AI has a discovery problem that mirrors what the early web faced. Thousands of AI tools launch daily, but benchmarks get gamed in weeks, marketing budgets determine visibility, and many people still don't trust AI for real decisions. The technology works, but the discovery and trust layer hasn’t materialized yet. Against that backdrop, we’re excited that our portfolio company, Recall, has reached a key milestone today – the launch of skill markets and their token launch event. Skill markets a...

The future is electric. Electric vehicles (the fastest “production” car in the world is now electric). Electric stoves. Electric heat pumps. Electric robots. And of course all the compute powering the AI revolution. At USV we have long held the belief that all of this adds up to a massively growing demand for electricity along with an ever increasing need to store that electricity. Batteries are improving rapidly with the cost of storage plummeting, making more and more applications feasible....

USV is looking for an AI Lead—a technical operator who will help us reimagine how a venture firm develops theses, finds companies, and supports its portfolio in the AI era. You’ll be the builder-in-chief: prototyping tools that help us source founders earlier, synthesize markets faster, and operate more intelligently. You’ll stand at the edge of what’s possible with language models, embeddings, and retrieval systems—and bring it back to Earth in the form of working tools that matter. This rol...

The line between “tool” and “worker” is disappearing. Markets known for enterprise sales and pricing are becoming increasingly consumer oriented. And the concept of “billable hours” is quickly becoming antiquated.

The purpose of our annual portfolio summit is simple: give 100 CEOs from around the world the space to connect and learn from each other. This year, we tried something new. We pulled 16 of them aside, paired them up, and turned on the cameras. No script. Just founder-to-founder conversation. We call the series Edge Cases. Today, we’re releasing the first in this 8-part series. It’s a conversation between Ben Leventhal and Seth Goldstein. Two repeat founders who’ve been present for every major...

So maybe the best AI memories won’t be flawless databases. Maybe they’ll be artful editors, skilled at remembering imperfectly. Knowing which signals are core, which are passing whims, and which should fade gently into the background.

We’re excited by tools that retrieve, move, and process data with elegance. But we’re interested in partnering with tools that turn this data into collective knowledge and sources of truth. Despite a wildly changing landscape, systems of record continue to be the door to endurance.

This blog is co-authored with Zoe Weinberg and Matt Hawes at ex/ante, and is a follow-up to our first blog post on the topic, 'You don't own your memory.' We need an open architecture that puts us in control of our memories while making their exploitation technically impossible. But how will this shift happen? In order to discover possible implementations, we must understand how our data informs LLMs. The three predominant context engineering techniques are prompt design, retrieval-augmented ...

This blog is co-authored with Zoe Weinberg and Matt Hawes at ex/ante and can also be found here. Who will own our digital memory? This question has become increasingly urgent as ChatGPT and Claude ask us to entrust more and more of our memories to their platforms. Frontier AI models have already ingested the world's public knowledge, but their advancements may slow down as we approach a compute ceiling. Additional performance gains will require them to adapt to the user’s context, which calls...

One of the most exciting trends in energy is the rise of programmable power. Energy devices have become increasingly software-controllable. Developers can now build large virtual energy systems out of many small decentralized assets. We’ve been investing across the programmable power stack from foundational hardware to app-layer networks. At present, app developers have to navigate a fragmented landscape of energy hardware. Virtual power plants, for example, have to control devices from elect...