SignalFire

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"Lago moved to SF instead of New York" - Why? I've been asked this so many times for the past months: by founders, team members, candidates, investors. - As always, I thought "I should write about it" (it's a more scalable way to answer the question). An even better opp was to chat with the fantastic Julie Bort at TechCrunch (Thanks Josh Constine!). The TLDR: SF is the best place to expand Lago: from a customer pool and talent perspective, *despite* the timezone. Before having any physical presence in the US, we already had 30% of our user base here, and we moved in the Bay Area to amplify this. SF is also a place where "luck is manufactured" or, in 🇫🇷 we'd say "provoquer sa chance"! We've already made our first hires in SF in a few weeks and are still hiring! (ping Alison Eastaway ;) ) Immensely grateful to the amazing local support group here in the Bay Area! Oana O. AJ Solimine Nicolas Dessaigne Diana Hu Romain Huet Cathy Han Aishwarya (AG) Goel, and of course to my partner in crime Raffi Sarkissian! PS: to answer another of the most common questions: Deel Alex Bouaziz Shuo Wang ahmed mousa 👋 helped me for the visa, ping them directly! 🙃

SF really is back. SignalFire’s Beacon data platform reveals San Francisco leads the country as the #1 place to found, fund, and hire for startups. More stats include: -The SF Bay Area is home to 27% of all startup engineers and 49% of all big tech engineers.  -SF leads with 26% of all top VC-backed early-stage funding rounds, and 38% of AI funding rounds.  -Despite the “SF is dead” narrative, its share of founders and startups both dropped less than 10% in the COVID era Though we love our NYC office too, we're proud to be headquartered in SF and contribute to its lively startup culture. Check out our full SF Is Back report in the comments for more stats and graphs from our head of research Asher Bantock‎‎.

Four trends to watch in one of the most exciting areas of AI—called reinforcement learning—from leading experts: Our partner and machine learning scientist Oana O. moderated a panel at Ai4 in Las Vegas with William Viet Tran (senior engineering manager at Pager Health), Jasleen Singh (senior principal research scientist at Dell), Alfredo Garcia (Texas A&M professor), and Sainyam Galhotra (Cornell assistant professor). Here’s what we learned about reinforcement learning (RL), a branch of machine learning where an agent learns to make decisions by interacting with an environment (think driverless cars): 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝘅𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴: An autonomous car can handle a closed course well but struggles when a family of ducks tries to cross the road. This strategy takes the environment into account when training, which makes training much more difficult but is often necessary to move from theory to reality. 𝗦𝗮𝗳𝗲𝘁𝘆: RL can come up with custom treatment plans for patients based on their history or discover new drugs, but are its recommendations safe? For a lot of applications, the “do no harm” principle will have to apply. 𝗥𝗟 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸: Ever read something and think, “this sounds like it was written by AI?” RLHF focuses on pushing AI systems to become more human, with an expert (human) comparing the AI’s responses to those of a human and tweaking the model. 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴: With IRL, the AI figures out what to do based on what it observes instead of being pre-preprogrammed. In the driverless car example, researchers could input reams of real driver data and let the car figure out what is important, instead of inputting countless commands like “go at green light” and “stop for pedestrians” and letting the car figure out what to do when both conditions are present. For more details, see our latest blog post (link in comments).

SF really is back. SignalFire’s Beacon data platform reveals San Francisco leads the country as the #1 place to found, fund, and hire for startups. More stats include: -The SF Bay Area is home to 27% of all startup engineers and 49% of all big tech engineers.  -SF leads with 26% of all top VC-backed early-stage funding rounds, and 38% of AI funding rounds.  -Despite the “SF is dead” narrative, its share of founders and startups both dropped less than 10% in the COVID era Though we love our NYC office too, we're proud to be headquartered in SF and contribute to its lively startup culture. Check out our full SF Is Back report in the comments for more stats and graphs from our head of research Asher Bantock‎‎.

Congratulations to CodaMetrix on being featured as an Epic Toolbox recommended product!

One uses AI to stop cyber attacks. The other uses AI to help injured victims get justice. And now they’re both honored as one of Forbes‎‎‎’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups. Congratulations to SignalFire‎‎'s portfolio companies Horizon3.ai‎‎ and EvenUp‎ for being recognized on the list of 25 startups poised for rocketship growth. In the past decade, 58% of companies featured on the Forbes list have reached a billion-dollar valuation while just 2% have shut down. Here’s a taste of the fascinating work these companies are doing—with links to the full list and more details on each firm in the comments: 𝗛𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘇𝗼𝗻𝟑.𝗔𝗜: Imagine you hired a reformed prolific robber to prevent your home from break-ins. That’s the “attacker approach” Horizon3.AI takes with cybersecurity, continuously finding and fixing weak points before an attack can take place. As a ‘90s kid, CEO/co-founder Snehal Antani‎ formed this mindset while trying to get around the restrictions his parents put on their dial-up internet. Now, Horizon3.AI’s AI-driven NodeZero tool has been used to autonomously find security flaws and gain domain admin privileges in major firms in as little as 7 minutes. 𝗘𝘃𝗲𝗻𝗨𝗽: Big companies and insurance firms have the upper hand in personal injury cases because they have mass amounts of data and legal resources. EvenUp levels the playing field by using AI to analyze huge pools of available data and auto-generate legal docs and suggest fair compensation for the lawyers representing injured people. Its AI ingests more than a million medical documents a week along with a quarter-million settlements and verdicts. The time savings for law firms is staggering—what used to take staff days or months, analyzing as much as 30,000 documents per case, can now be done in minutes, resulting in settlements as much as 30% higher.

PayZen’s AI-personalized medical bill payback plans keep American families out of bankruptcy. As one of the clearest examples of AI’s positive impact, we’re honored to fund Itzik Cohen & the team again!

If you’re building in NYC we’d love to see you at our next event!

Tag your NYC consumer founder friends! We've got legends of the sector coming to chat about building with AI.