The latest from 8VC

At our September Chat8VC gathering, we hosted Mike Del Balso, founder and CEO of Tecton and a visionary behind Uber's Michelangelo, for a conversation with 8VC Partner Bhaskar Ghosh. As a reminder, Chat8VC is a monthly series hosted at our SF office where we bring together founders and early-phase operators excited about the foundation model ecosystem. We focus on having highly technical, implementation-oriented conversations and give founders and builders the opportunity to showcase what they’re working on through lightning demos and fireside chats. This can be a fun side project, related to a company they’re starting, or a high-leverage use case within a company operating at scale. 

We were delighted to engage in a dynamic conversation with Amjad Masad, founder and CEO of Replit during our August Chat8VC gathering. As a reminder, Chat8VC is a monthly series hosted at our SF office where we bring together founders and early-phase operators excited about the foundation model ecosystem. We focus on having highly technical, implementation-oriented conversations and give founders and builders the opportunity to showcase what they’re working on through lightning demos and fireside chats. This can be a fun side project, related to a company they’re starting, or a high-leverage use case within a company operating at scale. 

We were delighted to engage in a dynamic conversation with Andrew Lee (co-founder/CEO of Shortwave) and Dennis Xu (co-founder/CEO of Mem) during our June Chat8VC gathering. As a reminder, Chat8VC is a monthly series hosted at our SF office where we bring together founders and early-phase operators excited about the foundation model ecosystem. We focus on having highly technical, implementation-oriented conversations and give founders and builders the opportunity to showcase what they’re working on through lightning demos and fireside chats. This can be a fun side project, related to a company they’re starting, or a high-leverage use case within a company operating at scale.

It’s hardly news that we’re living in an era of information overload, with an unrelenting explosion in data volume, complexity, and fragmentation - most of it by popular demand. As user personas have multiplied, new tools and systems of record have cropped up faster than they can be managed. Despite massive data growth, there’s an increasingly acute shortage of data discoverability and transparency. Simply determining what lives where is surprisingly difficult. Perhaps most worrisome, the downstream consequences of data misplacement and breaking changes extend far and wide. 

AI and automation have become essential components in the developer's toolkit, transforming the way we build software and offering the best hope yet of meeting the unrelenting demand for scale, speed, and reliability that has come to characterize the cloud-native era. Whether as engineers or investors, when attempting to identify the essential tools amid a sea of contenders, context is everything. This is doubly true for generating test code - a realization that helped to guide the formation of 8VC’s newest portfolio company, SapientAI.

Spartan Radar’s momentum continues to build following their Series B (led by 8VC and joined by strategics Microsoft and Wipro), with rapidly expanding partnerships and the addition of radar engineering authority Dr. Matt Markel as President. In this post, we explore how Spartan’s ambitious yet pragmatic approach delivers immediate safety upgrades to today’s automotive industry, while scaling to an autonomous future.