NFX

When Opus 4.6 dropped, something changed. Smart people saw its intelligence and felt replaceable. The way they saw themselves and the world shifted. This is similar to "Zen sickness." It's the mental distress many meditators get as they start to wake up, caused by their inability to integrate new, profound experiences. There is a way through Zen Sickness to "AI Zen." James Currier breaks down how to get there: https://lnkd.in/eF-T2tea

Gartner just listed Maisa as a Front-Runner in the global agentic AI race. Their new "Emerging Tech: AI Vendor Race - Startups to Watch in Agentic AI" report analyzed 120+ AI companies globally on market traction, product maturity, and the ability to deliver in complex environments. Maisa was mentioned as Front-Runner in the "Set Diamonds" category. This mention reflects our continued progress in bringing agentic AI into production within highly regulated industries, supporting complex, large-scale enterprise workflows. None of this happens without our clients & partners who trusted us with real operations early on. If you're exploring vendors in the agentic AI space, the full report is well worth a read. Let’s continue building the future of work, together.

It was a very busy Q1 2026 for many companies in the NFX portfolio 🚀 Across AI infrastructure, space, security, tech bio, fintech, and consumer — we’ve seen a wave of financings and M&A from companies where NFX led the seed, often as the first institutional investor. In total, over $1.25B in announced follow-on capital so far in 2026 for NFX cos. This is core to how we operate at NFX: We lead seed rounds — often before there’s consensus. We back founders at day zero. We help shape deep defensibility from the very beginning. And we support companies through breakout scale. Different sectors — same pattern: • Exceptional founders • Massive markets • Network-driven advantage A few highlights from the quarter: 🚀 Stoke Space — Extended its Series D to $860M We led the seed in 2020, backing a bold vision for fully reusable rockets and a team executing at an exceptional pace. https://lnkd.in/gigRNJs9 🌌 Starcloud — $170M Series A at a $1.1B valuation (plus extension), led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures & Growth We led the seed in 2024 — before hyperscale AI infrastructure became obvious. https://lnkd.in/gUZjm8p5 ⚙️ ScaleOps — $130M Series C at an $800M valuation We led the seed in 2022, with early conviction in AI-driven infrastructure efficiency as compute demand explodes. https://lnkd.in/gvjyGmNq 📊 Novig — $75M Series B Building a trader-first prediction market — a fresh take at the intersection of consumer behavior and sports. https://lnkd.in/gFwah964 🧬 Centivax — $37M financing Advancing next-generation immunology and building toward a remarkable universal vaccine. https://lnkd.in/gSW43M23 🔐 Koi Security — Acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $400M We led the seed ~18 months ago — a standout example of speed, focus, and execution. https://lnkd.in/gc39F349 And this is just a slice. Many more companies in the portfolio are quietly building toward their own breakout moments. Grateful to my exceptional partners Gigi Levy-Weiss, Morgan Beller, Omri Amirav-Drory, James Currier and the rest of the NFX team — and especially to the founders who let us be their first believers. The best is still ahead.

When we first invested in Starcloud data centers in space sounded borderline insane to most people. Today, they're announcing a $170M Series A at a $1B+ valuation, with their first satellite already in orbit — Nvidia H100 GPU on board. Congratulations to the team! Here's the full story in TechCrunch: https://lnkd.in/eZsVR2n2

I am super excited to share that Starcloud has raised a $170M Series A at a $1.1bn valuation to fuel our development of data centers in space 🚀 The round comes after the successful deployment of our first satellite, Starcould-1, a few months ago, which had the first NVIDIA H100 on board and was the first to train an LLM in space. The funds will be used to develop our third satellite, which aims to be cost-competitive with Earth-based data centers in terms of AI inference cost. The round was led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures, and we are excited to welcome Benchmark GP, Chetan Puttagunta, to our board. We are also excited to welcome other new investors including Seven Seven Six 7️⃣7️⃣6️⃣, Manhattan West, Adjacent, Carya, GSBackers, Link Ventures, Harpoon, New Vista Capital, and angels, including Goldman Sachs board member Kevin Johnson. We are very grateful for the continued support of existing investors, including NFX, Nebular, Y Combinator, FUSE, Soma Capital, 3C AGI Partners, Wyld VC, Tiny Supercomputer Investment Company, and Taurus Ventures. Onwards! https://lnkd.in/eDZY5Cdc

The future of computing is autonomous. We invested in ScaleOps because they saw his shift and built infrastructure that manages cloud and AI workloads in real time. Congratulations to the team on the Series C! More below via TechCrunch https://lnkd.in/diwXh6RX

Most people have used AI. But very few have talked to AI. The difference is bigger than you'd think -- and it's starting to create an entirely new category of games. On the NFX Podcast, Max Child of Weekend joins James Currier to explore it: Watch the full episode here: https://bit.ly/47sDcSh For more: https://lnkd.in/eqJfPJVz

We’ve achieved escape velocity. In the last 8 months we’ve completed our $45M Series A, became a clinical stage company with our first clinical program, and now announced $37M in follow-on funding from some powerful new allies for the mission. Looking to the future, as the Phase I studies complete and we are now funded to immediately proceed to Phase 2 in early 2027, in parallel we are looking to deploy a significant innovation in scalable manufacturing to the GMP environment. We’ve toured 4 facilities in the past 3 weeks, investigating the ecosystem of rental GMP suites as well as a subleasing options. Controlling the means of production is a paradigm shift for any clinical biotech, made possible now in a way that wasn’t imaginable ten years ago. I can’t wait to share more details about the stunning process innovation that Gusti Zeiner has developed - stay tuned. Our $45M Series was led by Steve Jurvetson at Future Ventures and included follow-on by Omri Amirav-Drory at our earliest and largest stakeholder NFX, as well as GHIC, Base4, BOLD capital, Amplify Bio, Kendell Capital partners, and many early SAFE investors. The $37M follow-on funding includes Structure Fund, Patrick Collison, Meiji, and existing fund LPs expanding their position with the company. The Phase I study includes over 300 participants and has an efficacy by correlate-of-protection readout against a panel of 24 diverse influenza viruses.

"If our data looks good by the end of this year, effectively, the pandemic era for influenza is over," Glanville says. As reported in the Axios exclusive by Katherine Davis, while our Phase I trial is ongoing, we’ve raised another $37M to accelerate through Phase 2, deploy scalable manufacturing innovations, and advance the follow-on portfolio. huge thanks to Structure Fund led, joined by Meiji Seika Pharma Co., Sigmas Group, Kendall Capital Partners, and Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison. Following our Series A with Future Ventures last year, with follow-on by our longest and largest shareholder NFX, GHIC, and others, and our Phase I clinical start at the beginning of this year, this new acceleration capital positions us to 1) move our universal flu program immediately into Phase 2 studies in early 2027 following completion of the current ongoing Phase I (led by CMO Jerry Sadoff). This is an outstanding timing opportunity to advance immediately to Phase 2 without pausing for another fund-raise or non-dilutive in between, which gets us through additional key clinical inflection and much closer to approval. 2) accelerate our four follow-on programs through completion of preclinical characterization and poised for GMP manufacturing (led by CSO Sawsan Youssef, Senior Director Sangil Kim and others). This positions us to advance the next universal immunity medicine from our platform into GMP and clinical development in 2027, further demonstrating the profound generalizability of our platforms to make disruptive 21st century medicines. 3) accelerate our solid phase continuous flow scalable manufacturing process innovation into GMP in 2026, for use with both Centi-Flu consistency lots and also to accelerate and greatly reduce cost and time for manufacturing every one of our follow-on programs (led by CINO Gusti Zeiner and Director of CMC Atsuko Sakurai-Sangria). Being able to do this now is huge for accelerating Centi-Flu to approval and global access, but also huge for having this technology stack deployed in GMP to dramatically lower the cost, time, and risk barriers of entry to clinical for every one of our follow on programs. Steve Jurvetson Omri Amirav-Drory Emilio Emini Helen McBride, Ph.D. Patrick Collison Stephanie Wisner Omri Amirav-Drory Anastasia Budinskaya Pamela Garzone, Ph.D. https://lnkd.in/gTQ6sCPe

Congratulations to Theator — named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies for the 3rd time. This year's recognition highlights Surgery-to-Text®, which automatically turns surgical video into complete operative reports. Theator is building surgical intelligence that actually works — AI that helps surgeons get better at their craft while fixing critical gaps in documentation and quality. Here's why we invested at Day 0: https://lnkd.in/g5hnAm5k