Kalshi’s decision to put regulation before growth looks obvious now. It looked a lot less obvious when they were spending years on it without much to show on a chart.

Exa just passed $100m in annualized revenue. We've grown almost exactly 10x per year for 3 years. We now handle 2 billion requests a month from 200k+ teams. And it’s still so early: We predict agents will search 1000x more than humans by 2030. Agents don't search like humans. They write long, complex queries and want all the world's data, not just the web. We've spent 5 years building a search engine designed for them. We now serve personal agents, AI labs, coding agents, GTM agents, really any agent. Exa gives these agents access to 100s of billions of web documents and tons of proprietary data. Our customers are increasingly noticing that information is the bottleneck to agent performance. While the world seems close to perfect intelligence with models like Fable and Astra, we are very far from perfect information. To our small but legendary team, thank you for getting us here, from engineering to research to GTM to ops. To our customers, it is an honor to serve you. We have some exciting releases coming soon and can't wait to share them 🫡

I’m all in. Revolut to $1tn. 🚀🚀🚀

We are here for the Jevolution! 💞 Couldn’t have gotten this far without my partners who are in the tranches helping with this mission: @stuffyokodraws @venturetwins @steph_zhang @sarahdingwang @DavidGeorge83 @martin_casado @pmarca @bhorowitz Return the power to builders, and let them build! 👷‍♂️👨🏻‍💻👩🏾‍💻👷🏼‍♀️

It’s not just about having a record quarter, it’s also who you do it with. Proud of team @hebbia

Today marks three years since October 7th, when the largest number of Jews were murdered in one day since the Holocaust. It is difficult to describe the magnitude of devastation, sadness, and grief that now fills this day. I spent much of today reflecting on how it impacted me and so many other young Jews in America. For many of us, October 7th forced us to confront the fragility of our people. We deepened our Jewish identity in an effort to rebuild ourselves; we returned to tradition to reclaim our agency at a time when everything else was falling apart. Now, it seems that in the wake of one of the darkest days in our history, the decades-long freefall in Jewish identity has begun to turn the corner. I would like to offer my own story. Many of the most meaningful experiences of my life have taken place in the three years since October 7th. Notably, I had the privilege of volunteering in the south of Israel in early 2024, an experience that forever changed my relationship with the country and my identity as a Jew. During this volunteering trip, we spent time with the then-newly drafted Kfir unit, the largest infantry brigade in the IDF, and helped cook them a BBQ dinner. We sat side-by-side with these boys, Jews with roots from all over the world—Iraqi, Ethiopian, Syrian, Russian… I even met a lone soldier from my hometown—and heard their stories. Most were 18 or 19 years old, barely out of high school. I remember how excited they were to sit and eat with us, how positive they were, and how excited they were about the opportunity to serve their country. I remember finding it funny that they were thanking us for cooking them dinner, when they were the ones preparing to defend us on the front lines. I remember feeling both pride and grief at how young they were. Especially as young people, it can often be hard to comprehend how much of our lives are, in fact, up to us. So much of who we are is simply who we decide to be. As for my background, my mom is Israeli, and half my family lives in Israel. I’ve always felt a deep connection to the country and its people. I took my first steps there and, growing up, we visited our cousins as often as we could. But this trip (and the subsequent trips I’ve taken since) served as a dramatic recalibration for me in terms of what it meant for me to be Jewish. I came to more deeply understand my responsibility in maintaining the Jewish future. This understanding and appreciation has changed the way I’ve lived my life. It has had a profound impact on who I have decided to be. Today, we are reminded of the immense suffering facing our people and the world. And yet, it is central to the Jewish experience that sorrow and joy can exist side by side. We praise God’s goodness while reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish; we smash a wine glass into pieces at a Jewish wedding. On that same volunteering trip, I visited the site of the Nova Music Festival. It was springtime, and I remember the fields were covered in red Anemone flowers in what is referred to as Darom Adom (“Red South”). These dramatic flowers were blossoming among the charred remains of trees. Life was returning to a place once covered in blood. In the Torah, when Moses nears the end of his life, he speaks to the Israelites: “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life…” We choose life. Am Yisrael Chai

a16z's Alex Immerman, David George, and Sarah Wang on why a data center can lower your electricity bill: "It may seem counterintuitive, but a data center can help lower your electricity rate. A recent US study showed that for every 10% increase in data center capacity, residential rates went down by 40 bps." "You should think about it as a power grid is a shared fixed cost base: poles, wires, substations. A large stable customer, like a data center, can help spread those costs across more units of electricity. Simply put, more demand across a shared system is a positive." "Investment in shared infrastructure can also improve the economics for the households and businesses connected to it." "There's real examples of that today. It's not just lip service." Still, 56% of Texas voters say more data centers would raise their power bills. The catch is it depends on who pays. When developers cover their own grid upgrades instead of pushing them onto everyone else's bills, the savings are real. a16z's @rmcentush on how to get that right: a16z.news/p/why-texas-is-mak… @aleximm @DavidGeorge83 @sarahdingwang

Consumer AI primarily monetizes via subscriptions. But <5% of consumers pay for ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. ChatGPT launched ads in February, crossed $100m runrate revenue in 6 weeks, and $1b by August. Google + Meta combine for $500b+ ad revenue. We are so early in AI ads.

Today, I’m proud to announce Sardine AI Labs, an applied research group building fraud and financial crime AI models. As part of the launch, we’re funding 5 independent researchers with $375,000 in total funding. I’ve wanted to build this for a long time. Let me give you an early example of the work we’re doing: Typically, new card programs lack the data to detect fraud reliably, and they're often among the first targets for fraud rings. In testing on card issuers held out of training entirely, the very first foundation model from Sardine AI Labs improved fraud detection accuracy by 68% for a consumer card issuer and 41% for a business card issuer compared with standard machine learning approaches. Our consortium recently crossed 6.5B devices profiled and $1.8T in payments. This data, combined with our fantastic team of AI researchers and engineers, makes this lab and these early results possible. In addition, the Sardine AI Fellowship Program is an initiative I wanted to launch alongside Sardine AI Labs. When I was writing my PhD dissertation in the early 2000s, the preeminent research labs like Bell Labs, HP Labs, AT&T research did a lot to move research on various internet technologies forward. Over time, the concept of research labs withered away. This is our attempt to give back to the research community. We're funding up to 5 research fellowships, with $375,000 in total, for researchers who want to help push this work further. Key details: - Advanced-degree students, researchers, and faculty at US or Canadian universities. - Fellows work with the Sardine AI Labs team to build new foundation models, and are encouraged to publish in peer-reviewed venues. - Research areas include cross-institution generalization, multi-stream modeling, scaling laws, identity matching, real-time inference, cold-start learning, and applications beyond fraud. Here’s more about Sardine AI Labs and how to apply to the fellowship: sardine.ai/ai-labs I am absolutely thrilled to launch both of these initiatives. Thank you to the entire @sardine team who has brought this vision to life.

Thrilled to officially launch "Headless Hebbia" It's already one of our fastest growing product lines, customer reception has been phenomenal!

when @eriktorenberg joined @a16z, he asked to record our team meetings because he thought they'd make good content. this is the closest we've gotten. fun jam sesh with @DavidGeorge83 @sarahdingwang @santiago__rdz

a16z's David George and Alex Immerman on why the AI buildout is the next chapter of "Software Is Eating the World": David: "You're seeing it in CapEx. It's heavily covered in the data center build-out. It's heavily covered in the amount of capital that's been going in to fund the model development." "To put it into very deep historical context, because this is probably the analogy that we've seen the most of, this build-out just surpassed railroads as a percentage of GDP." "We all happen to think that if you fast-forward five to seven, maybe 10 years from now, we'll be looking at these numbers, and they'll probably be 20x higher cumulatively." Alex: "This does feel like the next chapter of Marc's 'Software Is Eating the World.' Over the last 15 years, software has transformed all these industries, but only a small fraction of the population could build it. None of us could." "But today, look at us. We all have a handful of automations running every night. If you think about the software demand, that means a lot more compute, chips, power, construction." @DavidGeorge83 @aleximm

Agent token usage on OpenRouter is up 14x. Every task is now a chain of model calls, and each call keeps getting cheaper. Companies are taking advantage of caching to reuse background information instead of processing it from scratch each time. I’ve seen @hebbia take advantage of this - they’ve seen their financial chat workloads become 10x cheaper to run. Same budget, 10x the work.

a16z's David George, Sarah Wang, Alex Immerman, and Santiago Rodriguez on the State of Markets, from AI and infrastructure to the next investment cycles: 1. Tech is the everything cycle. High-tech equipment, software, and R&D are now about 55% of US capital spending, and the AI buildout just passed the railroads as a share of GDP. The five largest hyperscalers will spend about $780B on capex this year, heading past $1T in 2027, and demand still outstrips supply at every point in the chain. 2. It's an earnings story. Stocks are up about 20% while multiples are down about 20%, and the S&P trades under 20x earnings. The market is up 90% since ChatGPT, on 15% earnings growth. 3. AI adoption is broad and shallow. 69% of the S&P 500 has a live AI deployment, 30% report a quantified result, and just 2% have AI doing a job they'd notice if it stopped. The power users are pulling away: the top 1% of AI spenders spend eight times the top 10%. 4. The private markets are enormous. Six private companies, Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, Stripe, Waymo, and Revolut, add up to about $2.4T by last round, more than every IPO of the past decade combined. "The founder is the asset class. The IPO is another financing event." Plus: why a data center can lower your electricity bill, what Amazon saying no to Muse and Instacart saying yes tells you about marketplaces, and the seven areas the team is most excited about next. 0:59 Charts from State of Markets II 2:59 Tech is the everything cycle 4:56 Is it a bubble? 6:31 Hyperscaler CapEx: $1T next year 12:12 CapEx is someone else's order book 14:36 Data centers can lower your bills 17:06 OpenAI and Anthropic vs. some of the best software companies ever 18:22 Enterprise AI: 69% adopted, 2% measured 20:32 The top 1% spend 8x the top 10% on AI 24:36 Spending on AI for growth or for savings? 28:46 Only 2% of households pay for AI 31:36 Amazon blocks Muse, Instacart welcomes 36:16 Software traded growth for profit 42:56 6 startups vs. a decade of IPOs 45:46 Why employees are turning down liquidity 48:44 Seven areas they're excited about YouTube: piped.video/lr3hNhA0IfQ @DavidGeorge83 @aleximm @santiago__rdz @sarahdingwang

You have to be a little crazy to rocketship to serving 20% of America's multifamily apartments + 30M renters in only a few years. Elise is crazy in the best way possible. Minna only calls me after 7pm on Friday or on the weekends. Their work ethic has led them to be embedded deeper in the housing market than perhaps any other AI company is in any services industry. Here's to the crazy ones - congrats to the EliseAI team.

EliseAI has one of the most impressive growth profiles we've seen across vertical AI, in its scale, pace, and durability. Elise has become synonymous with AI in property management. We led their round a year ago, growth has since accelerated, and we're thrilled to double down. Incredible work @minnasong and team!

Pokémon cards >>> (h/t @MosesSternstein)