markets, startup ecosystems, and business model evolution. This role focuses on analyzing emerging sectors, company formation trends, and market dynamics to complement our technical research and inform investment decisions. Both roles sit at the center of Kindred’s investment process, working closely with our Partners from initial thesis development through investment, portfolio support, and publishing research that helps define new technology frontiers. We are looking for individuals who are deeply curious, rigorous in their thinking, and excited to engage directly with founders and builders pushing the edge of what is possible. 📍 Full-time, in-office in San Francisco 📩 More Info: https://lnkd.in/gM2Q_skr

We are hiring! We are looking for two Research Analysts to join our San Francisco team. ➡️ Research Analyst, AI & Frontier Tech For candidates with deep technical expertise in AI and emerging technologies who are excited to translate research and applied development experience into investment insights. This role focuses on evaluating new models, technical architectures, and frontier technology opportunities shaping the next generation of companies. ➡️ Research Analyst, Technology & Markets For candidates who bring strong perspectives on technology markets, startup ecosystems, and business model evolution. This role focuses on analyzing emerging sectors, company formation trends, and market dynamics to complement our technical research and inform investment decisions. Both roles sit at the center of Kindred’s investment process, working closely with our Partners from initial thesis development through investment, portfolio support, and publishing research that helps define new technology frontiers. We are looking for individuals who are deeply curious, rigorous in their thinking, and excited to engage directly with founders and builders pushing the edge of what is possible. 📍 Full-time, in-office in San Francisco 📩 More Info: https://lnkd.in/gM2Q_skr

The research and investing team here has been looking out for fun, explorable, and playable world models to experiment with - but no luck - too early, could not find. However! We did instead discover and meet an incredible team led by Louis Castricato and Shahbuland Matiana, former research engineers from Stability AI, the pioneer in diffusion models. Today, we are super excited to share our investment in Overworld! We led the company’s $4.5M pre-seed alongside a group of investors like Logan Kilpatrick, Garage Capital, and Amplify.LA. Interactive software and visual world generation is at an inflection point. As interaction becomes continuous, static worlds and cloud-first AI start to break down—latency creeps in, costs scale with usage, and coherence is hard to maintain. Overworld is building real-time, local-first world models that persist, maintain state, and update continuously as users move and act. The world itself becomes the system. Founded by Louis Castricato and Shahbuland Matiana, Overworld rethinks diffusion as a stateful, real-time system—running locally on consumer hardware and enabling persistent, responsive worlds that feel alive. Today, they’re sharing an early research preview with Waypoint 1, a first public reference implementation of this vision. We believe the shift from static environments to real-time world models will define the next generation of games, simulations, and creative tools. We’re thrilled to partner with the Overworld team as they bring this new medium from research into reality. More on our investment thesis from Steve Jang and Mark Wasuwanich, and the Overworld team's vision and plans at the blog post below! https://lnkd.in/gnpi_2AG

What if AI-generated worlds didn’t stop at a single output, but evolved continuously as you interacted with them? Today, we’re announcing a research preview of our real-time, local-first world model, built to run on consumer hardware and respond at game-level frame rates. It’s designed for researchers, engineers, and builders exploring what AI-native worlds can become. Visit our site to download, https://over.world/. This work is supported by a $4.5M pre-seed led by Kindred Ventures, backing our belief that interactive worlds should preserve creative agency, remain local-first, and open the door to entirely new kinds of play. This early system maintains a persistent world state, responds to input in real time, and runs entirely on consumer hardware. It prioritizes responsiveness, modifiability, and creative agency to promote experimentation and exploration. Discover the thinking, architecture, and implications behind our model in our launch blog post written by Overworld co-founders Shahbuland Matiana and Louis Castricato. https://lnkd.in/gz9pRGQK

CES 2026 last week was an incredibly kinetic show - at the center of it, was compute and AI in the physical world. The Kindred Ventures research team, investors, and several portfolio companies were on the ground, where the strongest pull was around advances in AI compute, autonomy and mobility, and robotics. In a conversation with The Information on TITV, our Managing Partner Steve Jang shared live impressions from the show. CES is still a consumer showcase, but this year the center of gravity broadened: alongside TVs and devices, there was real focus on the racks, chips, robotics models, and early agentic systems that will power them. Nuro, a Kindred portfolio company, underscored that shift. Its new Autonomy Intelligence Platform, built on NVIDIA’s DRIVE AGX Thor automotive stack and developed with Uber and Lucid Motors, is a template for how automakers and ridesharing networks can plug into a shared autonomy stack instead of rebuilding it themselves. That reflects a pattern Steve highlighted: “Alongside Nuro, Nvidia is accelerating the autonomy ecosystem with open datasets, open models, and standardized hardware, so any OEM or tech company can assemble its own high‑autonomy system with real-time agents and robotics workloads becoming the leading edge.” Nvidia is not kingmaking companies, but entire sectors by feeding the ecosystem with the tools and models necessary to accelerate many competitive products. Rubin’s rack-level design targets roughly an order-of-magnitude gain in inference efficiency and treats the system as a “golden monolith” rather than a simple drop-in GPU upgrade. That full-system approach helps kick off a fresh replacement cycle across hyperscalers, neoclouds, and frontier labs. In Steve’s view, “Physical AI is moving into the mainstream, and Rubin is the infrastructure cycle built to support that shift. CES was still about devices—but just as much about the compute foundation that will define robotics, autonomy, and agentic AI for the next decade.” Nuro shows what’s possible on the road today, and Rubin signals how quickly that future can scale. https://lnkd.in/guWdCQtA