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Darian Shirazi shared thisDarian Shirazi shared thisJoin us in recognizing Delta's Rising Investors of 2026! 🎉 Congrats to the investors our community nominated as truly exceptional at the early stage. Angels, emerging fund managers, and established names alike, recognized for their track records, the depth of their writing, and their presence in the technical community. These are the people who cut through the noise, back the right companies early, and show up as real partners to the founders they work with. https://lnkd.in/e_aZ3QJv
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Darian Shirazi shared thisDarian Shirazi shared thisI am very happy to announce that Mercado Libre has just taken a meaningful step in deepening our involvement wit the AI startup ecosystem in Silicon Valley. We have officially joined Gradient's oversubscribed $220M Fund 5 — marking our debut as a Limited Partner in an investment fund. Really looking forward to the partnership with Darian Shirazi and the whole Gradient team. AI has been the backbone of our growth for over a decade, embedded in everything we do — from personalizing the user journey to fraud prevention and credit assessment. This investment gives us early visibility into the pre-seed and seed-stage global startup ecosystem, and a front-row seat to the next wave of AI innovation. Gradient's focus on reinvented B2B applications, AI agents, and the development stacks that support large enterprises building AI in-house closely mirrors our own priorities in personalization, automation, and scalable infrastructure. AI innovation is a global phenomenon — and Latin America has become one of the top regions for adoption of new AI tools and products. Bridging Silicon Valley's startup ecosystem with Mercado Libre's platform and data at scale is exactly the kind of strategic bet we want to be making. To know more about this, checkout this article in @Epoca Negocios in Brazil: https://lnkd.in/dp26WqeV #AI #Gradient #MELIMercado Livre anuncia investimento em fundo de venture capital do Vale do Silício especializado em IAMercado Livre anuncia investimento em fundo de venture capital do Vale do Silício especializado em IA
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Darian Shirazi shared thisCongrats Sona on raising a $45M Series B from N47! We seeded the company when it was just an idea and it’s so amazing to see dozens of enterprise hospitality and frontline operations use Sona’s AI workforce automation solution daily. 🚀🎉 https://lnkd.in/gNMWJS3aExclusive: Workforce planning startup Sona raises $45M Series BExclusive: Workforce planning startup Sona raises $45M Series B
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Darian Shirazi reposted thisDarian Shirazi reposted thisLambda is one of @FastCompany's Most Innovative Companies of 2026. We built the SuperIntelligence Cloud for the teams solving the hardest challenges in AI. Read more: https://lnkd.in/e-M4rAzY #FCMostInnovative
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Darian Shirazi reposted thisDarian Shirazi reposted thisHad a great conversation recently with Cristian Raygoza from Rho, sharing what we’re seeing at Gradient in the agent market and where real moats are forming. What matters isn’t just what agents can do in isolation, but how well they perform within complex, real-world workflows and constraints. We chatted about: - Agents are still ~2 years away from replacing traditional RPA. The bottleneck isn’t just LLM/VLM capability, but the lack of workflow data: cross-tool traces, step-specific evals, and real-world feedback loops. - The most underrated moat in enterprise/vertical agents is operational: getting the “boring” things done quickly and at scale, such as custom integrations, on-prem deployment, compliance and security, etc. - The best founders we’ve seen share the same trait: high urgency, translated into extremely fast iteration across both product and GTM. Full podcast: https://lnkd.in/g95F9xtA Thanks Ansgar and Justin for putting this together!An AI Investor's Playbook for What Actually Matters at Pre-SeedAn AI Investor's Playbook for What Actually Matters at Pre-Seed
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Darian Shirazi shared thisCongrats Spade!Darian Shirazi shared thisToday, we’re thrilled to announce Spade’s $40M Series B, led by Oak HC/FT with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Flourish Ventures, Gradient, National Bank of Canada, and Y Combinator Spade has always been the trusted steward of our customers’ payments data. That trust was earned with our best-in-class enrichment solution delivering 99.9% coverage of US and Canadian merchants with >99%+ accuracy at unparalleled speeds (<40ms p99). But customers no longer just want enriched data passed back. They want a platform that helps them build and manage workflows that solve real business problems, end-to-end. Spade is evolving from an enrichment API to a data and AI platform. Our customers aren't just enriching data anymore, they're leveraging our platform for real-time rewards attribution, push notification triggers, behavioral segmentation, loan targeting, and fraud flagging. This round helps us accelerate that transition: expanding our team, deepening our merchant coverage, and building the intelligence layer that transforms raw payments data into outcomes. A major thank you to our team, partners, and supporters – we wouldn’t be here without you. And we’re just getting started. → Read more from Oban MacTavish and Tess Bloch on our blog linked in the comments! → Want to see what real-time merchant intelligence can unlock for your business? Reach out to sales@spade.com → Interested in joining us? Check out our jobs board https://spade.com/careers/
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Darian Shirazi reposted thisDarian Shirazi reposted thisToday, Linkup adds support for x402, the open payment protocol developed by Coinbase. Here's what this means in practice: an AI agent can now call our search API without anyone having created an account first. No sign-up, no email verification, no credit card entry, no API key. The agent makes a request, pays in USDC, and gets its results - all over standard HTTP. This sounds like a small change, but it removes a fundamental bottleneck. Most APIs still require a human to provision access before an agent can use them. That's fine when a developer is setting up a tool once. It breaks down when you want agents to operate independently - spinning up sub-agents, delegating research tasks, running 24/7 without someone managing the billing relationship. x402 solves this by reviving the HTTP 402 status code (literally "Payment Required" - it's been in the spec since the 90s, unused). When an unauthenticated request hits a paid endpoint, the server responds with a price and a wallet address. The client signs a USDC transfer and retries. If the payment is valid, the server returns the resource. From the agent's perspective, accessing a paid API becomes as simple as accessing a free one. The only requirement is a funded wallet. Massive thank you to Coinbase and Stripe for building the payment infrastructure that makes this work. Their teams made it significantly easier to implement the protocol correctly and reliably. If you're building agentic workflows that need web search, this is a new way in - no account required. Full details in the blog post - link in the comments.
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Darian Shirazi liked thisJoin us next week in SF for the first AI CTOs meetup! Thursday 6pm All technical builders welcome. No demos, talks, or thinly veiled advertising. Just beers, snacks, and interesting conversations with other engineers and engineering leaders about what works right now. Luma link in the first comment
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Darian Shirazi liked thisDarian Shirazi liked thisSona has raised $45M in Series B funding, bringing our total funding to over $100M. But more than a funding milestone, this is a product story. When we started Sona, the question was simple. What would it take to help every manager make the same great decisions as your best GM? That question has taken us from scheduling into forecasting, from HR into payroll, from dashboards into agentic AI that actually acts on what it sees. Today Sona is a single agentic system of record across scheduling, HR, payroll and communications. Our AI doesn't just report on what happened last week. It tells you what's about to go off track and what to do about it. We've been building AI into workforce management from the ground up, not bolting it on as an afterthought. This funding lets us move faster on the things that matter most. So proud of everyone in the Sona team for getting us to this point, it's without doubt both the smartest and the most entertaining group of people I've ever had the privilege to work with! And continually grateful for the trust our customers put in us and how generous they are with their time. We're just getting started!
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Darian Shirazi liked thisDarian Shirazi liked this📣 This isn't April fools! 📣 So excited to share that Sona has raised $45M in Series B, led by N47 🎉 Total funding now over $100M. Our AI-powered platform helps frontline businesses optimise their largest cost base, drive more revenue and, most importantly, supports the workforce doing the most demanding jobs on the planet. A lot has happened since our Series A. The product has grown from workforce management into a full operational platform. The team has grown. The ambition has grown. And we're just getting started with our US expansion. A big thank you to N47 for leading this round, and to Felicis, Northzone, Gradient, and Italian Founders Fund for their continued support. I couldn't be prouder of the entire Sona team and what we've built together. There's nobody I'd rather be doing this with! Still early days. Lots more to do
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Darian Shirazi liked thisDarian Shirazi liked thisThank you, Tim Bradshaw, for sharing the Air Street Capital epoch III story in Financial Times! Featuring Black Forest Labs Synthesia ElevenLabs Delian Alliance Industries https://lnkd.in/eyYVu6ZbSolo investor Air Street raises $232mn to chase hot AI betsSolo investor Air Street raises $232mn to chase hot AI bets
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Darian Shirazi liked thisLast week BackOps AI announced our Series A, and I thought it’d be fun to show how the launch video came together. The concept was to show a world where everything goes right. Everything’s humming, operations running smoothly, not a single fire to put out. Then, just kidding. Because that’s not how it works. The back offices behind global supply chains are powered by people manually chasing exceptions, filing claims, and solving complex problems every day. And every company has the one or two people who hold it all together. The ones everyone goes to. But right now, they’re buried in the manual work instead of driving the improvements only they can see. We built BackOps to give them that time back. We capture how they work, turn it into AI-driven processes, and let them do what they were actually hired to do. Instead of knowledge living in silos, our process center brings teams across the organization onto the same page for the first time. Where they’re improving operations, not just surviving them. We’re just getting started, and we need great people to build what’s next. We’re hiring across every team. Come build with us! Theory Ventures Construct Capital Gradient 10vc
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Darian Shirazi liked thisDarian Shirazi liked thisThrilled to announce that N47 is leading Sona's $45m Series B, alongside friends and partners at Northzone, Felicis, Gradient, and Italian Founders Fund! From care to hospitality, construction to QSRs and retail, the incumbent systems in place to support frontline industries in hiring, managing, scheduling, and paying their workforce are outmoded and ill-prepared for the performance advantages of AI. To meet this challenge and opportunity, Sona have built the leading, AI-native platform upon which frontline economy businesses can power their operations. I'm very much looking forward to working alongside Steffen, Ben, Oli, and the whole team at Sona as they continue to build something exceptional. Read about our partnership here: https://lnkd.in/ewx7eR9wBuilding the operational foundation for the frontline economy — N47Building the operational foundation for the frontline economy — N47
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Darian Shirazi liked thisDarian Shirazi liked thisI’ve said it before. In the next few years, we’re going to have AI-first companies or dead companies. And right now the gap between the two is looking a lot more like a canyon. And it’s widening WAY faster than leaders are willing to admit. AI is exposing decades of dysfunction that's now impossible to ignore. Enterprises are literally breaking under the weight of it. And the difference between who makes it and who doesn't is becoming very, very clear. I’m taking the stage at #HumanX next week with Natasha Mascarenhas from Bloomberg to dig into some new findings about what's actually happening on the front lines, why so many AI strategies are failing, and what the companies that ARE pulling ahead are doing differently with WRITER. If you’ll be at HumanX, come say hi! We’ll be on the main stage at 2:40pm PT on Tuesday!!
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Darian Shirazi liked thisDarian Shirazi liked thisWe are honored to welcome Joseph Spisak to the keynote stage at PyTorch Conference Europe in Paris! 🥐 Joe has been a pivotal force in the AI ecosystem for over a decade. During his leadership roles at Meta, Google, and Amazon, he helped make PyTorch the world’s leading open source AI framework and guided its transition to The Linux Foundation. Most recently, his work on the open source strategy for Llama has enabled the global community to scale AI in an unprecedented, collaborative way. Join us from 7-8 April to hear from a true architect of the open AI movement. Learn more: https://bit.ly/3Q0mCTE Full schedule: https://bit.ly/3PpSktm Join us in Paris: https://bit.ly/4bUWj91 #PyTorchCon #PyTorch #PyTorchFoundation #FutureOfAI #AI #GenAI #MachineLearning #ML #DeepLearning #OpenSource #OpenSourceSoftware #OpenSourceDevelopment #OpenSourceCommunity #OSS #LinuxFoundation #events #linux
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Darian Shirazi liked thisDarian Shirazi liked thisGREAT PANEL DISCUSSION - The New Rules of Fundraising: What VCs Actually Fund in 2026. Thank you to Kenan Saleh a16z, Lauri J. Moore Bessemer, Andrew Brackin Gradient Ventures, Madison Faulkner NEA, Brent Murri M13 David Kwon Abstract Ventures and Grace Gong Smart Venture Media #venturecapital #startups #cfo #tax #audit CLA (CliftonLarsonAllen)
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Gradient
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