General Catalyst

The momentum of Anthropic is generational. Grateful to be part of this journey. Onward.

When Parloa co-founders Malte Kosub and Stefan Ostwald started believing in voice in 2016, everyone said chat would change everything. They turned down a $7.7M acquisition, scrapped the entire product, and rebuilt it from scratch. Starting in Europe turned out to be an advantage too. Solving for dozens of languages from day one is now what makes Parloa the right partner for global enterprises, including SAP. The vision is a personal AI agent for every single customer, one that knows who you are across every interaction. Watch Max Rimpel's full conversation with Malte in the comments.

Hemant Taneja and Jeannette zu Fürstenberg have been named to the Forbes Midas List this year, Hemant for the 10th consecutive year. We exist to back founders working on the big, right problems and to build a company worthy of their ambition. From Anthropic, Applied Intuition, and Deel to Helsing, Legora, Stripe, and Zepto, they have shown up, from seed to scale. Congratulations to both. Full list in comments.

Modal is building the execution substrate for the AI era. We're proud to co-lead their Series C. Modal is a serverless platform for any GPU workload, covering inference, training, batch, and agent sandboxes where most competitors stop at model endpoints. They threw out Docker and Kubernetes and built their own container runtime, scheduler, and image builder from scratch. Developers can decorate a Python function and Modal handles the rest at any scale. Congratulations to Erik Bernhardsson, Akshat Bubna, and the entire Modal team.

Pim de Witte sees AI development in three stages: bits to bits, bits to atoms, and atoms to atoms. Most labs are still solving the first. He founded General Intuition to solve the last one, training AI on spatial and temporal dynamics, with video games as the richest environment for teaching a model how the world moves and changes. He turned down several acquisition offers to pursue it. Watch Max's full conversation with Pim in the comments.

The most ambitious AI systems being built today are bottlenecked on human data. We co-led Luel's seed to fuel that supply. Luel pays ordinary people around the world to turn their daily lives into AI training data, the ground truth that frontier labs need. Congratulations to William Namgyal, Inigo Lenderking, and the entire Luel team.

Meet GC

We led Forus' Series A with the conviction that better infrastructure could unlock medicine for the people who need it most. Today, we're doubling down on their Series B. Forus is the AI-powered network connecting doctors, pharmacies, payers, and biopharma, automating the path from prescription to patient across every drug, every payer, every pharmacy. Forus is live in all 50 states, reaching nearly 80% of U.S. zip codes, and five of the top 10 global biopharma companies work with Forus. Congratulations to Sahir J. and the entire Forus team. Why we doubled down by Chris Bischoff and Tyler Olkowski in the comments.

Congratulations James Lo and Daniel J. Mankowitz, we are thrilled to back Ethos’ Series A.  

General Catalyst's GRAIL (Global Resilience Aligned Initial Listing) has completed its IPO. There are many amazing founders building companies in aerospace and defense, industrials, energy, and manufacturing who are committed to driving global resilience. We are excited to partner with one such mission driven team to access the public markets via the GRAIL to build an enduring Global Resilience company. We at GC are committed to innovating to meet the needs of the founders. Traditional SPACs are misaligned: sponsors get paid on deal closure, not company outcomes. We built a different structure — the GRAIL — designed to align incentives around long-term company building, not just transaction completion. Fun fact: We first tried this six years ago, right after Covid. We believed the moment demanded a different kind of capital for companies building global resilience. The market wasn't ready. We gave the money back. But we always knew the product would find its time. I am grateful to Paul Kwan, Christopher Kauffman and many others at GC who worked to make this a reality. Paul (CEO) and Chris (CFO) will lead GRAIL and we have put together an outstanding board with Barry McCarthy, Fareed Zakaria and Tom Linebarger. https://lnkd.in/gkBnhkTT