
@benchmark investing at seed/ series a
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Joined March 2009
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Models are becoming smarter, faster, and cheaper, but the OCR industry hasn’t kept up.
We’re launching r-1 mini: the first model to offer truly premium parsing without the premium pricing. At $1/1000 pages, r-1 mini beats options that cost up to 25x as much.
Chetan Puttagunta retweeted
The hot new role emerging in law is the legal engineer. The New York Times dug into their rise at the intersection of law and technology.
"As artificial intelligence is becoming a bigger part of legal work, technology vendors like Legora, law firms, and in-house legal teams are all looking for people who understand both law and technology well enough to rewrite work flows and teach others how to use A.I. tools."
“It’s a true profession,” Daniel Himmel told @nytimes. Read the full story here: nytimes.com/2026/10/31/busin…
Chetan Puttagunta retweeted
Exactly a year ago today, we launched Starcloud-1 to space. To celebrate its birthday 🥳, we have put together some previously unseen footage we have from around the launch. I particularly like the footage we have of the @Starcloud_ kids! 😅👌
Starcloud-1 is operating today with the only @NVIDIA H100 in space, still the most powerful SI compute on orbit. With it we became the first entity to do training and high powered inference on orbit, and we now have 3 more launches coming up in the next year! We are planning to move almost all compute off Earth 🚀
See the careers page on our website if you want to join this awesome team!
Chetan Puttagunta retweeted
Legal professionals are moving from assistive to agentic AI, and @WeAreLegora is firing on all cylinders as a result. Coming off the strongest quarter in our history, we reached new highs in October.
On the business side:
- YoY top line growth was more than 6x, and October was the best pipeline month in Legora’s history, up 50%+ vs. last quarter-opening month.
- The number of new customers added grew 20%+ vs. the last quarter-opening month. Legora now has more than 2,600 customers across 80+ markets.
- Gross margin was up more than 10 points MoM.
- @JonesDay, @HoganLovells, @Littler, @BMWGroup and @Loyens_Loeff chose Legora.
- We raised $550 million at an $8.8 billion valuation, in a round led by @GavinSBaker at @Atreidesmgmt with participation from @Fidelity, @CapitalGroup, @BaronCapital, @GladeBrookCap, @jpmorgan,@MenloVentures, @benchmark, @Accel, @generalcatalyst, @Redpoint, @BessemerVP, @ICONIQCapital and others.
Product momentum:
- Big improvements in Agent quality and reliability, which is translating to MAU platform usage of ~20 hours per month
- Launched Ontological Legal research: Comprehensive legal data built on an ontology of law, with an AI-native citator that checks authority is current and binding.
- Launched Skills: Reusable instructions for the Legora Agent, with 250+ pre-built and the option to build your own.
- Launched Intake: A front door for in-house teams that turns business requests into tracked work, with a first draft from the Agent.
Personal highlight:
I grew up in New York and visited the @Guggenheim often as a kid. Returning this month to host Precedent New York, Legora’s flagship global summit, with 250 legal leaders in the room was surreal. The same building, but a very different reason for being there.
Thank you to our customers for trusting us as partners, and to the entire Legora team for the relentless work behind this record-breaking month. October belongs to all of you.
Let’s get to work.
Chetan Puttagunta retweeted
A positive second derivative at this scale feels like magic 😊
Every quarter at Sierra, we celebrate the end of the quarter with Double Denim Day (or, as some like to call it, Canadian Tuxedo Day) 👖. This Q3, we needed a lot of denim to celebrate the most remarkable quarter in Sierra's 2.5 year history.
We added over $150M ARR this quarter, bringing our total ARR beyond $400M. Remarkably, we added more ARR in one quarter than we had all of last year.
The most exciting thing to me is that our pace is accelerating. It took us six months to double from $100M to $200M ARR, and only five months to double from $200M to $400M ARR.
@claybavor and I are grateful to our customers and proud of the entire Sierra team.
Chetan Puttagunta retweeted
Jack and I spend much of our day discussing the latest in tech with our partners and figured why not extend that conversation to our friends on the internet. Let us know what you think!!
After 58 episodes of Uncapped it was time for a little format refresh.
Benchmark Breakfast, where @EverettRandle and I will talk about whatever's on our mind or in the news as though it's our monday partner meeting. Sometimes with guests sometimes without.
Here's the first one, let us know what you think 🤗
(0:00) Intro
(0:45) Introducing Benchmark Breakfast
(2:09) Anthropic S-1 drops
(3:59) The revenue vs. compute chart
(6:19) Growth volatility and consumption-based revenue
(7:11) The race for the best model
(10:21) Code gen saturation and software factories
(13:39) The AI-bottleneck trade
(17:39) Code gen as the most impactful PMF in history
(21:27) Durability is hard to call
(23:36) Investing in the trend vs. calling the next one
(26:09) Circular revenue vs. outside customers
(28:15) Open source vs. closed source steelman
(34:25) Own your intelligence
(36:29) Open source as a % of frontier spend
(40:52) AI and cybersecurity
(44:35) Abliterated models
(48:08) Bio, robotics, and physical abundance
(51:52) Why physical feedback loops are slower
(54:12) Ev’s dad and the promise of bio
(55:13) Halloween plans and the iPhone Duo
Chetan Puttagunta retweeted
After 58 episodes of Uncapped it was time for a little format refresh.
Benchmark Breakfast, where @EverettRandle and I will talk about whatever's on our mind or in the news as though it's our monday partner meeting. Sometimes with guests sometimes without.
Here's the first one, let us know what you think 🤗
(0:00) Intro
(0:45) Introducing Benchmark Breakfast
(2:09) Anthropic S-1 drops
(3:59) The revenue vs. compute chart
(6:19) Growth volatility and consumption-based revenue
(7:11) The race for the best model
(10:21) Code gen saturation and software factories
(13:39) The AI-bottleneck trade
(17:39) Code gen as the most impactful PMF in history
(21:27) Durability is hard to call
(23:36) Investing in the trend vs. calling the next one
(26:09) Circular revenue vs. outside customers
(28:15) Open source vs. closed source steelman
(34:25) Own your intelligence
(36:29) Open source as a % of frontier spend
(40:52) AI and cybersecurity
(44:35) Abliterated models
(48:08) Bio, robotics, and physical abundance
(51:52) Why physical feedback loops are slower
(54:12) Ev’s dad and the promise of bio
(55:13) Halloween plans and the iPhone Duo
Chetan Puttagunta retweeted
Today we launch Ontological Legal Research. The best data and the best technology, together at last.
Available now in the US. More jurisdictions to come.
Read more in our launch blog: legora.com/blog/introducing-…
From Benchmark leading the seed to an $8.8B valuation in 2.5 years, the Legora team has led the industry by bringing the best products to lawyers around the world. Thrilled to be joined by our friends at Atreides, Baron Capital, Capital Group, Fidelity, JPM, and many others!
We have raised a $550M Series E at an $8.8B valuation, led by Atreides.
Every major existing investor is back in, and we’re welcoming Baron Capital, Capital Group, Fidelity, Glade Brook and J.P. Morgan. We picked investors who think in decades. Several of them work with law firms and legal teams every day, so they can see where the work is heading.
Lawyers are moving from AI assistants to agents that do multi-step work. The money goes there. We’re growing our teams across North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific, and going deeper on the Legora aOS.
Thank you to the 1,000+ people at Legora, and to the 140,000 legal professionals who use what we build.
I say this a lot because I believe it: it’s the best time in history to be a lawyer. We're thankful to be a part of it.
Full story: legora.com/blog/series-e
Chetan Puttagunta retweeted
We’ve been selected as one of 4 new vendors chosen to advance to a FY27 Fly Off for the Army’s IFPC Inc 2 interceptor program.
More at breakingdefense.com/2026/10/…
@BreakingDefense @USARMYPIT @Furientis
Chetan Puttagunta retweeted
We spend a lot of our time at Instinct on things that go well beyond the classic use cases. But the classic use cases still have to work.
Last month, more than 20% of our users had Instinct help with their flights.
So we rebuilt the flight search and booking experience from the ground up. Your Instinct can now find you the best deals, book with a single tap, and take care of the messy parts of flying, like lost baggage, missed connections, and cancelled flights.
The team put a lot of care into the design, so we hope you like it.
im liking this new ui 👀 @noahrshinn
just in time to adjust my transoceanic plans
Thrilled to announce Benchmark’s investment in Furientis! This is a remarkable team building incredible technology to produce scalable, low cost interceptors.
Excited to announce @Furientis @DeptofWar OTA contract for 100mi interceptor and $25M Seed raise led by @benchmark!
This couldn't have happened w/o our incredible engineering team testing at industry best pace. Join us- we're hiring across all disciplines!
furientis.com/careers
Chetan Puttagunta retweeted
1/6 We submitted our application to the OCC to establish Modern Treasury National Trust Bank. If approved and authorized to open, the bank would add federally supervised digital asset custody and related fiat services to @ModernTreasury.
Chetan Puttagunta retweeted
I was in the Bloomberg studio in London this morning.
Q3 was the most hectic quarter in @WeareLegora's history. We added 800 new customers in three months and now work with more than 2,300 across 80+ countries. We also added more ARR this quarter than our total ARR at the end of 2025.
I was asked the jobs question, and my answer hasn't changed: our customers are hiring more lawyers.
Legal is supply constrained. If you could review every contract, you would. If you could run full diligence on every asset before it goes to investment committee, you would. Better tools mean more of that work gets done, and a lawyer still owns the judgment.
We talked about junior lawyers wondering whether they need to learn to code. With large language models, the programming language is English. I'm not especially good with words. Lawyers are, and they turn out to be some of the best drivers of our product.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I think this is the best time in history to be a lawyer.
Thanks @TomMackenzieTV for having me on The Opening Trade. Full interview below.
Chetan Puttagunta retweeted
Q3 2026 was the strongest quarter in @WeAreLegora's history.
By the numbers:
$200M+ ARR, crossed in September
2,300+ customers across 80 countries, with 800 new customers added during Q3
40%+ of new business from in-house legal teams
We added more ARR this quarter than our total ARR exiting 2025
We shipped improvements to our harness, reducing credit consumption tied to LLM costs on the Agent by ~25% while improving the response quality
Product: Q3 opened with our biggest-ever release: Legora Agent, Monitors, and Lists reaching general availability in June. From there:
AI-native Legal Research launched
@imanageinc MCP integration and expanded file handling went live
Legora on Salesforce AgentExchange and Legora inside ChatGPT (via @OpenAI for Law) shipped in the final weeks
Those releases are compounding inside the product:
Daily active users spend 2+ hours a day on the platform
Legal research searches per task have doubled
The average search reads 2x more documents
We also closed our fifth acquisition of 2026: Wexler, the London-based fact intelligence platform, now forming the factual foundation of Legora's agentic workflows.
New Q3 customers included:
@PaloAltoNtwks
@salesforce
@bradleylegal
@DanskeBank_UK
@SPGlobal
@FaskenLaw
Thank you to every Legora team member and every customer who bet on us. We intend to earn that trust every day.
More soon.
Legal spending on law firms continues to accelerate. Law firm customers of @WeAreLegora are growing and adding new business lines and expanding staff. AI is expanding the market.
Chetan Puttagunta retweeted
You may have heard that Legora has surpassed $200M in ARR at positive gross margins.
Here is the other half of the story: what happens after customers are on the platform. Usage has to map to value, and efficiency gains must show up for customers.
Most credit consumption on @WeAreLegora comes from two areas: LLM usage and document processing.
In August, we significantly improved our Agent harness, LLM routing, and orchestration. Credits tied to LLM usage on Agent dropped by roughly 25%, with response quality improving.
In September, we rebuilt how Legora ingests and processes documents. The work now uses ~25% fewer credits while maintaining quality.
Those two changes have reduced credit consumption for the same work by more than 20% since August. Consumption-based customers can now do the same work for fewer credits.
Next, we are working on additional harness and routing improvements, as well as more efficient document processing. As we find efficiency gains, our goal is to keep passing them back to consumption-based customers.
Legora is building a long-term company to support legal teams for decades to come. Our strong financial health makes that all possible. That includes a pricing model that gives back to our customers.
Numeral is solving the complexity of sales tax for thousands of businesses around the world with AI. The growth and execution from this remarkable team has been terrific. Thrilled to have invested in every round since we led the Series A.
Numeral has raised a $100M Series C, led by Insight Partners with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Benchmark, Mayfield, Uncork, Y Combinator, FCVC, and Geodesic.
This brings our total funding to $157M.
@numeral solves U.S. sales tax, VAT, and GST compliance for 3,500+ global businesses, trusted by companies like Supabase, Eight Sleep, and Graza.
We’re building the future of tax -- where AI agents, human expertise, and global compliance come together in one system.
Since starting the business in 2023, we’ve grown quickly across our core e-commerce and software segments, while expanding into new industries including manufacturing, distribution, and wholesale.
There is a lot of work in front of us. Sales tax is more dynamic than ever, with states like California implementing new taxes on software and more states using AI for enforcement.
We are hiring across the org from engineering to product, sales, and marketing. And we’ve just opened our new office in NYC. If you are looking for what’s next, I’d love for you to take a peek at our careers page.
Excited for the year ahead. And humbled to be working with investors like @insightpartners, @rebeccaliudoyle, @SalesforceVC, @katiessschwartz, @ZKokosa, @MayfieldFund, @SPangulur, @benchmark, @chetanp, @ycombinator, @gustaf, @uncorkcap, @susanwliu, @GeodesicCap, @arvindayyala, @FundersClub, @mittal, @mantisVC, @AlexPallNY, @ShaanVP, @lennysan, @moizali, @ringmybeller, @khency6, @asturnerr, @maariabajwa and so many others.





























