Robert Chatwani

“Oftentimes, founders think of government affairs as a cost center rather than a business accelerator. But when you are able to open regulatory gates, you have automatic business growth.” We sat down with Prashanthi Raman, former VP / Head of Government Affairs and Policy at both Lyft and Cruise. Now more than ever, companies that want to experience hypergrowth in regulated industries need to take government affairs seriously from the early days rather than waiting for a crisis 💡

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Great conversations at our WillowTree Ventures dinner with leaders across fintech and AI. A few themes stood out strongly: enterprises are leaning into AI for real efficiency gains, product and engineering orgs still set the agenda, and the whitespace in “boring” industries is wider than most people assume. It’s clear that the next breakout companies in AI for financial services won’t come from the obvious places. Thanks to everyone who joined - excited to keep working alongside founders building in these non-obvious, high-impact wedges.

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Today Isembard announced a $50m Series A fundraise led by Union Square Ventures, less than a year after Notion Capital led their Seed round. 💥This is a company right at the intersection of AI & supply chain sovereignty & they’re exceeding even our most optimistic expectations. By the end of the year they will have 25 factories across the UK, US, Germany, France & Ukraine. 💥Isembard is rapidly scaling its network of AI-first factories for precision manufacturing at the same time as market demand is accelerating. Macro forces (reshoring, rising defence spend, concentration risk in Asia, and the growth of neo-primes) are structurally increasing demand for fast, local, flexible manufacturing that the current industry is unable to deliver on. 💥The innovation is in the way the company builds and franchises factories as a product with tightly integrated units of machines, software, robotics, & process intelligence that turn design files into certified components with speed & reliability. 💥Their AI software platform, MasonOS, connects all sites into a single operating system, replacing fragmented shops with standardised, high-performance industrial nodes & enabling real-time quoting, predictable delivery, & low defect rates. By owning the full production stack, Isembard delivers premium manufacturing performance with the scalability & flexibility of a software platform. 💥We are at the top of the AI hype cycle and there are understandable concerns about the ROI on the vast sums of money being invested into this new super-cycle. But, the ROI for Isembard is both clear and compelling. They will deliver components 10x faster and at 50% of the cost of current suppliers. They will also build a de-centralised, global network of factories to meet the growing demand for national or regional sovereignty. 💥This is a company with a clear vision to disrupt a massive, fragmented $1.8tn component manufacturing market. Today marks another huge stride towards that vision. And they are only just getting started. We’re thrilled to be on this journey with Alexander Fitzgerald & the team & we’re also excited to welcome Rebecca Kaden & USV into the investor base. Notion Capital Union Square Ventures Alexander Fitzgerald Rebecca Kaden Maximilian Eichler Stephen Millard Britt Mulder

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Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

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🚨NEW EPISODE: Recorded live at FUTURE TITANS 2026 - Jeff Perry of Carta sat down with the iconic Seth Levine, co-founder of Foundry. Seth has been in venture for 25 years, built Foundry from scratch as an emerging manager himself, and has backed about 50 emerging manager funds through his fund of funds. He has genuinely seen every side of this table. They went deep on building Foundry, why VCs are in the influence business, not the decision business, and why the concentration problem in venture is not only bad for LPs, but also for the innovation ecosystem overall. And why Seth's new book, Capital Evolution, is so important for the future of America. 🎧 Links to listen... Apple: https://lnkd.in/ehQUQ2EM Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eU4FExpg

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Camber Creek led the $3.7 million Seed round for TwinKnowledge, which is tackling an important problem in the built environment. Construction projects get delayed and rework is required because of discrepancies across construction documents, submittals, requests for information, design, and other plans. TwinKnowledge’s AI Agents absorb structured and unstructured project data, surfacing and preventing conflicts before the work begins. We’re excited about our partnership with CEO Ivan Panushev and his team. #construction #AEC #AI #technology https://ow.ly/mBYX50VtaVG

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In the San Francisco Bay Area, founders are relentless about growing and scaling their companies. They spot opportunity, scale through uncertainty, and create companies that redefine industries. Recently, we gathered a group of founders and tech leaders to discuss the intersection of company growth and long-term personal success. Eric S. Yuan, Founder and CEO of Zoom Communications, shared the inspiring story behind his company’s growth and eventual IPO. Eric reiterated that the founders who create the most impact don’t just plan for an exit – they prepare for what comes after. Too often, personal wealth planning lags company growth, and that gap can become costly at the most pivotal moments. The rest of the evening was focused on closing that gap. Our colleagues in Goldman Sachs Investment Banking, Pawan Tewari and Nick Giovanni, shared a candid outlook for M&A and IPOs in this environment, along with important steps founders should take to prepare for a strategic exit. We ended with a conversation around the key considerations for maximizing founders’ personal outcomes. Pre-transaction planning isn’t defensive - it’s opportunistic. Your company’s exit strategy and your family’s long-term planning work should not be done in isolation. When investment banking and private wealth work in sync, founders can cohesively optimize outcomes on all sides of the equation. To learn more about the practical “do’s and don'ts” for founders, we are happy to share our ‘Goldman guide’ for navigating wealth planning, business exists, and IPOs: https://lnkd.in/ewhEGjV3. Thank you, Eric, and to all the founders who joined us at The Battery in SF. On behalf of Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management and Investment Banking, we look forward to the next conversation.

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Dayna Grayson is a leading VC who has “sat in every chair” at a young age. She founded Construct Capital with Rachel Holt, an early leader at Uber. Together, they are tackling the digitization of industry. Dayna will discuss macro trends, what it takes to be a founder, and the potential for AI. She is one of the few who have successfully blended a career of operations and investing.  Check out our discussion at: https://lnkd.in/eYBUGjbW #leadershipdevelopment

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In an ecosystem flooded with service-first startups chasing scale through funding, Urban Company stands out by doing the hard (and right) thing—building a real business. Their recent shift from being a pure-play service marketplace to developing tangible, monetizable products is a playbook more entrepreneurs should study. Too many service startups stop at aggregation—thinking scale alone will drive defensibility. Urban Company went a step further: ✅ Leveraging deep consumer insights ✅ Creating integrated solutions ✅ Building new revenue lines rooted in real-world usage This is what scaling with purpose looks like. Instead of chasing round after round of capital to keep the engine running, they’re creating sustainable value by aligning product innovation with the trust and access they’ve already earned through services. For founders building in services: 💡 Don’t just deliver the service. Understand the gaps around it. Own the value chain. Monetize where others overlook. Urban Company is showing what it means to evolve with intent. A solid reminder that great businesses aren’t built on burn—they’re built on depth. #Entrepreneurship #Startups #Innovation #BusinessStrategy #ServiceBusiness https://lnkd.in/dzNHtpBS

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This week was so productive. We had a very productive work session with the AMD team, launching collaboration with Omeed Momeni & the University of California, Davis, followed by dinner and a great conversation with Mike Torre, a longtime Google veteran, former technical operations executive & advisor, and someone with deep experience scaling large, complex infrastructure environments. One of the main AI data center pain points was obvious. Modern data centers are increasingly constrained by unpredictable congestion inside the rack and across blades, where bursty, synchronized traffic from AI and distributed workloads creates microbursts and incast that overload fixed, wired switch paths in microseconds—driving queue buildup, tail-latency spikes, and, in lossless fabrics, head-of-line blocking and congestion spreading. Traditional networks are architecturally static: traffic is forced through pre-defined switch topologies that can only react after congestion forms, leaving operators unable to dynamically steer load away from hot spots or prevent cascading overload. RIVVOR Inc. Fabric fundamentally changes this by introducing a wireless, blade-to-blade, dynamically reconfigurable fabric layer that enables direct, on-demand paths between blades, absorbs burst traffic, and rebalances traffic in real time. The result is predictable, low-latency performance and high utilization precisely when conventional fabrics become unstable. #ai #aiinfruststructure #aidatacenters #datacenters #mmwave #amd #opencompute #ocp #wireless #infrustructure #hyperscalers

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Thrilled to announce our investment in CtrlB! Privilege partnering with founders like Adarsh, who are deeply obsessed with the problem they’re solving - a true force of nature. CtrlB is redefining enterprise observability, building a next-gen telemetry engine that makes search up to 10x faster and 90% cheaper. In an era where enterprises generate terabytes of data every day, CtrlB is closing the gap with a fundamentally new approach to ingesting, indexing, and querying petabyte-scale data - enabling teams to gain real-time visibility without trade-offs between cost and speed. #funding #startups

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As enterprise AI moves from experimentation to deployment, Myriad is helping founders accelerate enterprise adoption by going beyond capital and also providing access to operators who have built, deployed, and scaled systems inside the world’s largest organizations.  That’s always been our belief behind Myriad’s Executive Advisory Board, and today we’re welcoming a new group of leaders, bringing the Board to more than 30 C-suite executives from Fortune 500 and global enterprises. These operators work directly with the founders in our network on product design, enterprise introductions, and proof-of-concept deployments. It’s a proven model that’s already helping portfolio companies reach 119 Fortune 500 deployments and 70 enterprise POCs. Excited for what we’ll build together.    Read the full press release here:  https://lnkd.in/eiBvkSxM

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I am excited to announce that Shine Capital has led AudioShake’s $14M Series A. Our investment represents the culmination of two years of searching for a company that will define the next generation of audio. Since 2023, we have been asking ourselves the question, "What technology will be used pervasively across the totality of the audio landscape?" Then we met Jessica Powell and Luke Miner, founders of AudioShake. AudioShake makes a suite of AI-powered tools for processing audio that include stem-splitting, voice isolation, speaker separation, and more. These primitives are critical infrastructure for almost any task involving audio, as evidenced by the breadth of use cases that the company serves. The Walt Disney Company and Downtown Music use AudioShake to make tracks available for sync licensing. Film studios and post-production houses use AudioShake to clean up sound from microphones to prevent re-recordings and manual audio engineering. Sports leagues and broadcasters use AudioShake to separate stadium noise from commentary to enable clean captioning and crisper audio. And Big Tech and frontier labs use AudioShake to prepare their audio data for multimodal AI training. We believe that audio will be the most important medium in the age of AI, defined by explosive growth across three categories that are even better with AudioShake: 1) Audio-as-AI-Interface: For the first time, people can perform complex compute operations using their voice. Conversing with AI will propel voice assistant usage well beyond its current ~50% adoption. 2) Explosion of Content: The rate at which user-generated content is made continues to accelerate, which will be further amplified by the possibility of AI-generated content. Audio is a superset of video — nearly every video uses sound to convey meaning, message, or emotion. 3) Voice Agents for Business: More than $100B of phone labor is performed annually in the United States. While some of it sits in call centers, most of it is fractional work. Businesses across finance, healthcare, and beyond have rapidly adopted phone agents. We are fortunate to partner with Jessica Powell and Luke Miner, passionate entrepreneurs and audiophiles dedicated to making audio as easy to work with as images or text. Audio contains vast amounts of information and creative possibility, and AudioShake will help unlock it. Thank you to our friends at Indicator Ventures for connecting us to Jessica. We are thrilled to support the AudioShake team with them, alongside Origin Ventures, Thomson Reuters, Precursor Ventures and Background Capital.

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Owning your narrative is leadership. Last week in San Francisco, we gathered with AAF SF Bay Area to talk about positioning in competitive markets. Three themes emerged: Be memorable. Be clear. Be consistent. The market doesn’t reward talent. It rewards clarity. Grateful to everyone who showed up thoughtfully. #personalbrand #careergrowth #leadership

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Big news for Nscale: We are delighted to welcome Lauren R Hurwitz as our new Chief Operating Officer. I’m excited about what Lauren will bring across the whole business as we scale. And on a personal note, I’ve known Lauren for a long time and we have often debated how best to architect for government needs, reconciling sovereignty/policy requirements with truly cutting-edge technology. That’s why, from my vantage point in Europe, I’m particularly energised by what her experience leading Palantir’s international public sector business can bring to Nscale. While public sector AI adoption across EMEA is accelerating, success depends on more than raw compute — it requires a trusted, compliant way to utilise AI services with strong governance and operational excellence. We’re also aligned on how agents embedded within operations can help advance localised compliance. By codifying and automating process & controls (access, approvals, drift checks, logging/evidence), they reduce ad-hoc human intervention and the risk of error or interference — while improving auditability and consistency at scale. Welcome, Lauren—can’t wait to build & solve together.

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🦄 $150M to improve tutoring and education globally. Preply just announced a new round, putting the company on a clear trajectory to become an iconic global marketplace. In a world obsessed with fast wins and volatile growth, some companies quietly beat their goals year after year — for more than 6 years in this case (as long as we’ve at Acurio Ventures been partners). A few learnings from this journey, relevant for founders and investors: Pick a growing market with an unsolved problem. 2 out of 8 billion people globally are learning a second language. Despite many options, outcomes are still poor. Our original thesis was simple: if you build the reference platform, everyone who wants to learn will eventually come to you. Category leadership matters. When we backed Kirill Bigai and Dmytro Voloshyn back in 2019 (together with Rob Kniaz), there were dozens of similar startups. Small details showed Preply had already built a superior tutor base and a scalable growth engine. Build a product customers love. Speaking a language and teaching it are very different things. Preply transformed the learning experience by combining a motivated base of +100,000 tutors with tools that actually drive outcomes. Never stop experimenting. Few companies maintain a strong experimentation culture as they scale. Preply’s DNA reminded me of Booking.com — enabling them to execute 10x better than most marketplaces. Great companies turn every change into an opportunity. From riding the post-COVID shift to online learning, to betting early and heavily on AI as Dmytro Voloshyn has excelled at. What once sounded like sci-fi is now reality. Great companies become talent magnets A company maturity can't be addressed only by looking at the revenue, profit or product. I like to see how much better they become at attracting talent and retaining it. Proud that Acurio Ventures made this possible and the WestCap team saw things as bullish as we do and are now supporting the next phase of Preply’s journey. Huge congratulations to the entire Preply team!!

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Talking to users and thoughtfully integrating their needs and wants was woven through everything we did at IDEO—threaded through every prototype and product decision. Reading my colleagues Joanne and Leo's latest work brought that to mind. They describe a future where research runs continuously, with AI agents recruiting participants and instantly surfacing insights. Synthetic personas, carefully trained on consumer signals, mirror human behavior closely enough to extend live studies and compress timelines from weeks to hours. Today user research mostly runs in fits and starts, prohibitively expensive and locked away in dedicated project cycles when it could be a constant companion, seamlessly integrated into the product development process. Joanne and Leo lay out the full vision here: https://lnkd.in/gEUBSG_J

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