Congrats to @zainasgar & the @gimletlabs team on their $300M Series B! 🎉 Every AI product runs on infrastructure. As AI gets more powerful & adoption grows, demand grows exponentially. Gimlet's infrastructure gets more out of existing hardware, serving massive volumes of AI at a fraction of the cost. We're proud to partner with @zainasgar, Michelle Nguyen, @oazizi, @nserrino & James Bartlett. Watch @jai_das sit down with Zain to discuss Gimlet's journey. 🎥

AI has changed what counts as real product-market fit, & it's forcing a rethink of the SaaS playbook that built the last decade. Two Sapphires are taking the stage at @TechCrunch Disrupt next week with plenty to say about the shift underway. On Tue, @rajeevdham joins Anu Bharadwaj (@ICONIQCapital) & @rahulvohra (@Superhuman) for "PMF Red Flags: How to Tell If You Really Have It" moderated by @DominicMadori. On Thu, @cgao joins @aaronej (@NEA) & @BarrMoses_MC (@montecarlo_ai) for "Rewriting SaaS: Why AI Breaks the Old Business Model" moderated by @RebeccaBellan. If you're in SF for Disrupt, add both to your agenda: techcrunch.com/events/techcr…

Congratulations to @reactorworld! 🎉 We're proud to join the company’s expanded Series A as a strategic investor alongside @NVIDIA. We’re excited to partner with @taiuti, @_bschmidtchen, & the Reactor team as they set the standard for real-time world model infrastructure. Read more in our blog by @aranum, @jai_das, Adam Liu, & Jasmine Yang: sapphireventures.com/blog/sa…

Congratulations to @mati, @dabkowski_piotr, & the entire @ElevenLabs team on their $300M tender offer & $22B valuation! 🎉 From a $9M valuation at founding in 2022 to $22B today, doubling since this past February, ElevenLabs has moved beyond single-purpose voice generation into a full platform for AI-driven conversation, with enterprise leaders already putting it to work at scale. We're proud to partner with @elevenlabsio. Here's to what's next! 🔗 lnkd.in/gzVjBPnN

Congratulations to @minnasong & the @elise_ai team on the $350M round at a $4B valuation! 🎉 Since first partnering with EliseAI in 2024, we have been committed to supporting their mission to transform industries crucial to sustaining our lives. In just a couple of years, Minna & her team have revolutionized leasing & resident communications in housing, & are now also reshaping patient scheduling & care coordination in healthcare. Learn more: eliseai.com/blog/intelligenc…

Robots have been "two years away" for 20 years. That's finally changing. For the first time, the ingredients for commercial-scale physical AI coexist: 🔹 AI models that can reason & act in the physical world 🔹 Hardware costs down an order of magnitude 🔹 Real demand from labor shortages in manufacturing, construction & healthcare @adamdliu, Adrian Kania, Lou Segall & Jake Randall mapped the entire Physical AI landscape across 6 layers. 🔗 sapphireventures.com/blog/ph…

The gap between durable companies & short-lived hype is widening fast, & when every startup claims to be AI-native, telling the two apart gets a lot harder. @jai_das is heading to @HumanXCo Amsterdam to dig into exactly that. He'll be joined by @vidiborvc (@atomico) & @imthemusic (@RenegadePtnrs) for a panel, The AI Investment Reality Check, moderated by @romaindillet. 📅 Wed 9/23, Main Stage Panel: 15:40–16:00 CEST

Building strong, meaningful relationships with founders has always been at the root of venture. It's something @aranum hasn't lost sight of in his 14 years at @SapphireVC. His take on AI, what it means to show up for founders, & advice for those building today: 🔗 Read the full feature by @GillianTan for Future Nexus: heyfuturenexus.com/posts/sca…

The model layer is going plural. Intelligence is becoming cheaper, more abundant, & more interchangeable, & it's the throughline of our Summer 2026 Spotlight Newsletter. Here's what we've been up to this quarter… 🚀 New investments in @harvey, @gimletlabs, @baseten, & @chaidiscovery, + follow-ons in @BlockdaemonHQ, @clay, @cyera_io, @HuntressLabs, & @mercury. 🎉 Congrats to @BioCatch (joining Visa), @contentful (joining salesforce), @dremio (joining SAP), & @MirantisIT (joining IREN) on their next chapters. 💡 Fresh takes on AI x drug development, AI x design, & physical AI's breakthrough moment from @CGao, @rajeevdham & the team. 📢 @CGao on @BloombergTV, @Jai_Das on The Room Podcast, & @aranum in @crunchbase on the open-weight debate, agent trust, & what separates winning AI startups. 🎤 Our partners took the stage at Startup Grind, Web Summit, RAISE Summit, & Step SF. 📩 Read the full issue + subscribe here: linkedin.com/pulse/cheaper-i…

A big congrats to @SamarAtTemporal & the @temporalio team on the $550M Series E! 👏 We partnered with Temporal at the Series D, when AI agents were becoming more capable, but the infrastructure to make them reliable in production didn't yet exist. Six months later, agents are running payments + customer operations, & Temporal's durable execution layer keeps that work running no matter what breaks. We are proud to continue our partnership with Temporal. Read more about why we first invested: sapphireventures.com/blog/th…

Congratulations to @kareemamin, @vxanand, & the @clay_gtm team on the $115M funding round! 👏🎉 Over the past year, Clay has built out AI agents that can find ideal customers, monitor buying signals, & run outreach on their own, learning + improving with every use. We're proud to continue to partner with Kareem, Varun, and the entire Clay team as they build the next generation of agentic sales tools. 🔗 clay.com/blog/series-d

Huge congratulations to @winstonweinberg, @gabepereyra, & the @harvey team on the $550M funding round at a $15.5B valuation! 👏👏👏 Legal is one of the industries where AI is already delivering real, measurable value - work that's language-intensive, expensive, & full of repeatable processes well suited to AI. With 75% of Am Law 100 law firms already using Harvey alongside many of the world’s leading in-house teams, we are thrilled to partner as the team transforms how legal & professional services operate with the power of AI. 🔗 harvey.ai/blog/harvey-raises…

When anyone can ship an AI product in a weekend, what actually makes a company defensible? @aranum is taking the stage at @stepconference for a panel on Moats in the Age of Infinite MVPs alongside @marianebekker of @youdotcom, @alysaaco of @BainCapVC, & @anuraggoel of @Render. They’ll cover where durable differentiation comes from - proprietary data, customer-embedded workflows, & security & compliance choices that are harder to replicate than product features. Attending STEP SF? Add it to your agenda: stepsf.com/