At 8VC, we've spent over a decade investing in companies that bring operational intelligence to complex industries. Palantir demonstrated something foundational: raw data isn't enough to run an organization. You need to map the structure of how a business actually operates, on top of the data, to drive decisions at scale. That insight created hundreds of billions of dollars in enterprise value and reshaped how corporations and governments approach operations.

Over the last eighteen months, the concept of an agent has evolved in real time. Early on, it was largely a rebranding of workflow automation: deterministic pipelines with a language model somewhere in the loop. Useful, but not qualitatively different from what came before.