Lorimer Ventures

Please join Lorimer Ventures on Tuesday, June 2nd for our 4th Annual TECH WEEK by a16z event. No boring speeches, just 💻 live demos, 🍺cold beers, and the 🧑🏭 best builder community in New York. Join us for demos from three amazing companies whose products enable anyone to experience the magic of AI to build better and build faster: ✨ Gamma (Grant, Kristin, Amanda) ✨ Zo Computer (Rob, Ben) ✨ Windmill (Brian, Max) 📍 Where: Gothic Refectory in Chelsea 🗓️ When: Tuesday, June 2nd 🎟️ RSVP: https://lnkd.in/d-NJM_jj Space is limited. See you there! #NYTechWeek

My biggest takeaways from this year's Forbes AI 50: 1. The funding curve has split in two. Two companies on the list raised $242.6B between them, about 80% of the total. The other 48 combined raised $63B. There's the frontier model layer and there's everything else, and the gap in how much capital each needs has become the defining structural feature of the industry. 2. Lean is the default now, not the exception. Gamma raised $91M. Krea $83M. HeyGen $74M. Midjourney zero. Companies reached real scale on what used to be seed-plus-Series-A budgets. At the application layer, outside capital is no longer scaling with revenue. 3. Revenue per employee broke. Gamma is one data point: 50 people, $100M+ ARR. The SaaS math of doubling headcount to double revenue no longer describes AI-native products at the application layer. Whatever replaces it hasn't been named yet. 4. The bar for "newcomer" collapsed. 20 of the 50 companies are new this year. 40% of the list turned over in a single cycle. Category leadership in AI is now earned in quarters. That cuts both ways. 5. Distribution is outrunning the models. Application-layer companies on the list reached hundreds of millions of users on top of models they didn't build themselves. The interface and workflow layer is compounding faster than the foundation layer underneath it. Building on top of someone else's model has become its own discipline. 6. Profitability stopped being a punchline. For years, the working assumption was that AI-native companies would burn for a decade before anyone asked about margins. Gamma has been profitable since 2023. Investors are starting to read that kind of signal as conviction rather than a ceiling. 7. Consolidation is already happening quietly in the mid tier. Three companies from last year's list were acquired or acquihired. Cognition bought the rest of Windsurf. Google paid $2.4B to hire Windsurf's cofounders and license the tech. The M&A floor is rising faster than most founders think. Proud of this team. Honored Gamma made the list. Congrats to Anthropic, Baseten, BlackForest Labs, Clay, Glean, HeyGen, OpenAI, Runway, and everyone else who made the cut.

Today's episode of the #S2GPodcast will change the way you see American manufacturing and showcase why it’s both more vulnerable and more adaptable than you may think. Saman Farid, CEO and founder of Formic, sits down with S2G's Chuck Templeton to pull back the curtain on a pressure point hiding in plain sight: Hundreds of thousands of U.S. factories are running behind schedule or turning down orders, not because they lack machines or materials, but because they simply can’t find people to run them. Saman introduces Formic's "robotics-as-a-service" model and explains why this is the unlock that the industry needs. He also breaks down where AI in robotics actually stands today and why the next decade of American manufacturing isn't about replacing workers. It's about making factories more efficient and profitable, making manufacturing jobs safer and more sustainable, and rebuilding the industrial pyramid from the ground up. Listen to the full conversation: https://lnkd.in/g_NZThYh #energy #robots #robotics #manufacturing #SpecialOpportunities Marisa C. Sweeney August O'Hern

My biggest takeaways from this year's Forbes AI 50: 1. The funding curve has split in two. Two companies on the list raised $242.6B between them, about 80% of the total. The other 48 combined raised $63B. There's the frontier model layer and there's everything else, and the gap in how much capital each needs has become the defining structural feature of the industry. 2. Lean is the default now, not the exception. Gamma raised $91M. Krea $83M. HeyGen $74M. Midjourney zero. Companies reached real scale on what used to be seed-plus-Series-A budgets. At the application layer, outside capital is no longer scaling with revenue. 3. Revenue per employee broke. Gamma is one data point: 50 people, $100M+ ARR. The SaaS math of doubling headcount to double revenue no longer describes AI-native products at the application layer. Whatever replaces it hasn't been named yet. 4. The bar for "newcomer" collapsed. 20 of the 50 companies are new this year. 40% of the list turned over in a single cycle. Category leadership in AI is now earned in quarters. That cuts both ways. 5. Distribution is outrunning the models. Application-layer companies on the list reached hundreds of millions of users on top of models they didn't build themselves. The interface and workflow layer is compounding faster than the foundation layer underneath it. Building on top of someone else's model has become its own discipline. 6. Profitability stopped being a punchline. For years, the working assumption was that AI-native companies would burn for a decade before anyone asked about margins. Gamma has been profitable since 2023. Investors are starting to read that kind of signal as conviction rather than a ceiling. 7. Consolidation is already happening quietly in the mid tier. Three companies from last year's list were acquired or acquihired. Cognition bought the rest of Windsurf. Google paid $2.4B to hire Windsurf's cofounders and license the tech. The M&A floor is rising faster than most founders think. Proud of this team. Honored Gamma made the list. Congrats to Anthropic, Baseten, BlackForest Labs, Clay, Glean, HeyGen, OpenAI, Runway, and everyone else who made the cut.