Sequoia Capital

I'm proud to share that Glean has surpassed $300M ARR, just five months after crossing $200M and growing ~3x over the past 15 months. This is an exciting milestone for Glean, and it's a signal about where the enterprise AI market is heading. We’ve long believed the real challenge in enterprise AI is not access to models. It is grounding AI in how a company actually works: its people, knowledge, workflows, permissions, and systems. That’s even clearer now. The companies creating real value with AI are not just adopting better models. They are building systems that understand their business well enough to deliver reliable outcomes at scale. That is the real moat, and it is what we’ve been building at Glean: an unrivaled context layer for enterprise AI. That context has to work across the business, not just inside a single team or use case. We see that in how customers adopt Glean: more than 85% use it across five or more job functions. It also has to meet the security and governance demands of complex enterprises. We see that in who is choosing Glean: our Fortune 500 customer count nearly doubled year over year, including eBay, Dell Technologies, Booking.com, WD, Dominion Energy, Nationwide, and Zillow. And it has to make economic sense as usage grows. In our recent benchmark with Claude Cowork, Glean was preferred roughly 2.5x as often as off-the-shelf MCP tools and used 30% fewer tokens on average. Better context improves both quality and efficiency. I enjoyed talking with CNBC's Deirdre Bosa about this broader shift. In enterprise AI, the winners will not be defined by better models alone. They will be defined by who builds the strongest foundation for enterprise context. Thank you to our customers, partners, and team for helping us build the future of enterprise AI. We're bringing together the enterprise AI community at Glean:GO. Hope to see you there. https://lnkd.in/gK4d_qQF

When Cresta crossed $100M ARR, our CEO, Ping Wu, sat down with our Chairman of the Board, Douglas Leone, and Cresta board member, Carl Eschenbach (the former CEO of Workday), for a conversation on the power of customer experience AI. From the transformation of customer relationships to new AI-powered experiences, the discussion dives into what this moment means for businesses everywhere ⬇️

We’ve raised $46 million in Series B funding, co-led by Thrive Capital and Sequoia Capital, with participation from Emergence Capital and Pruven Capital, to help our customers insure more of the world’s risk. Pace agents have completed more than 250,000 critical insurance workflows, growing 3x every quarter. The world’s leading insurers, like Prudential, WTW and Convex, trust Pace to scale back-office operations. 60% of the world's losses last year went uninsured. Closing this $9 trillion protection gap starts with AI-native operations. When you change the economics of operations, the new product that wasn't possible before can launch, the small business gets the same quality of service as a 10,000-life enterprise, and the claim is paid in hours instead of weeks. Thank you to our customers, some of the largest insurers in the world, who are partnering with us to build this future. Today’s announcement is grounded in the trust the industry has placed in Pace, and the responsibility we feel to keep earning it.

The Marketing department is changing. The role of the CMO is changing. Across all the CEOs that I talk to, Marketing is the team that is using AI the most (second to Engineering). The role is becoming more cross functional, more dynamic. Ivan Zhaon talks about how this shift at Notion - Storytelling is now embedded with the Product team - Demand generation is serve the sales function Those that are part of the Marketing team are now Marketing "and Sales" or Marketing "and Product". This is the evolution to the five tool operator. Links below to my chat with Ivan 👇

The first interview at Notion no longer involves a resume. The CEO of Notion, Ivan Zhao, wants to see something you've actually built. That’s not a quirky startup thing anymore, it’s the new normal. In the AI era, companies want to see what you can do with the AI tools. The candidates who stand out aren’t just AI curious. They’re "fluent". They’ve built Skills, they've shipped projects, automated workflows, prototyped ideas, and moved faster because they treat these tools like a superpower. The resume is becoming table stakes. Your portfolio, especially the one you’ve built with AI, is what gets you in the room. And yes, compensation is shifting too. Companies are starting to reward people who actually leverage these tools to deliver significantly more value. If you’re early in your career or reinventing yourself right now, here’s my direct advice: Stop consuming, start building. Get creative. Ship something this month. Document your process. Share what you learn. The future belongs to the makers, and it’s arriving faster than most people realize. Links below for the full episode 👇

🚨 NEW Long Strange Trip episode just dropped: Ivan Zhao, CEO of Notion Ivan is the definition of a Refounder, and has rebuilt his company nearly three times. Anyone who is looking to move into this new era, the “jazz era” should listen to this one Notes from our chat: 1. The Next Evolution to companies is structured freedom You need operators who can improvise and contribute creatively without waiting for orders. Think jazz band over marching band. Leaders must build teams that riff off each other dynamically rather than blindly following a rigid sheet of music. 2. Build a barbell engineering team Pair hyper senior architectural minds with junior talent. Senior leaders provide the taste and direction that language models lack, while junior engineers manage fleets of coding agents to execute the vision. 3. The best companies reinvent themselves When a startup stalls, incremental pivots rarely save it. Sometimes you must cleanly sever the past and start fresh. True technological shifts shouldn't feel like feature updates; they should feel existential. Interacting with frontier models should command a complete re-evaluation of your company's purpose. If a founder hasn't built with AI to feel this paradigm shift firsthand, they cannot find a new path forward. 4. Hire people who can blur traditional roles The best Notion hires have always blurred lines: designers who code, PMs who ship, engineers with taste. Baseline capability is no longer the bottleneck. The premium is now on a candidate's energy, optimism, and fundamental taste across multiple areas. 5. Acqui-hire founders aggressively As companies scale, they naturally calcify and slow down. The antidote is systematically acquiring early-stage startups just for the founders. Ex-founders act as aggressive machinery, breaking old patterns and forcing the organization to regenerate. 6. Financials March, Product Strategy Jazzes You cannot build a rigid product roadmap anymore because the underlying technology shifts too rapidly. Financial planning is the only system that still requires predictability; product strategy must be entirely fluid and improvisational. 7. Make compensation radically more meritocratic The SaaS era of "peanut buttering" compensation across the entire team is over. Companies must transition to extreme meritocracies to reward top performers. 8. Don’t reinvent the wheel unless you must Notion tried to first principle their way into sales. Eventually, they realized that was just plain wrong. Founders waste years trying to creatively invent a new sales system when the classic playbook works best. 9. Decentralizing the CMO Traditional marketing departments move too slowly to keep up with modern shipping cadences. The solution for Notion was to rip the CMO org apart and embed storytelling directly next to the product team. Demand generation now strictly serves the sales function. (links below)

We're only year 3 of a decade (if not multi-decades) long transformation of work. 3 years ago we bet on building an horizontal platform for work with agents, a chance to invent a new operating system for companies, from scratch, with AI as a fundamental premise. Many people considered us crazy for going after that, praising verticalized AI products as the winning strategy. But here's the thing: the time horizon of tasks successfully handled by agents has been predictively increasing form minutes to hours and will in all likelihood reach the equivalent of days and weeks of human work equivalent in the coming quarters. This is were verticalized and/or single-player AI falls short. Single-player tools, one person, one agent, confined to your machine is the wrong architecture for what's coming. We're shifting from using AI to produce things, to managing fleets of agents that do the producing. 3 years ago I wrote[1]: "ChatGPT is the Pong of LLMs. [...] Imagine, one day we'll get the DOOM, Civ, Red Alert, and Counter Strike of LLMs. Let alone multiplayer modes." Weeks long tasks in companies are inherently collaborative and mechanically spanning multiple teams. The new bottleneck in harnessing agents within organizations is coordination: multiple humans and multiple agents need to work together, with shared context, shared tools, shared goals. Agents that can hand work off to other agents or surface decisions to the right person at the right time. Humans who can review, steer, and step in without losing the thread. Teams that can run parallel workstreams and actually stay aligned. This is Multiplayer AI, and that's what we've been building at Dust. Across Datadog, Clay, Persona, 1Password, Doctolib and 3,000+ organizations globally, we've watched teams figure out what this looks like in practice. 300,000+ agents deployed. 70% weekly active. 240%+ NRR. Today we're announcing a $40M Series B with Abstract, Sequoia Capital, Snowflake and Datadog to accelerate our vision. Designing the right interfaces for multiplayer AI is the next frontier.  Join us to redefine work by defining multiplayer AI.  Blog in the comments.

Software is mostly just workflows on top of a database. This hasn't changed. What's changed is how those workflows are built. Jake Stauch and Serval saw the world changing and nailed it.