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Karthik Rau shared thisWho exactly are you optimizing your content for? It sounds straightforward. But for most marketing organizations, the honest answer is becoming complicated, because the audience consuming your digital presence is no longer exclusively human. Bots have quietly surpassed humans as the dominant traffic source on the internet, and most organizations are further behind on this than they realize. The gap is widening. Organizations are building content strategies, SEO playbooks, and brand narratives designed entirely for people, while an increasingly large portion of the entities actually interacting with digital surfaces are AI agents with fundamentally different needs, behaviors, and decision-making logic. I've spent a long time watching technological inflection points unfold, and the pattern here feels familiar. The organizations that adapt earliest don't necessarily have the best technology. They're the ones that ask the harder questions before everyone else does. In this case, the question isn't just "how do we use AI?" — it's "how does the existence of AI as an audience change everything about how we build for the web?" I worked through the structural shifts I see coming in a piece for TechRadar. It covers how we can build responsibly for what's next, rather than optimizing for a web that's already changing underneath us. I'd value your perspective on this, especially if you see the shift differently. → https://lnkd.in/geagkKdK What are you uncovering in your own conversations?
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Karthik Rau shared thisHaving spent 20+ years of my career in the infrastructure space, I appreciate how much work goes into ensuring a seamless and uninterrupted experience during peak capacity events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Thank you to our engineering organization for delivering yet again at an extraordinary scale.Karthik Rau shared thisWith another big shopping weekend behind us, it's time to reflect again on the increase in traffic to Contentful - with this season beginning earlier and ending later every year. I had to explain to some 'youngsters' why there is even a thing called Cyber Monday. Each time our APIs see massive spikes I am grateful to our amazing infra team that keeps us tuned to handle it without a blip. https://lnkd.in/gtB_DKFxAPI traffic on Black Friday 2025 climbs 33% year over year to 4.6 billion callsAPI traffic on Black Friday 2025 climbs 33% year over year to 4.6 billion calls
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Karthik Rau shared thisMarketing has always been one of the most human disciplines in business, and it's only getting more human. This new research from Contentful and Atlantic Re:think shows how AI isn’t replacing that humanity, it’s sharpening it. Full stack marketers are learning to work alongside machines: combining data, speed, and creativity to drive measurable results. AI fluency is no longer optional. It’s the foundation for how modern teams will operate, compete, and grow. Read the full report: https://ctfl.io/4pqG6hGKarthik Rau shared thisAI isn’t making marketers less human. It’s actually making us *more* human. That may surprise you if your feed is full of doom posts about “AI slop”. But when we spoke with hundreds of marketing leaders around the world, a different story emerged. Together with Atlantic Re:think, Contentful has released new research on how AI is reshaping go-to-market. A few themes stood out to me: - Brilliant marketers don’t just use AI to make more stuff. They use it to make smarter decisions, move faster, and amplify their own creativity. - Evidence-based creativity is the must-have skill of our time. Data analysis, design, personalization, and even writing for AI are now core to the craft. - A new generation of “full stack” marketers are already here: fluent in prompts, platforms, and workflows that weave AI into everyday operations. - AI is changing how the work gets done, but not who does it. And that’s the point: it’s unleashing our humanity, not replacing it. 🔗 If you’re a marketer, you’re going to want to read this report: https://ctfl.io/4pqG6hG 🔄 If your network is full of marketers, please share this post with them. Huge thank you to The Atlantic insights team and Alice McKown for your partnership!
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Karthik Rau shared thisExcited to share that we’ve signed a strategic reseller agreement with Vercel, formalizing and deepening a partnership that’s already delivered incredible value to our shared customers. As the demand for composable, high-performance digital experiences accelerates, enterprises are looking for tightly integrated solutions that reduce complexity and increase speed to value. That’s exactly what this partnership delivers. Together, we’re making it easier for global teams to leverage the power of Contentful’s composable digital experience platform + Vercel’s leading web application delivery platform, unlocking the flexibility, performance, and support they need to lead in a fast-moving digital world. Grateful to all the product, partner, and go-to-market teams on both sides who helped bring this to life. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gZBNUuVF
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Karthik Rau shared thisToday is a milestone day at Contentful! We announced a suite of exciting new features and partnerships to support our evolution from a composable CMS into the broader digital experience arena. Unlike traditional DXPs, which force companies into rigid workflows that slow down innovation, Contentful is taking a different approach. Our platform is built for speed and agility, giving marketers and developers the flexibility to create, optimize, and personalize digital experiences at scale so they can stay ahead, no matter how AI evolves. The future is not so distant—we are helping brands prepare for a world where highly personalized, autonomous, and data-driven content is the norm. You can read more about my take on the future of digital experiences and how Contentful will help customers succeed in this new reality. https://lnkd.in/guEXwyf9The future of digital experiences: AI-powered, composable, and built to winThe future of digital experiences: AI-powered, composable, and built to win
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Karthik Rau shared thisI enjoyed chatting with Niraj Patel on the Tech Disruptor's podcast. There's a tidal wave of change coming to marketing organizations as GenAI solutions become more enterprise ready. Had fun discussing the implications with him.Karthik Rau shared thisTune in to the latest episode of Bloomberg Intelligence's Tech Disruptors podcast, to hear about Contentful’s platform. CEO Karthik Rau talks about customer choices across the marketing-tech landscape and the company’s evolution to a broader platform from a composable content-management system (CMS). We cover a lot of topics ranging from the state of so-called headless solutions in CMS, AI disruptions in digital agency, customers’ buying criteria, the marketing-tech stack, machine-generated content volume and more. See link here: https://lnkd.in/eVnPRin2
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Karthik Rau shared thisIt’s an exciting day at Contentful! I am proud to share that we’ve signed a definitive agreement to acquire Ninetailed, the pioneering personalization and experimentation platform, and a long-standing partner of ours. Ninetailed’s products radically simplify personalization of digital experiences. This next step in our journey allows us to deliver a scalable, AI-driven personalization solution within the Contentful platform, helping solve a key challenge for marketers: driving meaningful ROI at scale. I have immense respect for the company Andy Kaiser and Alexander Braunreuther have built and and I’m excited to come together with them and the rest of the Ninetailed team once the deal closes to deliver world-class products. Contentful will soon be the only solution in the market that offers a modern, composable platform tailored to technical users, combined with low-code experience-building and personalization products for marketing and design teams.Karthik Rau shared thisWe’re thrilled to have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Ninetailed, a long-standing Contentful partner. By combining forces, we will be able to offer our customers a scalable, AI-driven personalization solution that’s already integrated into the Contentful platform. This will enable brands to generate higher ROI from their content and data investments and ultimately increase revenue through tailored customer journeys. We’re looking forward to this next chapter! 🚀 https://ctfl.io/3YQ6lmC
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Karthik Rau shared thisI’m excited to step into my new role leading Contentful. Twelve years ago, Sascha Konietzke and Paolo N. pioneered the concept of a composable content management system. While traditional CMS systems were optimized for the web presentation layer, the Contentful composable, API-first system enabled digital teams to manage content centrally and publish to any form factor. As we see the number of channels explode — web, mobile, wearables, voice, etc. — and application development shift towards modern frameworks such as JAMstack, Contentful has rapidly disrupted the industry and made composable systems the way of the present and future. The wave of generative AI technologies will only further cement content as one of the central pillars of any enterprise’s digital strategy. With nearly $200 million in ARR, more than 4,000 high quality customers, including nearly 30% of the Fortune 500, Contentful is the market leader for composable content. I’m incredibly excited about building on all our past success, leading the company into its next stage of growth, and delivering great new innovations to our customers and partners. Being an entrepreneur at heart, I’m particularly excited about working with exceptional founders like Sascha and Paolo. Together, with all of the other global Contentful employees, we will continue delivering market leading innovations and accelerating our customers' digital and AI journeys. Andreas Weiskam Trevor Oelschig Suranga Chandratillake Christine / Chris Heckart Fred Ball Eric VishriaKarthik Rau shared thisWe are pleased to announce that Karthik Rau has been named the new CEO of Contentful. Karthik has a wealth of experience as an entrepreneur, founder, and seasoned operating executive. Please welcome Karthik Rau to the Contentful team!Contentful Appoints Karthik Rau As CEO | ContentfulContentful Appoints Karthik Rau As CEO | Contentful
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Karthik Rau shared thisCongrats to P0 Security on their launch! The company is solving the very real problem of developer entitlements and secure access for cloud native companies. Excited to see where they take their product and company! #AccessControl #IAM #LeastPrivilegeKarthik Rau shared thisWe’re excited to announce the GA of P0 Security and $5 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed, SVA and a multitude of angel investors! P0 is the first solution to give #SecurityEngineers a unified offering to secure cloud access for all identities. Learn more about our launch: https://lnkd.in/eU3j2d_c #cloudnative #accesscontrol #iam #privilegedaccessmanagement
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Karthik Rau reacted on thisKarthik Rau reacted on thisQ1 is in the books at Resolve AI, and it was a big one. New logos. Growing customers. A team that keeps raising the bar. After a week of QBRs, one thing is clear: the momentum we're building is real, and it compounds every quarter. To the customers who joined the Resolve family this quarter: we're proud to partner with you and fired up about what we're going to build together. We're hiring across the board. If you want to work on problems that matter in production, reach out. 👇
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Karthik Rau reacted on thisKarthik Rau reacted on thisAlways lovely to get together with old friends! I can't believe it has been 21 yrs since I met these two! And somehow we all ended up on the dark side of venture capital. Raghu Raghuram, Jerry Chen. #vMafia
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Karthik Rau liked thisKarthik Rau liked thisAbsolute honour to be invited to 10 Downing Street by David Gelberg today to talk about AI and Pydantic. Surreal that the UK government is in a large part defined in Pydantic models. I continue to be impressed by how the UK government is adopting and leveraging AI. Now we just need a British model!
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Karthik Rau reacted on thisKarthik Rau reacted on thisToday we're announcing the launch of Resolve AI Labs and an additional $40 million in our Series A Extension at a $1.5 billion valuation led by DST Global and Salesforce Ventures. Agents that debug and run production is way more than a harness on top of a frontier model pointed at infrastructure. Requires dealing with practically infinite data, tens to tools, very complex reasoning trees, and very long horizon tasks. Simple agents on top of frontier models fall short on accuracy, reliability and performance. Resolve AI Labs is our investment in building SOTA agents and models for production engineering, a very deep and wide domain that we feel can be better served with domain optimized models. To do that we convinced Dhruv Mahajan to come and lead the lab. Dhruv has deep expertise in AI and LLMs and most recently led post-training for large-scale Llama foundation models at Meta. Alongside Dhruv, Sean Bell led all pre-training data efforts for Meta foundation models has joined us as well. We are also excited to announce additional researchers soon. We are already seeing huge impact at customers like Salesforce, DoorDash, Coinbase, and Zscaler. Meir Amiel, President, Chief Trust and Infrastructure Officer at Salesforce, put it well: "Resolve AI has changed how our teams work through production incidents. What used to take hours of manual investigation and coordination across teams now gets resolved in a fraction of the time. Our engineers aren't only faster, they're focused on the work that actually drives impact." The team we've assembled over the past two years is going to build a world where AI removes the burden from engineers and removes the constraints from production for good. I’m very excited to continue this journey with Mayank Agarwal and the Resolve team! Mayank, Dhruv, and I spoke with Forbes about the news. See the full story: https://lnkd.in/gC7QTAM9
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Karthik Rau reacted on thisKarthik Rau reacted on thisFor me, it was week 2 on the job at Sequoia Capital when the Wiz founders showed up. Writing the investment memo for Wiz was literally the first thing I was asked to do at Sequoia... Talking about being in the right place, right time... I re-read that investment memo this morning. It says, "The founding team is credible and has a proven track record building a company". What an understatement 😃 ! I may have peaked early in my VC career! But what a journey to learn from the GOAT Douglas Leone, and to watch these terrific founders do their wizardry! This team pivoted twice in their first year and still came out ahead of everyone. Most importantly, Assaf Rappaport, Yinon C., Roy Reznik, Ami Luttwak, Raaz Herzberg, and many other Wizards are now true friends! To the entire Wiz team - we are proud to have been your partners from day 1, and excited to see what you keep building with Google. https://lnkd.in/eChneqFk .
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John H.
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Vedika Jain
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𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝘆 𝗪𝗲𝗲𝗸𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝗙𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝗗𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗼𝗽𝘀 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘀 𝗴𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘀𝘆. Flat-rate and seat-based models are giving way to usage-based, hybrid, and outcome-driven models...and companies are iterating weekly. And yet…most deals are still priced in spreadsheets, Slack threads, and CPQs built for a world where pricing changed once a year. That’s why we invested in DealOps. Their platform cuts quoting time from ~30 minutes to 2–3 minutes while increasing ACVs and margins. It can: - Map use cases to SKUs (critical as platform companies explode in SKU count) - Automate forecasting (needed with usage-based pricing) - Generate polished proposals in one click 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝘃𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁 Spyri priced thousands of deals at Stripe as part of the finance team, saw the limits of current tools firsthand, and has lived this problem end-to-end. 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝗽𝘂𝗹𝗹 They're off to a strong start. Teams like Plaid, Harvey, and Airwallex use DealOps to scale new pricing models, guide reps in real time, and drive pricing discipline without slowing deals. The results: 10× faster quoting, 30% lifts in average contract size, millions in incremental revenue. They’ve already processed over $1 billion in revenue, and are just getting started. 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘀 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 The entire AI supply chain, from GPUs to infrastructure, is variable COGS. Pricing agility is no longer a “nice to have”; it’s a must-have. We’re thrilled to back Spyri and the team alongside Pear VC, General Catalyst, and others as they build the pricing system of record for modern sales teams.
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Graham Kelly
ServiceNow • 3K followers
I've had the pleasure of working with Eric in the past and continue to see B2B selling organizations struggle with this. Make no mistake, this is the ultimate leading indicator that explains a lot of the negative lagging ones. I'm sure that Eric would also have an opinion on the diversity of talent needed on a value engineering team. At the end of the day, this is all about leading change and you need people in your org with the experience and track record of actually having done it. https://lnkd.in/euNTNNx7
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Medha Agarwal
defy.vc • 17K followers
Huge congrats to the Haast team on announcing their $12M Series A 🚀 I met Kunal 18 months ago at a conference of all places. I knew instantly that we had to back him. The insight was simple but incredibly powerful: in a world where AI is accelerating every part of the enterprise, compliance was becoming the bottleneck. That gap is only getting wider and Kunal Vankadara, Liam King and team are the right people to bridge it. What’s impressed us most is how the team has executed against that vision. They’re not just building another AI tool. They’re creating the infrastructure layer that allows companies to move fast and stay compliant. Embedding policy, judgment, and risk directly into workflows is a fundamentally different approach. The leading indicators of a special company speak for themselves - rapid growth, zero churn, and adoption by some of the world’s largest enterprises. They are strong signals of what we’ve believed from day one: compliance is becoming mission-critical infrastructure in the age of AI. defy.vc is proud to be early partners to the entire Haast team. The journey is just getting started. If you'd like to learn more reach out to Kunal below. 👊 💥 Peak XV Partners, DST Global, Airtree, Aura Ventures, Black Sheep Capital. Rohit Agarwal Jackie Vullinghs Daniel Gavel Eric Chan Yoseph Taslim Jessica H. Tan
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Atul Tiwary
CorpDev.Ai • 11K followers
https://lnkd.in/geSxUcPk Interesting read..AI-native SaaS startups under $25M ARR are scaling with ~38% leaner GTM teams by leaning heavily on AI for onboarding, support, and RevOps—delivering growth without the usual headcount. But as these companies cross $50M ARR, the efficiency gains start to flatten, and in M&A scenarios, the traditional playbook of achieving operating leverage post-acquisition may not apply—AI-native orgs don’t scale in the same formulaic way as their non-AI peers, and integrating them into legacy structures can actually erode the very efficiency buyers are hoping to acquire.
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Hilary Gosher
Insight Partners • 5K followers
Using real world examples from Optimizely , Hinge Health, Aptean , Diligent , Copado , Brinqa , CentralReach and Fin, this shows how companies have pivoted AI product strategy and operations to embrace #AI transformation. Companies need to adapt or risk their future.
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Carlotta "Lotti" Siniscalco
Emergence Capital • 11K followers
The best AI apps today are being built like infrastructure companies. Great breakdown from the awesome 💡 Yazan "Yaz" El-Baba on why technical depth, rapid iteration, and margin-aware architectures are becoming table stakes for AI startups. Definitely worth a read: https://lnkd.in/gMVFFXgH
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George Crump
Verge.io • 4K followers
vSAN Tip of the Day: Dump the Dedicated Storage Array Still clinging to your SAN? It’s time to rethink the economics. By moving to a hyperconverged model like vSAN—or better yet, a fully integrated, ultraconverged architecture—you can eliminate the complexity and cost of: • Dedicated storage arrays • Proprietary controller hardware • Specialized storage networks • Separate support contracts • Costly refresh cycles The ROI is clear: Instead of paying a premium for all-flash arrays with SSDs marked as "SAN-optimized," you can use server-grade SSDs in standard servers and avoid the 10X markup added by AFA vendors. This method also reduces the number of components to manage and maintain, resulting in considerable cost savings. Organizations making the switch are saving tens of thousands of dollars, all while improving performance and simplifying operations. https://lnkd.in/gvehn6T7 If you’re facing a storage refresh or VMware exit, this is your opportunity to consolidate and cut costs at the same time.
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Jackie Vullinghs
AirTree • 10K followers
18 months ago I spoke to Haast’s customers for the first time. I’d never heard anyone rave about a product like they did. Today, some of the largest companies in the world are beginning to echo those sentiments. If I was choosing to join a startup today, I’d prioritise - strength of the leadership team, intensity of the culture, and depth of the PMF. Haast has all of those and they’re hiring.
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