lover, not-fighter. building and funding startups: @kindredventures, @heartbeat
on my 📲 too much
Joined October 2008
- Tweets35.6K
- Following798
- Followers40K
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Kanyi Maqubela retweeted
Big congratulations to the @fal team on their $1.65B financing led by @sequoia, @BessemerVP, and @nvidia and their phenomenal growth as the foundational inference and post-training platform for the generative media space! Led by @burkaygur and @gorkem, the company hosts and optimizes over 3000 models now, and provides the fastest inference and custom model development for both AI-native builders and Fortune 500 companies.
More on our continued investment and support of their awesome journey:
kindredventures.com/announce…
Kanyi Maqubela retweeted
Today, we’re announcing we raised our Series E & F rounds for a combined total of $1.65B. Our Series E was led by @sequoia and our Series F was led by @BessemerVP with continued investment from @nvidia.
We’re excited to push the boundaries of what’s possible even more next year and this funding will enable the team to build the way we want to.
Kanyi Maqubela retweeted
We spent $600B - $1.2T in real dollars fixing Y2K. It was a huge effort!
The lack of major problems from Y2K was more a result of solid preparation than misplaced fears.
Kanyi Maqubela retweeted
The new Holon-S1 model from @SophontAI is a strong example of how specialized domain-specific models can compete with or beat pure-scaling approaches in many fields - in this case, medical AI. Kudos to @iScienceLuvr @humanscotti and the Sophont team! Proud of you at @KindredVentures 👏👏👏
Cancer patients with the same diagnosis often have very different tumor biology.
Molecular testing can reveal underlying differences, but that's slow and expensive.
Introducing Holon-S1, our platform to predict genes and biomarkers from routine pathology slides.
• beats two other models at predicting spatial gene activity in a controlled comparison
• has identified potentially novel biomarkers in breast cancer and colon cancer
• evaluated across 16 organ types and more than 15 scanners, using slides from both formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded and fresh-frozen tissue.
We believe Holon-S1 has the potential to help researchers find new biomarkers in slides they already have, discover treatment targets, and bring more personalized cancer care within reach!
Kanyi Maqubela retweeted
AI x bio has had an insane week.
> Radical Numerics: Omnii-1 designed phages given to a human patient
> Claude: 17 scorpion-toxin binders validated in the lab
> OpenAI: acquired Orchestra Bio
> OpenAI + PerturbAI: agents found new neurodegeneration leads in 32 minutes
> RFD4-Proteina: open programmable protein design model
> BioEmu2: new biomolecular simulation model
> Chaperone: agent framework connecting 50+ protein design tools
> Xaira: launched X-Scientist for agentic drug discovery
> Sophont: Holon-S1 predicts gene activity from pathology slides
> Boltz + BMS: bringing biomolecular models into pharma workflows
> Phylo + Bayer: deploying Biomni Lab across research teams
> Kevin Weil, ex-OpenAI, launches Warp Sciences: AI + robotic labs for drug discovery
> Carbon-X: open DNA model its team says matches GPT-6.1 Sol at ~1,000x lower cost
This is happening across the whole stack: models, protein design, simulation, agents, robotic labs, pathology, pharma workflows, and actual patient use. Bio is becoming computer.
Kanyi Maqubela retweeted
Sophont CEO @iScienceLuvr explains how Holon-S1 can extract insights that usually require expensive molecular tests from an ordinary cancer biopsy slide:
"Why is it so hard to cure cancer? Because cancer’s a very diverse disease. Even though two people may have the same exact diagnosis, the underlying biology can be quite different."
"There are various tools for doing this, molecular tests and so on, but a lot of these tools can be quite expensive and time-consuming. Can we extract a lot of those similar insights directly from a tissue slide?"
"Whenever a cancer patient has a solid tumor, the gold standard is you take a biopsy, put it on a slide, under the microscope, and a doctor is analyzing that."
"We can take that same exact slide and with AI extract a lot more information about what’s happening at the molecular level, what genes are being expressed, and what makes that tumor unique for that patient."
@SophontAI
Cancer patients with the same diagnosis often have very different tumor biology.
Molecular testing can reveal underlying differences, but that's slow and expensive.
Introducing Holon-S1, our platform to predict genes and biomarkers from routine pathology slides.
• beats two other models at predicting spatial gene activity in a controlled comparison
• has identified potentially novel biomarkers in breast cancer and colon cancer
• evaluated across 16 organ types and more than 15 scanners, using slides from both formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded and fresh-frozen tissue.
We believe Holon-S1 has the potential to help researchers find new biomarkers in slides they already have, discover treatment targets, and bring more personalized cancer care within reach!
Kanyi Maqubela retweeted
Super excited to back the pioneering founders of @dreamlabs_ai on their world action model vision! Congrats to @jang_yoel, @scott_e_reed, @GeYunhao @youliangtan on their:
🔋$90M seed raise with @BCapitalGroup @ACapitalLP @svangel @Unusual_VC @Wing_VC @bznotes @Thom_Wolf @jhong @gharik @adrianaoun and us at @KindredVentures ❤️
🤖 shipping the Dream-1 model via API for general availability. The first World Action Model for public use by developers.
📈 achievement of frontier performance of top scores across the board by @robocurve on difficulty performance, latency, and cost against the SOTA LLMs from @anthropic @OpenAI @GoogleDeepMind 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
Kanyi Maqubela retweeted
we've seen driverless cars, industrious arms and humanoids, and even athletic robots.
now, welcome to the world of fun character robots - bringing animatronics into the AI era!
go Hugo and the @dynamicreatures team 🧸
Introducing Hugo: the first human companion robot.
At Boston Dynamics, I was Chief Strategy Officer, bringing robots into the real world.
My co-founder, Farbod Farshidian, led research at the RAI Institute.
Together, 15+ years teaching robots to run, jump, and work.
So we asked: what if robots could connect with people?
Hugo runs on the first Vision-Language-Expression (VLE) model.
He links what he sees and hears to movement, expression, and gesture.
He notices you, reads the room, and reacts in real time.
And he's only the first.
Dynamic Creatures is @BostonDynamics' official entertainment and hospitality partner.
We're building a cast of characters with film studios, resorts, and theme parks.
dynamiccreatures.com
Kanyi Maqubela retweeted
interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had
with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works
already-clean.goodfire.com/
Kanyi Maqubela retweeted
Go @MeckaAI! Congrats on your $60B Series B ❤️
Total outlier cracked team building original tools, infra, and specialized models just to create the very important data that robots and phys AI research labs need.
here’s to smarter and more dexterous robots, much sooner please! 🍻
Kanyi Maqubela retweeted
Robots need data that LLMs hadn’t required: perceptual and physical actions, and their consequences, at scale and then verified across various embodied agents.
The team @MeckaAI has tackled this data and deployment problem assuming a multimodal deep learning approach would emerge beyond just VLAs. Since then, the resulting customer growth has been simply incredible.
We’re excited at @kindredventures to double down with @joshavata @jasontheutopian and team in this latest round, and support them on the next chapter of growth! 🦾🦾🦾
Kanyi Maqubela retweeted
Bigger, better, and even more electric, the 2nd annual GenMedia Conference put on by @Fal last Thursday in SF was a global gathering of the growing number of really incredible builders and creative pioneers in the space. Some highlights below:👇🏽
- Fal has 3000+ models now hosted and available for inference. It was less than 50 two and a half years ago. The neolabs and established labs in generative media continue to grow and diffuse in specialty. 📈
- Fal Agent and Agent API launched and make the optimal model routing decisions for customers and devs. Building more above-the-token power and efficiency for creatives and enterprises ⏩
- @fal Research Labs moved out a new pareto frontier with a 35x performance improvement post-training an open weights video model re H3 Max. They are open for business to post-train models for any foundation model lab that seeks to commission it! 🏋️♀️
- Their new world model accelerator launched and proposes a long-horizon compute environment for world model labs and devs to explore a novel extended user experience versus the one-off generation workload. ♾️
- Iteration speed is the game changer in hollywood’s usage of gen media - not replacement of creativity and human originality. ⏩ ⏩
- best schwag bar ever. see @adamho’s timeline. ✨
- Live interactive storytelling and social experiences are now proven and possible with the latest breakthroughs in real time generation. Neo-studios are taking notice! 🕹️
- In my fireside with the head of Amazon MGM Studios, we spoke of “the Toy Story moment” that will happen soon bringing human art direction and storytelling, enhanced by frontier gen media models, to the wonderment of a mass audience. The models are now ready, and the creative artists and tools makers are making incredible progress. 🧸
- Like with LLMs, Gen Media is massively compute-bound and @fal is on the case with a multi-year commitment to build 1 GW of compute as the foundation infrastructure for the space. 🔋⚡️🏭
Our CEO and co-founder @burkaygur opened our GenMedia Conference in San Francisco this morning with one message: cost shouldn’t decide which ideas get made.
We’re building every layer, from fal Agent and the H3 Max model family to the compute that runs them, so creatives, builders, and enterprises can make whatever they imagine.
Kanyi Maqubela retweeted
Founder & Managing Partner at Kindred Ventures, @stevejang is joining us at GMC 2026.
At GMC, he’ll join us for a fireside chat alongside Albert Cheng, Head of AI Studios at Amazon MGM Studios, on how studios are adopting generative tools and what investors are watching as the next era of filmmaking takes shape.
September 24 in San Francisco.
Kanyi Maqubela retweeted
disturbed by the confidently held opinions and lack of curiosity from tech leaders, politicians, vc’s on the pacing the frontier topic.
if you’re not building the frontier yourself, how can you possibly have a strongly held opinion on how bad the alignment problem is and what’s coming our way and what the right policies are?
now is the time to listen with big dumbo ears. i have been talking to research friends all weekend and the fear is sincere. i’m sure there are 4D chess moves and hidden motives, but the fear is sincere.
i for one don’t have a strongly held opinion, other than that now’s the time to listen with curiosity instead of judgment.
Kanyi Maqubela retweeted
I’ve successfully run the full retained MaleCNS v1.0 fruit fly connectome, all 166,700 neurons, inside Minecraft, with its simulated neural activity driving a fly’s movement.
V1 Currently in development. Built with the help of GPT-6 Astra.
Props to the @OpenAI team and @thsottiaux for this release. Code and mod coming soon!
For the first time, scientists have mapped the complete brain and central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly — a key model organism in science. 🪰
Working alongside HHMI Janelia Research Campus and the scientific community, @GoogleResearch scientists and researchers used AI to combine millions of 2D images into 3D neural shapes, reconstructing a record-breaking 166,000+ neurons. This foundational map of the adult male fruit fly brain can help accelerate our understanding of the brain, and is a major milestone in neuroscience.
ALT Vibrant 3D digital reconstruction of a fruit fly brain against a white background, displaying a dense, intricate network of multicolored neural fibers and cell bodies in shades of blue, cyan, orange, and purple.
ALT A complex 3D visualization of a fruit fly brain, featuring a dense, symmetrical network of thousands of tiny, multicolored neurons and fine, interconnected fibers in shades of blue, magenta, orange, and green against a solid white background.
Kanyi Maqubela retweeted
the scariest thing about this is that society will now have an even bigger incentive structure to preserve & maintain the accumulated past instead of creating a future.
just look at housing & voting if you want to see how this all works, & now multiply that across a lot of critical segments including technological progress.
