Lightspeed Venture Partners is a leading global venture capital firm, through which it partners with audacious entrepreneurs from early stage to growth. It has been over two decades since it accomplished this. Lightspeed continues its drive toward extraordinary outcomes, leveraging transformative technologies on behalf of early-stage innovators and propelling their journeys through Seed to Series F and beyond. With its presence in 70 countries, the firm is known for its mission to find and cultivate the next generation of technology talent from around the world. This firm is part of our list of AI Venture capital investors.
A committed proponent of the development of AI, Lightspeed has played a significant role in shaping this corner of the AI world and helping groundbreaking research translate into reality. The firm was an early investor in industry-leading AI companies such as Mistral, Skild, and Snorkel, each founded upon breakthroughs out of foundational AI research. At Lightspeed, the portfolio reflects proactive involvement in AI with keen investments in bright startups rewriting industries by harnessing model architecture, optimization of computing, and productivity tools in new ways.
The progress in AI, however, has been triggered by a spate of research over the past 15 years driven by model architecture improvements, optimization techniques, and enhancements in task performance. Indeed, these findings have given way to new innovative startups focusing on automation, robotics, and enterprise productivity, creating new ecosystems of technology and rehashing industries in the process.
Recent Investments: Skild and Glean
One of the most interesting recent investments by Lightspeed in AI robotics is Skild, cofounded by a couple of experts in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta.Skild focuses on solving a highly critical situation-labor shortage-across industries by building a fundamental AI model that makes robots operate independently on a variety of platforms. Equipped with this innovative model, Skild powered robots can perform a wide variety of tasks with adaptability: from industrial settings to construction sites and homes. Powered by Lightspeed among other premier investors, Skild just raised a record $300 million Series A for its endorsement of the huge intelligent robotics market. Its advanced robotics is foreseen to open up more avenues and bring the technology closer to a future where robots would be omnipresent and as essential in life as smartphones
Lightspeed is also investing in the future of enterprise AI with Glean, an AI work assistant created by Arvind Jain, former Google Distinguished Engineer.Glean solves one of the most important problems in enterprise technology: secure,efficient, and complete data retrieval within organizations.By connecting large language models to company-specific knowledge, Glean lets businesses unlock their collective knowledge to drive productivity and power customized chat applications. The company has grown astonishingly, recently 4X-ing its annual recurring revenue and reaching a $2.2 billion valuation after it raised a $200 million Series D round co-led by Lightspeed. Glean is one example of howLightspeed scales enterprise AI tools that make workflows seamless and internal knowledge discovery more effective.
Image source: Mark Neal
