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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.
Excited to continue to work with @watneyrobotics - they are defining the frontier for robotics deployment in the most demanding environments a-star.co/news/watney
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.
The team at Antioch is enabling physical AI to move at the speed of software - we are very excited to double down in their Series A after leading their seed last year! @HarryMellsop @AlexLangshur
a-star.co/news/antioch
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.
I first met @nicckopp ~6 months before he raised his seed. I was lucky to help lead the seed (with @btrenchard) when the company was called Gnau and they didn't yet have a product. 5 years later, Nic has fully captured the AI wave and built the leading agentic ERP. Onwards
Today we're announcing our $100M Series C at a $1B valuation, led by @ICONIQCapital. It's our third round in 14 months and brings our total funding to over $200m
The round came together in less than 48 hours.
We weren't planning to raise. Then new ARR doubled last quarter and we crossed 600+ customers including public companies and enterprises with $2B in revenue. Rillet AI agent usage is growing 70% each month and CFOs are replacing Oracle Fusion, SAP and Workday to run their companies on Rillet.
We also announced our alliance with EY and officially partnered with more than half of the top 20 CPA firms.
@RilletHQ is creating an entirely new category of finance infrastructure. With Rillet, the ERP becomes the harness for the modern finance organization, where people and agents share the same financial data, apply the same accounting policies and controls, and work from a single, continuously updated view of the business. Agents perform increasingly complex financial work, while finance teams retain visibility, approval authority and a complete audit trail.
Thank you to our customers for believing in the mission and building the future of finance with us. We could not do this without you.
Thank you to the Rillet team. As I say often, building Rillet is our own version of sending rockets to Mars. It is incredibly difficult. You make it look easy.
Finally, thank you to our investors. To ICONIQ for leading the round and to our existing and new investors for building with us. @sequoia , @a16z, Sequoia Global Equities, @BainCapVC, @oakhcft, @BatteryVentures, @FirstMarkCap, @scalevp, and @creandum.
Back to work :)
Really incredible to see the @Intelligence_ai growth with such a lean team. Congrats to @grx_xce
Today, we're introducing @Intelligence_ai.
In 6 months, as a team of 10, we scaled from $5M to $60M ARR and 5.5M users across 190+ countries.
We raised a $7.9M seed, led by @IndexVentures with participation from @conviction, @A_StarVC, and @combinator to build DesignArena, a universal interface for accessing and evaluating the world's AI capabilities.
Most evaluations try to simulate the real-world. We believe the real-world is the ultimate verifier.
People come to @DesignArena with a request. Models compete to fulfill the request, and users determine what works best for them.
Their live user behavior evaluates the models, improves how work is routed, and helps people access the right intelligence.
We've helped the world's leading frontier labs break the news on their SOTA capabilities.
What's the limit? Join us and find out.
The @simile_ai team have had clarity of vision since our first meeting at the seed. Since then, they have assembled the best team, built the best technology, and signed the most innovative customers in the world.
We are excited to double down in this round led by Greenoaks. a-star.co/news/simile
Leeor (@lmushin) and I invested in one of the first rounds of USBTC (now Hut8). Our good friend @MattPrusak brought us in. It's now a $14b+ company with a lot of room to grow..
Never shared this publicly, but I’ve been a major shareholder in HUT8 (below the 5% disclosure threshold) since the USBTC days. My original cost basis is $3.56 per share, and I’ve never sold a single share.
@ashergenoot and @mikehomkh are building what I believe will be a 100B+ company and have largely flown under the radar despite being world class operators.
Watching them take the company from a few servers in a Niagara Falls warehouse in 2021 (where I literally had Asher hop on FaceTime video to show me the warehouse actually existed) to $27B in contractual cash flow from the most credit worthy companies in the world has been remarkable. I’m proud to be a part of their journey.
I first met Asher in an unlikely way, through my childhood friend @broukhim, who was his professor, and my brother @tylermateen, who went to USC with him.
Keep an eye on this company. I believe there is a lot more to come.
It's not every day you meet two MIT grads obsessed with audit & compliance. @AryoPatel and @tinahhong have channeled this obsession into a product customers love. They have a clear opportunity to upend one of the largest white-collar industries. Proud to have @A_StarVC lead the seed and double down in the Series A - more why we are excited here: a-star.co/news/andera
Tech has decided that regulation is the enemy of progress, but innovation requires capital
Regulation builds the trust necessary to inject billions into markets
To enable free innovation, Andera raised a $37M series A led by Lightspeed to scale financial oversight with agents
Nico is building one of the most important companies in Latin America. We’re excited to double down in his series A after leading his seed less than 12 months ago
More on what makes Nico and this opportunity special: telepatia.a-star.co/
Telepatia has raised $42 million, including a $33 million Series A led by a16z.
My father’s nickname was Telepatia.
He was a doctor who passed away at 58 from a preventable cause. A few days after his death, ChatGPT launched. My first thought was that an AI Doctor would have saved his life as a patient, and that he would have loved using one as a doctor. So we built it: an AI Doctor for doctors, by doctors.
Telepatia's AI Doctor is live in more than 25 public and private health institutions, home to more than 100,000 doctors and nurses throughout Latin America 🇧🇷🇨🇴🇲🇽🇨🇱🇦🇷
We're building an AI Doctor and our goal is to bring Latin America its first Nobel Prize in Medicine since 1984.
