Redpoint

AI is overhyped in the short term and under-hyped in the long term. In a market flooded with bold claims and new AI tools released daily, the challenge is whether these tools can deliver measurable value. At Grammarly, our mission is to use effective communication to drive real business outcomes, and we know how successful organizations become when they leverage Grammarly this way. Our data shows that the average Grammarly user within an organization saves 19 days of work each year—almost a full month of productivity regained per employee! Thank you to Jacob Effron for hosting me on Redpoint's Unsupervised Learning podcast! Listen to the full episode where we cover the future of Grammarly, AI’s potential to upskill, and more: gram.ly/3Xad60e

Grammarly is a personalized AI assistant for writing that has over 30 Million Daily Active Users. They have been building AI productivity tooling long before the most recent GenAI wave and have raised over $400M, most recently at a valuation of $13B. Grammarly CEO Rahul Roy-Chowdhury believes AI will enable everyone to focus on more meaningful, creative interactions by automating the "drudgery" of daily tasks. He joined Unsupervised Learning to talk about how he thinks about competition and his longer term perspective on how AI will be adopted by the enterprise. This interview was packed with tactical insights on successfully building AI products. Some favorite moments: 🚨 Rahul told us about a piece of feedback that Grammarly once received from a police department – it was making their police reports sound too positive. (i.e. “The robber found himself surprisingly wealthy after leaving the bank, if only for a brief period of time.”) The team learned that ensuring high-quality AI assistance requires a multi-faceted approach, including benchmarking, safety evaluations, and extensive user testing, to avoid things like upbeat police reports, or downbeat emails when users are trying to sound warm and friendly. 🩺 Rahul noted that aligning AI solutions with measurable business goals is a must. He talked about Grammarly’s work with ModMed, where the company can actually measure improved patient outcomes based on the quality of their communications with providers. 🔌 Grammarly is an app that functions as a plugin across all sorts of different business tools, from Salesforce to Gmail to Word, and more. This gives the company a unique advantage – working with user data across many platforms and contexts. It also means Grammarly can provide a "uniform AI experience," which Rahul says is a key differentiator in a fragmented landscape of communication tools. 1️⃣9️⃣ The average user of Grammarly in an organization saves 19 days of work from using the tool. In a time where enterprises still aren’t sure about the ROI of their investments into AI software, a month’s worth of work saved is certainly compelling. Rahul believes that enterprises will increasingly look to this ROI as initial exuberance about AI wears off. Give the podcast a listen for more insights from Rahul on the future of AI-powered communication: YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gEukgAHA  Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4egMbXH Apple: https://apple.co/4dRWotI

In a buzzing market where countless capable builders are running full speed ahead at many of the same challenges, true **FOUNDER MARKET FIT** is becoming a key differentiator 💡 These unicorn founders... 🙏🏾 enter the industry from a place of trust on D1 🔎 seek to answer the *right* questions for their customers (and not just the obvious ones) 🗺 know where the most valuable lives & how to access it 🏅 attract the best when it comes to industry talent (arguably the greatest advantage there is!) Few founders epitomize this more than Sarah Buchner from Trunk Tools. Exceptional, tenacious, and inspiring are words that come up again and again from builders, buyers, and investors who meet her. On this week's Unsupervised Learning podcast, Sarah & I sit down to discuss the Why behind so many of the early architecture, product, & hiring decisions she's made -- and where the construction industry, with the help of Trunk Tools' agents, is headed from here 📈 Check it out! 👷🏼♀️ Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gP2K6DVj Apple: https://lnkd.in/ghmt3Dz5

Many know CELSIUS Holdings, Inc. as a top energy drink brand today, but few know the tumultuous journey CEO John Fieldly took to rebuild the brand. In my latest episode, John shared how the company nearly went bankrupt multiple times, lost 50% of its revenue overnight and even got delisted from the Nasdaq. Despite these challenges, John stepped up to revive the business into the nearly $10B company it is today. We discuss how he shifted focus from weight loss to energy, secured key distribution deals, landed a major partnership with Pepsi, and more. → Where it all started Before John Fieldly joined Celsius, the company had secured distribution across major U.S. retailers but struggled to build a loyal consumer base, leading to poor sales rotation. Despite strong execution plans and marketing strategies, the company nearly ran out of cash and was plunged to penny stock status. When John came on board, Celsius was down to just 12 employees and facing significant challenges after being delisted from major retailers like Costco, Walgreens, and CVS. → How the Pepsi deal happened After pivoting their product positioning, Celsius faced significant challenges in rebuilding relationships with distributors due to their reputation as a failed brand. Plus, distributors saw Celsius as a “fitness gym rat” brand that didn’t belong in the beverage category. So, Celsius focused on building awareness, demand, and brand loyalty among the fitness community. Later on, Pepsi had a void in their performance energy portfolio due to a severed partnership with Bang Energy. Pespi knocked on Celsius’s door, and the partnership doubled sales basically overnight. → How they created a powerful brand The goal was to build an iconic brand that inspires people to live better, healthier lives, similar to how brands like Nike, Apple, and Starbucks evoke strong emotional ties with their customers. The team realized that relying solely on product features, like the number of vitamins, wouldn't set them apart in the market. Instead, they focused on making Celsius a symbol of a lifestyle, emphasizing the brand's ability to help people achieve their goals. This shift from a functional to an emotional brand identity became central to their strategy, helping to position Celsius alongside other iconic brands. Many more details in the full episode: https://lnkd.in/dG3SH_7s

In case Team Redpoint's enthusiasm about partnering with Andres Santos and Abiel Gutierrez isn't already *incredibly* obvious, excited to share a bit more about why we were so thrilled to welcome Comun into the portfolio here 👇🏽 https://lnkd.in/gCv5t5nk While Comun’s community-first approach is its secret sauce, the meat of the platform is its end-to-end tech stack, powered by a kickass technical team from the likes of Brex, Nubank, and more 💪🏽 we've held a high bar for our fintech portfolio and are excited for Comun to join the ranks of Stripe, Nubank, and Ramp on this list! #fintech #venturecapital #startups

Congrats to the Comun team on their $21.5M Series A! We're thrilled to partner with Comun in expanding financial service access to the 64M Latinos living in the US. https://lnkd.in/dnuHgN97

At Comun, our mission is to empower immigrants and their families to turn their hard work into upward mobility. With our recent Series A funding round of $21.5M, we are one step closer to achieving our vision. With this new investment, we’ll be able to accelerate our growth efforts to continue to meet our customers' unique needs today and in the future. We couldn’t have done this without our incredible team, the backbone of this company, and our investors, who supported us when Comun was just an idea. A special thank you to Redpoint, who led this funding round, and ANIMO Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, FJ Labs, RTP Global, and South Park Commons, who also participated in this round. Check out our latest article in TechCrunch by Mary Ann Azevedo. https://lnkd.in/dnuHgN97

A truly remarkable team reimagining CRM - we’re so excited to continue our partnership with Attio

Annie Kadavy and I are beyond thrilled to be partnering with Andres Santos, Abiel Gutierrez and the entire team at Comun as they redefine local banking in the digital world for the 64M Latinos living in the US today 🙌🏽 Their metrics, unlike any others we’ve seen in consumer fintech in a *very* long time, speak to the thirst for what they’re building 📈 ...and additional coverage from Mary Ann Azevedo 📰 TechCrunch at on this incredible company: https://lnkd.in/gw9w-j9d And PS – they’re hiring!! #fintech #venturecapital #hiring

Snowflake sits in a unique position in the AI landscape. They enable thousands of customers to build AI tools on their data and maintain their own suite of AI products. That’s why it was so fascinating to speak with Baris Gultekin, Snowflake’s Head of AI, on our latest Unsupervised Learning. Baris has helped Snowflake launch several key products, including Cortex, AI Data Cloud, and even Snowflake’s own LLM, called Arctic. Baris joined Snowflake via acquisition and previously led the Google Assistant and AI teams on Android. Patrick Chase and I really enjoyed hearing Baris's unique views on the future of AI. Some key takeaways: 👷 Why Snowflake built its own enterprise LLM Snowflake found many of its customers wanted to build Business Intelligence style apps to go from natural language to SQL statements to visualizations. So they built a model focused on SQL - which a lot of general models have shortcomings in. Baris and Snowflake brought on the founders of two open source projects, DeepSpeed and vLLM, and stood the model up in just 3-4 months. (And despite being tailored for enterprise, Baris says Arctic is pretty good at poetry too!) 🔐 Access controls and governance come first Even before the AI explosion Snowflake had fine grain access controls on the data they store for customers. With AI apps, that’s become even more important. “Let's say a company builds an HR Chatbot," says Baris. "You ask a question, 'who got promoted last week?' Depending on who asked that question, you need to give very different answers, and there is very little room for hallucination.” ❄️ Governance is also a moat for Snowflake "A lot of our customers spent a couple of YEARS getting the governance of their data in place,” says Baris. “So now they can benefit from that and then build AI on top of it.” Not an easy thing for a startup to recreate. 🦸 Agentic systems are coming It’s early days, says Baris, but the evolution of AI from chatbots to systems that can take actions on behalf of users, is on the way. BI systems are actually at the forefront of this, as users are essentially telling the AI to go construct a SQL query, decide when and how to run it, and then reason on the data it returns. We touched on so many more topics — how businesses are using RAG and how Snowflake is optimizing for it, how the Neeva acquisition has impacted Snowflake’s products (besides giving them a new CEO!), and much more. Baris also shared advice on what a new startup in AI should be trying to do today. Give the episode a listen here: YouTube: https://lnkd.in/ggh6rP8j Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Z8eRxL Apple: https://apple.co/3T2WFBJ