Co-Founder & General Partner A*. Co-founder of Sauron, Eventbrite (IPO 2018, acquired by Bending Spoons), and Xoom (IPO 2013, acquired by PayPal)
San Francisco
Joined August 2008
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Today, we're announcing A* III, a $450 million early-stage fund.
We started @A_StarVC with the simple idea to be a founder's first believer.
We are generalists by sector, but specialists in the stage and craft of seed investing. We partner with founders before there is consensus, before there is traction, and often before there is even a product. We are not organized around a market thesis. We back exceptional builders and follow them into the most important categories.
That matters because seed investing has changed. It is more crowded, more visible, and increasingly transactional. Too often, firms use seed to secure an option and then wait for proof before investing real time and attention. Seed has become a market of access. We believe it should be a market of conviction.
We built A* around a different model. We commit early. We show up before external validation, deploying both time and capital from day zero to help founders find their first customer, make an early hire, or work through the decisions that define the company.
We are selective at the start and concentrated over time. We partner with a small number of founders and deepen our commitment as their companies take shape. The best outcomes come from knowing where to go deep and having the discipline to do it.
This approach has led us to companies like Ramp, Decagon, Whop, Cape, Simile, Paraform, Watney Robotics, and Mercor.
We're grateful to the founders who have chosen to build with us and to the limited partners who have backed us. With this fund, A* manages over $1 billion in assets less than five years after launch. Our job remains what it was on day one: back exceptional founders early and be the partner they need when it matters most.
Kevin Hartz retweeted
Introducing the eNO badge, your mini AI bodyguard for personal safety.
Orders open for the next 72 hours only, limited amount.
Link in the comments.
Tag someone you’d always want to keep safe. Your sister, your friend, your partner, or anyone who deserves a little extra peace of mind.
Congrats to @pranavmulgund, @stopitnaveen, and the whole team at Fragment! Amazing team building in a huge and overlooked market
Enterprise software has spent decades digitizing paperwork while leaving the hardest work to people. We're changing that.
Today, we’re launching @fragmentdata with $56 million in funding, including a Series A led by @8vc and a seed co-led by @generalcatalyst and @A_StarVC, with angels including @roelofbotha, @nikesharora, and @jeffawilke.
Kevin Hartz retweeted
Enterprise software has spent decades digitizing paperwork while leaving the hardest work to people. We're changing that.
Today, we’re launching @fragmentdata with $56 million in funding, including a Series A led by @8vc and a seed co-led by @generalcatalyst and @A_StarVC, with angels including @roelofbotha, @nikesharora, and @jeffawilke.
Kevin Hartz retweeted
Wabi 2.0 is live!
personal agents are one person, one chat. but the parts of life that matter run on more than one person
Wabi is an agent you use together. you talk to it, it does stuff, builds the apps you need, and anyone can join the thread - your partner, your best friend, the preschool moms groupchat
school changes pickup time → Wabi updates the family calendar, everyone sees it.
a show you’d both love → Wabi finds a night that works, gets the tickets.
the trip everyone keeps talking about → Wabi picks the dates, builds the itinerary, books it
go start a thread with your people 👇
🤖 Made with AI
Excited to double down on our partnership with @watneyrobotics! Since co-leading their seed round last January, we’ve watched the company grow from two founders testing robots in a Berkeley strawberry field into a team deploying autonomous systems in some of the world’s most demanding environments.
We’ve raised $80 million in Series A funding, co-led by the Valor Atreides AI Fund and Hummingbird Ventures, with continued participation from Conviction, Abstract, A*, and Grant Gordon. This brings our total raised to over $100 million.
We started Watney by asking a simple question -- what can a robot enable in industries where the work remains valuable on an infinite horizon? We found an answer in the fundamental inputs to civilization: energy, matter, and intelligence.
A robot will never be as charming as a barista or as personable as a housekeeper, but it can be more exacting than a surgeon. And, a breakthrough in one quickly becomes the capability of millions. We don’t imitate human motions or processes. We care about the new, differentiated capabilities robots can unlock. We work on problems where our choice of embodiment gives us an order of magnitude advantage, whether through precision, reliability, or scale.
Compute is just beginning to transform society, but it’s constrained by execution. Since 2025, Watney has been serving the largest hyperscalers in the world, helping accelerate their compute rollout through an end-to-end deployment model.
Across hundreds of thousands of hours in customer facilities, our systems have achieved more than four nines of reliability. They’ve enabled our customers to build data centers faster, at larger scales, and with more ambitious architectures. Today, we operate the largest fleet of dexterous robots running 24/7/365 across the United States.
This is all to say, it's an exciting time at Watney. We’re all here because we want to see more ambition in the physical world. We are hiring across all domains. Join us.
I just had Persona *call* my wife, @juliahartz, ask what she wanted for dinner tonight, then go and make the reservation. 🤯
Everyone’s been asking what’s next after selling Cal AI.
Introducing Persona.
Others couldn’t figure out the interface, we did.
yourpersona.com/band
Kevin Hartz retweeted
Our new Trusted Person network is now available to all Instinct users! You can get started by asking your Instinct to add a few friends to your trusted network.
For the next two days, you’ll receive an additional 15 invites - bring the most important people in your life into your network.
Thank you to our early access users for helping with testing over the last few days. Some of the use cases that were shared with us:
- Meetings: finding 1 on 1 time with trusted people has never been easier.
- Dinner with friends: Instinct reached out to 10 peoples’ Instincts, found a common time, booked a restaurant reservation, and sent out the invites.
- Recurring tennis lessons: Instinct keeps a standing session available on both sides (trainer and student), and adjusts it when one side’s calendar has a conflict.
Today, we’re announcing Antioch’s $32 million Series A, led by @GreylockVC with participation from @A_StarVC, @Category_VC, @BoxGroup, @IcehouseVenture, and angels.
While AI has drastically accelerated software development, physical autonomy has been constrained by slow, expensive hardware-based development. Antioch enables physical AI teams to build, test, and validate systems at the speed of software.
We’re proud to be working with leading teams including @amazon @ring, @NVIDIARobotics, and @nebiusai as we make scaled, high-fidelity simulation the standard for physical AI development.
Our sincere thanks to the legion of investors, customers, partners, and advisors who are making this step change possible.
We’re scaling rapidly and hiring across simulation, infrastructure, machine learning, 3D graphics, go-to-market, and operations.
Kevin Hartz retweeted
Today, we’re announcing Antioch’s $32 million Series A, led by @GreylockVC with participation from @A_StarVC, @Category_VC, @BoxGroup, @IcehouseVenture, and angels.
While AI has drastically accelerated software development, physical autonomy has been constrained by slow, expensive hardware-based development. Antioch enables physical AI teams to build, test, and validate systems at the speed of software.
We’re proud to be working with leading teams including @amazon @ring, @NVIDIARobotics, and @nebiusai as we make scaled, high-fidelity simulation the standard for physical AI development.
Our sincere thanks to the legion of investors, customers, partners, and advisors who are making this step change possible.
We’re scaling rapidly and hiring across simulation, infrastructure, machine learning, 3D graphics, go-to-market, and operations.
First South Carolina, then the world! @MonacoGTM
Kevin Hartz retweeted
Weeks after launching Max, we’re growing faster than at any point in our history.
In the last quarter:
• DAUs have 3Xed…
• Total LLM usage has 5Xed, across both frontier, and our own post trained models…
• 40%+ of monthly active users use Hebbia on an average day, and 70%+ use it in a given week, with many of our customers still onboarding to the latest product.
The business has never been stronger:
• We beat 7 competitors to win the largest RFP in investment banking, and closed 10 banks shortly thereafter expanding our TAM well beyond our core investor business.
• We hired 100 people since January, doubling our headcount across London, SF, and NYC.
• We launched a new SKU that closed several of the biggest contracts in company history within *weeks* of first customer conversations.
• The majority of our Series B raise remains untouched. We remain remarkably capital efficient.
There’s a lot of noise in the market. This is a very dynamic market that changes rapidly, and we’ve never been more bullish on our market adoption, product leadership and ability to execute moving forward.
And of course, we’re hiring. careers.hebbia.ai
Come build the future of finance.
Kevin Hartz retweeted
Today, we're launching Monaco into General Availability.
We onboarded several hundred hypergrowth startups during our beta. The results are staggering:
The average customer added 16 percentage points to their month-over-month revenue growth rate.
The average customer tripled their monthly meeting volume.
With today's release, Monaco is now the most advanced AI sales platform in the world.
Monaco customers have an unfair competitive advantage.
Kevin Hartz retweeted
There is so much opportunity to disrupt .COM boom companies rn. Most suck so bad.
literally build with AI + grow with Cal AI style marketing = world takeover.
Kevin Hartz retweeted
Frontier drug discovery programs require frontier capabilities. Today, we’re excited to share that BMS will be using Chai’s models to support the discovery of new therapeutics. Since rolling out Chai-3 to partners at the start of this year, we’ve partnered with @EliLillyandCo, @Novartis, @Pfizer, @argenxglobal, and now @BMSnews. Many of the world’s leading biopharma companies are now using our models to go after diseases.
Scientific discovery is the domain where access to frontier AI matters the most. At @ChaiDiscovery, we’ve seen first hand how our latest model generations can make the difference between discovering a molecule and not. We’re excited to work with @BMSnews to break new ground in medicine and science.
Kevin Hartz retweeted
At Cartesia, our #1 value is "Get the fundamentals right".
This value has been with us since Day 0. It shaped the research @_albertgu led during our PhDs: rather than using the same algorithms & architectures for every problem, he asked whether they were the right tool for the job.
New algorithms will help us process the raw data in domains like audio, video, health, and robotics, and SSMs were born from that observation.
At @cartesia, the same value is core to how we build models. We've obsessed over every detail in building our 10-layer cake (parfait?): data, systems, algorithms, post-training & RL, evals, inference, serving, platform, product surfaces, and customer feedback loops.
These foundations enable us not only to produce world-class models, but to rapidly turn research advances into production-ready systems that scale reliably across millions of interactions.
As a researcher myself, it's exciting to see that we're #1 on AA. From my perspective, the most exciting result is our leading position on the Controlled Voices benchmark.
It's hard to game that benchmark because @ArtificialAnlys clones the same 8 voices on every model. It truly tests the model's ability to generalize. We're both #1 and #2 on that benchmark now with Sonic-3.6 and Sonic-3.5.
We're just scratching the surface. Our latest algorithms haven't fully made their way into these models yet. The work is advancing faster than ever before, and we have exciting new results in model intelligence & data efficiency coming soon.
Audio is the first step - it’s one of the simplest physical signals of the world. We’re tackling multimodal models next - models that will bridge the gap between knowledge & reasoning (text), and the physical world (other domains).
Our core belief is that a fundamentally sound approach that uses the right algorithms will generalize to all the data arising from the dance of atoms in our universe. From audio to video, robotics, biology, and everything else.
Expect many more exciting releases from us in the coming months.
Introducing Sonic-3.6: our most lifelike TTS yet, and another step change in naturalness across 44 languages. Just three months after our Sonic-3.5 launch, we've made fundamental model improvements based on feedback from the teams building on Sonic.
We're #1 on @ArtificialAnlys across both the provider and controlled voice streaming leaderboards — best-in-class voices + the best underlying model.
Available in beta today. Hear it for yourself 👇
Kevin Hartz retweeted
Introducing Cues: Voice & Gesture control for Matic
We raised $115M and spent 9 years to make the world’s first intuitive home robot
Say you spilled coffee: Point to the spill and say, "Hey Matic, clean this" and it will hear, see, locate in 3D, and go clean on its own.
Matic comes with a lot of features:
1. Say "Hey Matic" - it locates your voice, turns, and looks at you
2. Say "Hey Matic, follow me" and start walking. Matic will follow behind
3. Say "Hey Matic, go clean the living room". Since it knows your house map, it navigates and just does it
It's so easy, a 5 year old and an 80 year old can use it and it understands 75 different languages.
Matic has 8x the airflow, specialised cleaning algorithms for rugs, corners, toekicks, mopping, etc and cleans better than any other robot vacuum.
Also keeps improving with software updates.
13,000 families use and love Matic.
WIRED magazine gave it a 10/10 (the only hardware to receive this rating in a decade)
Buy yours at maticrobots.com and if you don't love it after 6 months, we'll give you a full refund.
To celebrate our launch, we're cleaning 300 homes with Matic in San Francisco and New York City.
Comment "Matic" below, we'll send you the link to sign up and come to your doorstep to clean your home with Matic.