Upfront Ventures

“SF never disappoints!” – said Kesar Varma while visiting SF’s HealthTech scene last night. Last night, the event was PACKED with awesome Founders, VC, builders, clinicians, and executives; and it was all made possible by partnering with Upfront Ventures (especially Kesar Varma) and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (especially Shawn Lichaa, Brian Appel and Patricia Swen) 🙏 🚀 Feel the difference at our next event on May 7 with Innsena and Vanta by signing up for my newsletter (that button under my face 😃) Also thanks to Emre Vural and Chris Gow. #HealthTech #HappyHour #Startups

ICYMI: Upfront General Partner Nick Kim interviewed Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital at this year's #UpfrontSummit to talk about the future of science, including how Josh thinks where the automation of science could be headed 👇 You can check out the full conversation on our YouTube channel!

Thrilled to share the full video of a recent keynote chat at Upfront Summit between Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity and Steve Jang, Managing Partner at Kindred Ventures. It’s an insightful discussion about where the company is going and a lot of the deeply held beliefs that have helped them create one of the fastest growing products by usage, revenue, and user love in the age of AI. Building amazing generational products is a mix of vision and hard work, of excellent taste and brilliant serendipity. We’ve had the honor of backing and serving as a small part of incredible journeys like Uber, Coinbase and many others. Today, our portfolio company Perplexity is surging in great velocity with its pioneering answer engine and sonar API, and navigating its own unique course within AI. We believe the Perplexity team led by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats Johnny Ho and Dmitry Shevelenko are the very best product design and engineering team in AI, alongside Waymo, Midjourney, Cursor/Windsurf, and ChatGPT. In this fireside chat, Aravind and Steve cover topics including the Perplexity’s consumer and enterprise product vision, open vs closed source AI models, the deep research experience, coming AI regulation, and Aravind’s own fascinating journey as a first-time CEO. Please enjoy! 🤝🏽 p.s. thanks again to the fine folks at Upfront Ventures for hosting ❤️ https://lnkd.in/gbnspGmV

🚨 We’re hiring a Founding Engineer at Kubera Health! 🚨 Kubera helps healthcare business teams manage complex documents, payments, and reporting. Our platform powers the teams behind patient care—helping them operate in a financially sustainable way. We’re building the infrastructure (“the pipes”) for healthcare contracting, finance, and decision-making. As a founding engineer, you’ll build features end-to-end, get to utilize novel applications of AI across the stack, and be part of a small, mighty, and fun team of “Kubera Koalas”—all while building for customers responsible for the care of hundreds of thousands to millions of patients. App link here: https://lnkd.in/evFHq6iQ

Come put your creativity to the test at AlleyCorp's upcoming AI + Robotics Hackathon (in partnership with betaworks and Upfront Ventures), where you'll get the chance to showcase your skills through Hugging Face's LeRobot automation models. Thanks to J.P. Morgan, Brannon Jones, Nicole Ripka, Krish Mehta, Krish Shah, Derrick S. Thomas and Alex Marley for hosting! Link in the comments to register.

Today, we’re excited to announce three new well-deserved promotions here at Upfront, reflecting our continued focus on specialized domain expertise 🎉 ➡️ Jacques Sisteron has been promoted to Partner - you’ve likely come across him in El Segundo, bringing his passion and extensive experience in the hard tech industry ➡️ Kesar Varma has been promoted to Partner - he has been an essential part of our team, sourcing deals and collaborating closely with founders in the health tech and gaming sectors ➡️ Peter Zakin has been promoted to Partner - as a former founder, Peter applies his technical expertise to continuously seek much-needed solutions to the challenges within the AI and developer tools space Please join us in congratulating these three and if you are a founder building in these areas, please be sure to reach out and connect!

Sensing at the edge will create novel datasets that change industries from oil and gas to power transmission, HVAC to water infrastructure. We at Upfront are investing heavily in this and excited for what this means for critical infrastructure across the country.

Help us congratulate Lauren Wetzel and the whole team at InfoSum on this exciting milestone! 🚀

It’s been amazing working alongside Brian Lesser Lauren Wetzel these past few years. It’s really nice to see both sides win and great people prosper. Congrats to WPP / GroupM on acquisition of InfoSum 👏🏼 👏🏼 👏🏼 https://lnkd.in/g9uhBgr4

VC platform people - do you have a burning question about producing the Upfront Summit? Are you attending the VC Platform Summit next week? Come on Weds and ask me all the questions, so I don't have to monologue my entire session, Cory Booker style. Share your large scale event tips with me too! Or we can just chat. I'm not precious. (I appreciate that this is a niche call to action as well as a laughably AI generated image, LinkedIn algorithm. Please don't penalize me.)