Founding GP at SE Ventures. $1B AUM. Investing in Physical AI & AI Infrastructure. Select Portfolio: Skild AI, Together AI, Foundry Robotics, Augury.
Menlo Park, CA
Joined September 2007
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- Following283
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Varun Jain retweeted
Love this @Revolut x @togethercompute x @Zai_org story.
Open-weights models are free/low-cost. @togethercompute has achieved startling efficiency (TPM/GPU) for serving open models like GLM. This is shifting companies from a scarcity to an abundance mindset when it comes to AI assisted software engineering, and resulting in accelerated software roadmaps.
Europe’s largest private company just made open models its default for coding.
@Revolut: ~2,000 engineers, 1/10th the cost, 70% faster lead time.
Proud to be part of the infrastructure powering open models in production 🚀.
Varun Jain retweeted
Foundry Robotics CEO @adarshkulkarni explains why robots that work 99% of the time still aren't reliable enough to build satellites:
"Something that's 90% reliable fails one out of 10 times. Something that is 99% reliable fails one out of 100 times. Something that is 99.99% reliable fails one out of every 10,000 times."
"So the difference between 90% and 99.99% is 1,000 times fewer errors. That’s why it’s so hard."
"When you're doing manufacturing for critical industries, when you're building drones or batteries or satellites, you really have to be pretty good. You gotta have the nines."
@FoundryRobotics
Today, @FoundryRobotics is announcing our $100M Series A, led by @MarlinspikeVC with continued support from @khoslaventures.
Together we’re securing America's ability to defend, compete, and innovate by building critical hardware at home with our new 130,000-square-foot factory in Emeryville, California.
We’re already shipping to paying customers across energy, telecom, autonomous vehicles, and defense. The next era of American manufacturing starts here.
Time to build.
Physical AI is about more than smarter robots. It’s about rethinking how factories operate and what they can manufacture. @FoundryRobotics is making that vision a reality. Excited to back this exceptional team led by @adarshkulkarni!
Today, @FoundryRobotics is announcing our $100M Series A, led by @MarlinspikeVC with continued support from @khoslaventures.
Together we’re securing America's ability to defend, compete, and innovate by building critical hardware at home with our new 130,000-square-foot factory in Emeryville, California.
We’re already shipping to paying customers across energy, telecom, autonomous vehicles, and defense. The next era of American manufacturing starts here.
Time to build.
Varun Jain retweeted
Very excited to announce the new post training platform from @togethercompute.
Together's team has deep experience in training, and have done seminal work in the field, from building the world's largest open datasets like RedPajama, new new architectures like Mamba, that have made their way into the world's leading models, to innovations in training kernels like FlashAttention. Our new training platform draws on that experience and talent to offer the most flexible and highest quality post training platform on the market today. Together Post Training, combined with our training FDE team, has been helping companies own their AI models and we'd love to help you if you are considering moving from rented to owned intelligence.
Varun Jain retweeted
Together is the #1 provider by volume of tokens (across closed and open endpoints) on @OpenRouter
openrouter.ai/providers
Enjoyed hosting @deepakpathak , Co-founder & CEO of our portfolio company @SkildAI, at @TechCrunch Disrupt yesterday.
One of my favorite moments was Deepak reflecting on what he’s had to unlearn as a founder. He once believed you could build a general-purpose robotics platform and leave deployment to others. The reality is far messier. Deployment is an integral part of the research loop, not something you can outsource while the technology is still maturing.
Equally telling was his observation that customers care most about how quickly a robot can be deployed and deliver value. That makes in-context learning a critical piece of scaling general-purpose robotics.
Skild recently crossed $100M in ARR, and they’re just getting started.
#PhysicalAI #Robotics
Varun Jain retweeted
We trained a robot to play football.
How? Self-play for 140 years in a virtual World Cup.
Meet the #Messinator:
Varun Jain retweeted
We're excited to announce a $12.35M Series A round of funding led by @Bosch Ventures and joined by new investors @MomentaOne and @counterpartvc!
This new round of funding will help us expand and advance #AmericanManufacturing.
More info: bit.ly/3YJGXNm
#SupplyChain
5 yrs. 30+ portfolio companies. 5 major exits (and several private unicorns). SE Ventures is now one of the largest venture platforms dedicated to providing capital and commercial acceleration to climate and industrial software startups.
wsj.com/articles/schneider-e…
Varun Jain retweeted
1/14 Not everything is made in China. America is home to thousands of manufacturing businesses, over 600,000 - most of which are small and medium businesses. --> a 🧵
Varun Jain retweeted
Google, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, and now Twitter run by CEOs who grew up in India. Wonderful to watch the amazing success of Indians in the technology world and a good reminder of the opportunity America offers to immigrants. 🇮🇳🇺🇸 (Congrats, @paraga!)
Varun Jain retweeted
7 years. Finally did it. Nobody behind the wheel. Much work lies ahead, but I'm so proud of the Cruise team and ridiculously optimistic about the future. This is the exact moment it happened.
(full vid here: youtube.com/watch?v=Pa7xU7PW…)
Good advice indeed!
Key lessons I learned founding 3 startups.
1 Optimize for size of pie, rather than slice
2 Join a CEO group
3 Success hinges on the quality of your team (so this needs to be #1 focus)
4 When things break, look inward first
5 Waiting to do hard thing will only make them worse
Varun Jain retweeted
After we blunt the initial wave in regions over a 4-6 week period, we will need to make the same decision China made. We will have to get back to work, even with risk, or the economic and social cost of staying contained will exceed the economic and social cost of the virus.
Varun Jain retweeted
Six weeks ago the idea that America would effectively shut down was unimaginable to many.
Now the idea that America - and the world - will restart in the next 3-6 weeks is similarly unimaginable despite being *overwhelmingly* likely.
Snapback rally will be violent.
Varun Jain retweeted
I am living through my third “reset” in Silicon Valley. Reputations are built in hard times, not the easy times. If you shake a hand, sign your name - stand strong, or your word is no good. Otherwise you are a transient that only wanted the easy take. And you should move on.
New chapter: Joining SE Ventures linkedin.com/pulse/new-chapt… via @LinkedIn
