@boldstartvc: the Inception fund. Helping the bold start. First check for technical founders. Security, AI infra, physical AI, agents & the weird. What’s 🔥 👇

Miami
Joined January 2009
🔥 up to announce @boldstartvc Fund VII $250M to back bold technical founders building the autonomous enterprise. From Inception. Before the world believes. It always starts with an idea that feels insane… until it isn’t. 🎥👇🧵
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Ed Sim retweeted
I think this is the clarion call. Humans will not be able to scale this and respond fast enough or with enough context. We must build agentic self defense networks
this is the new era of cybersecurity 🤯 mass scale that's only going to get worse, and zero if not negative time to defend millions of attempts in a couple hours, some before disclosure even happened... no human SOC keeps up with that, defense has to be agents + compute running 24/7
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insane 48 hours keeps getting worse... 🤯 banks finding unauthorized AI agents inside customer accounts, some acting on their own, and execs can't tell human from agent or authorized from rogue every agent needs identity + intent, dynamic, at runtime, scoped to the task and gone the second it's done
SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios. The findings have alarmed banking executives, who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond, multiple industry and bank executives told Axios. Several banks are now preparing for worst-case and even “day after” scenarios, including how to rapidly secure or restore customer accounts if things go wrong, the people said. Several bank executives told Axios they're struggling to distinguish between human users and AI agents. One executive said banks also struggle to determine whether agents are authorized by customers or potentially operating without their permission, more akin to rogue agent behavior. Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…
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literally just spoke about this last week 👇 flagged JPM blocking services that rely on customers sharing bank creds w agents... a week later here we are 👀 great recap from @snyksec: snyk.io/blog/ai-security-pan… xitter.cf/edsim/status/211073004…
fun panel yesterday to kick off @AISecSummit in SF, an unfiltered look at what's happening hacking is democratized, and only way for defenders to keep up is with more compute but so much has to be built to make it work some things at inception i'm thinking about - the physical frontier - who's securing the data centers and neoclouds, and the next headache will be billions of new intelligent devices coming online 👀 thanks @dee_bosa for moderating with @mnair1 @snyksec @JohnHultquist + Michael D'Angelo @OpenAI
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every one of these agent attacks rides on long-lived creds and over-permissioned apps... short-lived task-scoped access with instant revoke isn't a nice to have anymore 🔥 exactly why we backed @KeycardAI
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every one of these agent attacks rides on long-lived creds and over-permissioned apps... short-lived task-scoped access with instant revoke isn't a nice to have anymore 🔥 exactly why we backed @KeycardAI
The China state-aligned threat actor Storm-0940 used the agentic AI penetration testing framework ARTEX to automate attacks targeting hundreds of organizations globally across a broad range of industries. Microsoft Threat Intelligence assesses that Storm-0940 was responsible for the recently disclosed ConnectWise supply chain compromise of a multitenant application. msft.it/6018aakEE Our investigation found that Storm-0940's use of ARTEX accelerated the speed of compromised application abuse to authenticate to target environments through applications that had already been granted access, allowing the threat actor to operate without requiring an interactive user sign-in. AI-accelerated follow-on activity included reconnaissance, application credential changes, and attempts to modify privileges that could enable expanded or persistent access. Read our blog for a detailed analysis and indicators of compromise (IOCs), along with Microsoft Defender detections, protection recommendations, and guidance on investigating service principal sign-ins and unexpected application credential or privilege changes.
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sage advice - what happens when AGI shows up in the middle of your AI journey? seeing this across the board - founders going after hard to solve problems they didn't even think of even a year ago - going to be super cool to see what founders cook up as they start projecting out on the timeline and start building today also key point - Demis believes that specialized models like an Alphafold should be called by a Claude, for example, as doesn't make sense to fol all those proteins into the model due to regression - so agree here - so many more specialized models to be built
Demis Hassabis said sth here that every builder should hear... Hard problems are no harder than shallow ones, they're just differently difficult So if it's going to be hard either way, pick the thing that will really make a difference And his advice for anyone starting today → imagine AGI showing up halfway through your journey, then build sth that's still useful in that world Watch the video, every second of it is gold
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this is the new era of cybersecurity 🤯 mass scale that's only going to get worse, and zero if not negative time to defend millions of attempts in a couple hours, some before disclosure even happened... no human SOC keeps up with that, defense has to be agents + compute running 24/7
Some stats on #php2shell. In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the @Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.
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Wrote more about this here in August. Insane past 24 hours already for security professionals.
What's 🔥 #510 dropped - post Black Hat 🚨 The agent swarm future is already here. Most of cybersecurity doesn’t see it yet. The OpenAI/Hugging Face incident made one thing clear: attackers will scale with tokens and compute. Defense must do the same. Compute fighting compute 👇 Full post here: whatshot.vc/p/whats-in-aiinf…
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Cybersecurity needs to build cyber defense factories like developers do. For that also need layer of models of frontier plus post trained own to defend and afford 24/7 compute. Lots to build.
Traditional human APTs vs. agent swarms… The only limit is compute. Defense needs to become compute scale too.
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Between LiteLLM and php2shell, it’s getting harder to ignore how much we need better controls across development environments and the path to production, including dependency checks, isolation, network controls, and stronger auth like proof of possession. It’s also why I think we’ll ultimately end up with agent-orchestrated software factories. Identifying what’s affected, containing it, and getting a clean build into production needs to happen faster than we can coordinate manually. These are the problems we’ve been working through in the software factory reference architecture. Link below 👇
🚨 PHP has released emergency patches for two critical RCE vulnerabilities. Organizations unable to patch are advised to take affected systems offline. Believe it or not, PHP still runs an enormous amount of the web. And nearly half of #PHP sites run EOL versions.
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the music gives you those nintendo vibes - just what an agent is supposed to give you
We’re opening a research preview of Claude Duet, a new app where Claude works as a proactive agent. It comes to you with what needs your attention, completes tasks you ask of it, keeps working when you step away, and checks with you before it acts on your behalf.
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Legacy modernization is already a tens-of-billions market and growing fast. The bigger unlock comes after: once the buried logic is readable, agents can actually run the workflows that used to sit locked behind opaque mainframe code 🤯 was just a matter of time
Our latest model advances bring stronger capabilities for building and migrating software in low-resource programming languages such as COBOL, Fortran, and Visual Basic. These languages power software that banks, governments, and businesses depend on. Progress here means understanding decades of business logic and helping developers modernize those systems while preserving what works. We’re building these capabilities around the challenges developers and enterprise customers bring us. If your team is working on these systems, tell us which languages and workflows we should tackle next. openai.com/index/low-resourc…
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🎯
Every organization in the world needs access to a strong frontier cyber model—ASAP. You should be sweeping your whole system as much as possible. This is the new world.
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feel for @opencode exactly what we discussed a couple of days ago... attackers have agents running 24/7. defenders can't afford to wait to deploy their own. defense needs more compute, running continuously. human teams alone can't keep pace. time to make the leap even though some things may break
fun panel yesterday to kick off @AISecSummit in SF, an unfiltered look at what's happening hacking is democratized, and only way for defenders to keep up is with more compute but so much has to be built to make it work some things at inception i'm thinking about - the physical frontier - who's securing the data centers and neoclouds, and the next headache will be billions of new intelligent devices coming online 👀 thanks @dee_bosa for moderating with @mnair1 @snyksec @JohnHultquist + Michael D'Angelo @OpenAI
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they've been non stop trying to attack our systems for the past 48 hours a side effect is everything is getting hardened but damn we basically need agents going 24/7 because that's what they have
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Awesome pod! Great to see @jadtnaous @grepr_ai with @martin_casado diving deep as AI generates more telemetry than we’ve ever seen And great answer @martin_casado on why AI won’t replace VCs or at least the ones who do the work - people and relationships will matter even more as world becomes more transactional but I hope the other way around and that it frees up to spend more time on the founder and people side And yes I’m pumped about what’s ahead for @grepr_ai
Engineering leaders told Grepr founder and CEO Jad Naous they spend 5 to 20% of their infrastructure budget on observability, and it's buying less and less reliability. Jad, a former a16z partner, joins a16z's Martin Casado to discuss whether AI can run production systems as well as it writes code. Grepr sits in a company's log stream, can scan a petabyte of logs a day, cuts observability costs by about 90%, and is building AI agents that use those signals to troubleshoot production issues. How AI is changing engineering at Jad's 10-person company: - A data lake feature that once took one engineer about six months took Jad 10 days - The gap between okay and great engineers on his team "just multiplied 10X" - He runs 3-4 agent sessions at once, with a "tech lead" agent reviewing every PR Why running live systems is a harder problem for AI: - Jad: AI can almost tune databases, but can't yet keep servers running on its own - Martin: every bit of code doubles the ways a program can behave, which is why humans still own systems - The real world is messier than AI's training data, self-driving took 20 years and $170B 0:55 From Stanford to a16z to Grepr 7:00 Why observability spend stopped paying off 11:00 From autocomplete to AI that trains engineers 13:10 Why AI widens the engineer skill gap 14:55 Syntax vs semantics 18:00 Inside Jad's AI workflow 22:55 Six months of work in 10 days 24:50 Can AI reason about how systems really run? 30:10 Why AI SRE tools start in the wrong place 32:30 Can AI run a distributed cluster yet? 37:35 Why engineers buy extra capacity over predicting 39:15 How AI could trace failures in production 43:45 Why AI for ops is harder than for code 49:55 Can AI do a VC's job? 52:05 Why self-driving took 20 years and $170B 57:05 Customers skipped the AI pitch for the 90% savings YouTube: youtu.be/blkIGLlZePg @jadtnaous @grepr_ai @martin_casado
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this is what we do, inception, nothing better than waiting for the company to incorporate and for founders to get their 83b elections set! we are seeing so many amazing opportunities at the moment - what a time to be building 🏗️ LFG
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Celebrating a major milestone - 10 years of What's 🔥 - haven’t missed a week! 520 issues! What started out as notes to myself and a way for me to process the week that was, has turned into a labor of love since i do enjoy writing... 🙏🏻 for reading, sending notes, and being on this journey with me… For #520, back from a whirlwind week in SF and @AISecSummit with a few thoughts: → fight agent swarms with agent swarms—we don’t have the luxury of waiting → the agents can’t hold their own keys → AI is going physical…who secures the robots and drones? → who secures the neoclouds powering all of this? Plus a look at where I’m investing next 👀 whatshot.vc/p/whats-in-aiinf…
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Time to build 🏗️ 🇺🇸
1/ muse spark open is the most capable US open-weight model to date. 816B total params, 42B active. 1M-token context. natively multimodal. built for coding and agentic work like long-horizon tasks, hard software engineering, multi-step reasoning. america! 🇺🇲
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SF mornings ☕️ talking software factories, agent identity and intent with @guypod @ianlivingstone
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