Lightspeed Venture Partners March Newsletter

Meet Foundry

March 27, 2024

Welcome to the March 2024 edition of the Lightspeed newsletter. It’s been a big month for AI, cybersecurity, marketplaces and frontier tech, in particular. We’re also proud that 14 members of our portfolio were honored in Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in 2024 awards.

Read on for more.

In the world of AI, the GPU is king. Foundry makes this scarce computing resource more widely available at a lower cost and greater reliability. That’s why we’re proud to co-lead the investment into founder Jared Quincy Davis’s vision to democratize access to generative AI technology.

Michael Mignano (Partner, Lightspeed) and Jared Quincy Davis (Founder & CEO, Foundry) at Lightspeed’s Generative NYC event last fall.

There are 10 million+ GPUS already in the field, and most of them are severely underutilized. Foundry elegantly acts as air-traffic control, directing compute tasks to the most efficient available resources. It’s an incredibly simple idea that requires incredibly complex technology, which is why we’re so excited to back Davis and his founding team.

(Fun fact: Jared joins Kylan Gibbs of Inworld and Arthur Mensch of Mistral as the third Founder from Google DeepMind to join the Lightspeed portfolio.)

Wiz, led by Assaf Rappaport, is reinventing cloud security from the inside out. Led by an experienced and visionary team, Wiz is on a mission to help organizations create secure cloud environments that accelerate their businesses. By creating a normalizing layer between cloud environments, our platform enables organizations to rapidly identify and remove critical risks.

Recently, Assaf sat down with Bloomberg TV to discuss the state of cybersecurity and the startup landscape.

New technology and ideas continue to transform industries, and these 14 Lightspeed portfolio companies are helping to drive that innovation. Congratulations to these teams for being named Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2024:

Recently Lightspeed partner Alex Taussig sat down with Vinted CEO Thomas Plantenga and Harry Stebbings of 20VC to discuss how the largest C2C marketplace in Europe is defying the odds and battling fast fashion.

  • Listen to learn more about Thomas’s reluctant journey to CEO, the biggest BS in startups, why Europe is emerging as a vibrant hub of innovation, and much more.

Lightspeed’s Generative AI meetups and podcast continues, with the latest Los Angeles event featuring Disney Accelerator’s Bonnie Rosen, Garden’s Stephen Bell, and Lightspeed partners Faraz Fatemi and Moritz Baier-Lentz.

The panel talked about how companies can navigate the AI opportunity, and how nimble, focused startups can use the technology to take on market incumbents. 

On our Generative Now podcast, Lightspeed partner and host Michael Mignano talks with filmmaker Gary Hustwit, best known for his documentary, “Helvetica.” They discussed the uses of Generative AI in video, and much more.

And don’t forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast service:

Are you in LA on April 3rd? Join us for an evening of networking and a discussion with leaders in the frontier tech spaces, including Brian Schimpf, CEO of Anduril, Dino Mavrookas, CEO of Saronic, and John Gedmark, CEO of Astranis.

They'll share their insights leading deeptech companies and how they approach AI, autonomy, and complex hardware systems.

We are grateful for your partnership and support, and welcome any feedback you have. We’ll see you next month with more news, insights, and updates.

–Team Lightspeed

P.S. Don’t forget to check out our Instagram to stay up to date with everything we’re doing, like our recently launched Advisory Council: