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The surest way to invest in a unicorn...is to build it.
In this can't-miss Sourcery episode, 8VC Founding Partner Drew Oetting joins Molly O'Shea to discuss how the firm’s founder DNA has shaped the journeys of OpenGov Inc., Saronic Technologies, Affinity.co, Resilience, and more—as well as such big-picture topics as AGI, the economy, and, of course, aliens 👽.
With $6B+ AUM, 8VC has redefined the venture playbook: they don’t just fund companies—they build them.
Some outcomes speak for themselves:
Palantir Technologies ($370B)
Addepar (managing $7T+)
OpenGov Inc. ($1.8B acquisition)
On Sourcery, Founding Partner Drew Oetting breaks down 8VC’s infamous Build Program—where nearly 30% of the fund’s capital goes into startups they co-create.
To date, 8VC has co-founded 28 companies, including Affinity, Saronic Technologies, Epirus, and Resilience—all rooted in the firm’s builder DNA (see: Joe Lonsdale)
It’s not controversial that great sales teams need great data and great admin support, but despite a proliferation of tools, sellers still find themselves burdened by the considerable overhead of getting data into said tools and properly resourcing each opportunity. Aida elegantly incorporates AI throughout the sales admin cycle, allowing sellers to do what they do best and translate effort into revenue. Their new site just launched - check it out (and sign up for a demo!) at https://www.getaida.com/!
CC: Atish Das SarmaAlex KolicichBhaskar GhoshVivek Gopalan
Growth almost always comes with an invisible layer of overhead that drains time and attention from even the best people. This was a constant struggle even at Glean with the crazy growth we had. I have always been fascinated by this tussle between necessary processes/oversight and efficiency in growing organizations.
After Glean I teamed up with Atish Das Sarma to explore how we can leverage advancement in AI to help organizations with this problem. As we talked to various teams, we had one realization – the challenge is much bigger for sales teams. Imagine spending half your day on tracking and doing data entry instead of selling. Layer on top the fact that every seller is supposed to be on top of many threads at the same time. There is massive tool sprawl in sales – but sellers tell us that they still have to spend hours on this overhead – some still rely on pen and paper in the age of AI.
For the past year in stealth, we’ve been building an AI Chief of Staff for sales teams. It is designed to increase conversion rates and deal velocity by automating follow-up, surfacing the right prep at the right time, and ensuring nothing falls through the cracks – all while automating the required admin work. Behind it is a team that has played key roles in products like Google search, Apple Cloud services, Uber mobility, Meta and Glean
Sales is an art, and it’s time to free sellers to focus on the human connections that matter most. We’re building the future of revenue acceleration.
👉 Want to be the first to see it? Sign up for a demo now: https://www.getaida.com/
When I first saw Farid Vij and Nasha Fitter demo the Citizen AI advocate, I could immediately see how valuable it was for patients with rare disease and caregivers - synthesizing information from medical records, answering previously unanswerable questions, and accelerating the development of new cures.
HHS and FDA are giving strong support to innovation in rare disease. CMS’s CGT model is creating payment frameworks for some of the newer therapeutic modalities. The timing has never been better, and I’m proud to join the BoD and work with the Citizen team on this important mission.
CEO & Founder | Citizen Health | The AI Advocate – Data + Community + AI for Every Patient
Thrilled to share that Citizen Health has raised $30M in Series A funding - led by 8VC with participation from Transformation Capital and Headline - to accelerate our mission of building a personalized AI Advocate for every patient and grow the team bringing it to life.
At Citizen, we believe patients deserve the same clarity, personalization, and intelligence in healthcare that they get everywhere else in their lives. Our AI Advocate is powered by our agentic platform - AI that doesn’t just respond, but takes initiative - guiding people through their health journey, identifying opportunities they might not anticipate, and connecting them to the next best step.
Since launching in late 2023, we’ve:
- Built 60+ engaged communities across 120+ rare and complex conditions
- Partnered with 70+ patient advocacy groups
- Collaborated with 10+ pharma partners to accelerate new cures
We’re just getting started - and we’re hiring across AI, product, growth, and clinical roles. If you want to work on something deeply meaningful with the potential to change millions of lives, we’d love to talk.
Huge thanks to Sebastian Caliri at 8VC, Michael Dixon and Akhilesh Samant at Transformation Capital and Mathias Schilling at Headline for believing in us.
And most importantly, to the patients, families and partners who inspire our work every day.
#AI#HealthTech#RareDisease#Hiring#SeriesAhttps://lnkd.in/e6-fweXd
Citizen Health is pursuing some of the most important and ambitious missions in healthcare: consolidating the rare disease knowledge base, advancing new therapies, and reimagining patient education and advocacy. It's an immense privilege to lead their Series A, partner with Farid Vij and Nasha Fitter, and support the historic commitment to innovation at HHS, FDA, and CMS.
We are building the future of consumer healthcare, starting in rare disease.
Citizen Health just secured funding led by 8VC, with participation from Transformation Capital and Headline, to use AI to transform the healthcare experience for the patients who need it most.
More details about how we're doing this:
https://lnkd.in/gAVjH_72
Why people choose Citizen:
💜 100+ patient communities trust us
Building WITH patients, not for them. We focus on trust and community.
🧬 Infrastructure that actually works
We've built what others are still figuring out. Comprehensive record collection. Research-ready cohorts. #AIAdvocate to drive better health. Engaged patients who trust our platform.
🤖 AI with real impact
Not another chatbot. Our AI Advocate (now in beta) turns medical chaos into clear answers for the patients who need it most. Complex ML problems, elegant solutions, empathetic experiences.
⚡ Speed that matters
Our data saves lives. It has been used in regulatory filings to the FDA to accelerate drug development.
🔐 Privacy at scale
Medical information is never shared with third-party AI companies or used to train their algorithms. We build systems where people and privacy are at the heart of it all.
Want to build with us? We're hiring engineers, product builders, growth hackers, strategic operators, and designers who want their work to matter:
https://lnkd.in/g-eX4z2h#HealthTech#RareDisease#AIinHealthcare#Engineering#BuildWithPurpose#Hiring#AccelerateCures
A new era in logistics; a new Terminal Industries website 🤝. Terminal’s Yard Operating System™ connects highway to warehouse with CV, adaptable analytics, elegant automation, and decisive action. Flow state has come to the yard…and it’s beautiful.
Design culture is a foundational element of 8VC Build companies like Terminal (although we can't claim credit for the latest!). Hats off to Terminal VP of Design Leanne K. and REJOUICE® for a phenomenal partnership in re-imagining the brand and website.
To all supply chain leaders, logistics innovators, gate-to-dock operators, and AI computer vision aficionados: the yard of the future starts today.
Introducing the Terminal Yard Operating System™.
Check out our new website ---> https://lnkd.in/gg2eqH27
The 8VC Design team is hosting our quarterly design meetup, PixelEight, this coming Tuesday, July 29. Space is limited, but we’d like to open the event to any talented designers, design leaders, or other creatives who are interested in joining us.
Join the Waitlist here:
https://lnkd.in/dHKtdckV
Today, Bedrock Robotics is out of stealth. We’re proud to lead their $60M Series A, back the top team in construction autonomy, and support a renaissance in American development.
Read on for the Bedrock-8VC story, as told by Alex Kolicich and Vivek Gopalan: https://lnkd.in/g6R2f7wk
A flourishing civilization begins with breaking ground. New housing, commercial space, transportation infrastructure, data centers, ag—all begin with moving enormous volumes of dirt.
Excavation requires 6-figure machinery and skilled operators, who are increasingly hard to find. Meanwhile, autonomy has barely made a dent in the $2T US construction industry…until now.
Bedrock CEO Boris Sofman & CTO Kevin Peterson solved some of the hardest problems at Waymo. Now they’re tackling construction, where vehicles need to complete extremely complex motions without the guardrails of the road.
At Waymo, they saw the promise of end-to-end learning to solve problems once considered too complex for engineered solutions. Combined with hardening of autonomy systems and affordable sensors, this is construction’s breakout moment.
Bedrock combines a low-cost autonomy kit that retrofits OEM machinery into construction AVs, end-to-end learning for human-like navigation, and comprehensive workflow software. Their goal is no less than general-purpose construction autonomy at scale.
Congratulations to Boris, Kevin, and friends, and here’s to a new golden age of building and prosperity.
And don’t miss today’s Forbes exclusive on Bedrock, by Alan Ohnsman:
https://lnkd.in/g_rSMp76
We’re thrilled to share that Outset has raised $17M in Series A funding, led by 8VC, to help companies better understand their customers.
When Michael Hess and I founded Outset, we set out to solve a critical problem: truly understanding your customer is painfully slow, expensive, and at times, impossible. It shouldn’t be.
We believed AI could change this by focusing on the human side of AI.
So we built the world’s first AI-interviewer. An AI agent that asked questions, listened, and learned from real humans.
By removing the barriers of traditional research and allowing companies to have deeper conversations with more customers more quickly, we could help teams infuse their products with genuine human understanding at a speed and scale previously impossible.
So what was the moment we knew we were onto something?
When WeightWatchers ran that first pilot back in early 2023. Participants shared incredible amounts of depth, all with the world’s first AI-interviewer.
We got a call the next day from their head of research: "You built a thing. We want that thing. How do I pay you for it?"
That validation has turned into explosive growth. We've doubled our revenue in just the last 4 months alone, with >50 enterprise customers like Nestlé, Microsoft, and WeightWatchers trusting us to unlock deeper customer insights.
All of this built on the backs of a truly special early team with 0 employee turnover.
This funding round was led by 8VC, with participation from an incredible group, including: Future Back Ventures by Bain & Company, Y Combinator / Garry Tan, Adverb Ventures (April Underwood/Jessica Verrilli), Alt Capital / Jack Altman, Rebel Fund, Genius Ventures, Ritual Capital, and many more.
So what's next?
We're scaling our engineering and go-to-market teams to build the world's most powerful agentic customer research platform. All focused on one mission: helping companies better understand humans.
To our customers, investors, and team - thank you for believing in this vision.
Now check out the video to see Outset in action, testing the video itself with real people!
Understanding customers is existential for any business. Outset is redefining both the depth and the scale of user research, and today, we're privileged to share that we've led their $17 million Series A.
In the past, the tradeoff was stark: interviews (high fidelity, but slow, manual, and expensive) vs. surveys (fast and cheap, but unrefined and noisy). Outset harnesses gains in frontier models and a deep grasp of user research to create a new primitive: the AI-led 1:1 interview.
Outset's platform is multilingual and multimodal (video/voice/text/screenshare), includes a full UX testing suite and instant, customizable analytics, and supports all the core inputs and workflows of both UX and market research.
As detailed in today's VentureBeat exclusive, research with Outset is 8x faster and 80% less expensive—numbers we can certainly get behind:
https://lnkd.in/gBpYbsqC
Congratulations to Aaron Cannon, Michael Hess, and team on building a powerful, elegant platform that’s helping user research to become more human-centered than ever.
More on the Outset-8VC story from Jack Moshkovich and Kevin Niechen:
https://lnkd.in/dxjijP2V
