victor lazarte retweeted
Introducing AI agents that do your finances.
Brex is now an AI-native finance platform powered by agents that learn, reason, and act on your behalf. It’s designed to amplify finance, not replace it.
Here’s what our next chapter looks like 👇
Applied compute is an extraordinary team going after one of the biggest opportunities in AI. Creating models using knowledge that only exists inside companies. Grateful to be a part of the journey.
Generalists are useful, but it’s not enough to be smart.
Advances come from specialists, whether human or machine.
To have an edge, agents need specific expertise, within specific companies, built on models trained on specific data.
We call this Specific Intelligence.
It's what we're building at Applied Compute.
We unlock the latent knowledge inside a company, use it to train custom models, and deploy an in-house agent workforce that reports to your team.
We work with sophisticated companies that have already captured early gains from general models, like @cognition, @DoorDash, and @mercor_ai. They’re pulling even further ahead with proprietary in-house agents that don’t need to wait for the next public model release.
Together, we are building and validating models and agents in days instead of months, achieving state-of-the-art performance on customer evals.
Our team has high density and low latency. Our founders all worked on different parts of this problem while they were researchers at OpenAI — @ypatil125 as a key member on the agentic software engineer effort (Codex), @rhythmrg as a core contributor to the first RL-trained reasoning model (o1), and @lindensli as a core contributor on ML systems and infrastructure for RL training.
Two-thirds of the team are former founders, and everyone brings a deep technical background, from top AI researchers to Math Olympiad winners.
We are backed by $80M in funding from Benchmark, Sequoia, Lux, Elad Gil, Victor Lazarte, Omri Casspi, and others. With their support, we are growing the team, scaling deployments, and bringing to market the first generation of agent workforces built on specific models.
In short:
1. We are building Specific Intelligence for specific work at specific companies.
2. That will power in-house agent workforces to support their human bosses.
3. That in turn will unlock AI’s full potential through humanity’s greatest engine of progress: thriving corporations in a free market.
Incredible progress in 2 years.
We’ve raised our $350M Series C at a $10B valuation from @felicis, @benchmark, and @generalcatalyst.
Just 2 years after starting, Mercor is paying $1.5 million per day to experts in our marketplace.
We’re creating a new category of work in the AI economy, where software engineers, bankers, lawyers, and other professionals earn based on their experience while advancing the frontier of AI.
While most new categories take time to build momentum, we’ve broken every growth record. For comparison, in their first 2 years:
- Uber paid out just over a $1 million to drivers
- Airbnb paid out $10 million to hosts
We are unlocking human potential in the AI economy.
victor lazarte retweeted
HeyGen just hit $100M ARR this month, 29 months after we first reached $1M in April 2023.
None of this happens without our incredible team, customers, partners, and community. Thank you 💜
When we shared our first $1M milestone, it was to give back to the build-in-public community. The AI landscape has changed completely since then, but one thing hasn’t: how we build.
Internally, we’ve called it our “bible,” the system that’s guided us from $1M to $100M. It’s built from countless team discussions, experiments, and lessons learned along the way. After much reflection, I wanted to document what’s worked for us — for our team and for everyone building in AI.
We’re sharing it not because it’s perfect, but because it’s working. It’s how we deliver customer value, learn faster than the world changes, and keep riding the wave.
This is The HeyGen Way.
victor lazarte retweeted
AI has its PhD and now it’s on the job market.
Introducing the AI Productivity Index (APEX), a benchmark that measures how well we’ve automated the most valuable industries in the world.
Most benchmarks study abstract capabilities. APEX evaluates model performance on real deliverables across law, finance, consulting, and medicine.
The models most capable of doing work today, according to APEX:
🥇 GPT 5
🥈 Grok 4
🥉 Gemini 2.5 Flash
Other findings:
- GPT 5 demonstrates the strongest performance across all 4 domains
- Some cheaper models outperform more expensive models from the same provider (e.g. Gemini 2.5 Flash vs. Gemini 2.5 Pro)
- The best open source model, Qwen (7th), performs only 2% behind Grok 4 overall
Incredible progress by the @mercor_ai team. When I led their series A they were doing ~1m in revenue. Really impressive to surpass 500m in run rate in such a short period. Its just the beginning
Mercor (@mercor_ai) scaled from $1-500M in revenue run rate in the last 17 months, making us the fastest growing company of all time. Our growth is accelerating. We averaged 11% week over week growth in July, 18% WoW growth in August, and 19% WoW growth in September.
One trend driving this meteoric growth: the Economy is Becoming an RL Environment Machine.
Reinforcement learning is becoming so effective that agents can hillclimb any benchmark, but humans need to define the rewards to automate everything.
While everyone fears job loss, we’re creating a new category of knowledge work faster than any other time in history. The future of work will converge on training agents.
We're paying out over $1M / day to people in our marketplace and hiring experts rapidly across nearly every domain: software engineers, doctors, lawyers, consultants, bankers, and many more.
After 2 great years at benchmark, I’ve made the difficult decision to leave the firm in order to pursue a new adventure.
Benchmark simply excels in the craft of early stage investing and forming deep partnerships with founders. I’ll always be grateful to have had the opportunity to partner with and learn from great investors at benchmark, both current and past. I especially want to thank Peter for his mentorship, first on my board and later as a colleague over the past 6 years. While I’m eager to start investing my personal capital, I’ll certainly miss the great colleagues here.
The best part of investing is to partner closely with generational founders and help them at the start of their journeys when faith and support matter the most.
During my two years at benchmark, I’ve had the privilege to join the boards for remarkable founders like @BrendanFoody at @mercor_ai , @DLeitersdorf at @DecartAI, @joshua_xu_ at @HeyGen_Official , @ypatil125 @lindensli and Rhythm at Applied compute , and other incredible companies that are still unannounced. I’ll also continue to serve on the board of Brex, one of my first seed investments, with appreciation for Pedro and Henrique who trusted me as one of their first board members.
These founders have pulled off feats that would have seemed impossible when they started. Mercor has grown run rate over 100X into 9 figures in 1 year, Decart has created realtime generative videos that feel like magic, HeyGen is helping businesses create 10M minutes of AI video every month, Applied Compute is bringing frontier RL to any enterprise, and Brex has now provided credit cards to over 30K businesses.
It’s an honor to continue to support their growth.
Before benchmark, I was a founder for 12 years, so I know how much that word means. Nothing has brought me more joy over the past 2 years than to have some of you describe me as a co-founder to your business.
As for what’s next, I’ll continue leading rounds personally (including one where I am partnering again with my benchmark colleagues!) and plan to build a new investment practice. I look forward to sharing more soon. Thank you again to Benchmark for the wonderful experience.
Welcome to the era of AI live streaming.
MirageLSD makes reality and your imagination become one.
Once again, @DecartAI expands the frontier of what AI can do for entertainment.
We love partnering with the underdog at Benchmark @mansourtarek_ ❤️
Welcome to The Era of Evals
Mercor (@mercor_ai) is now working with 6 out of the Magnificent 7, all of the top 5 AI labs, and most of the top application layer companies. One trend is common across every customer: we are entering The Era of Evals.
RL is becoming so effective that models will be able to saturate any evaluation. This means that the primary barrier to applying agents to the entire economy is building evals for everything.
This will be one of the largest buildouts we have ever seen with enterprises pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into evals for every workflow we want agents to automate.
We're quickly defining a new class of work and hiring across nearly every domain: software engineers, consultants, bankers, lawyer, doctors, gamers, and many more.
great to chat with @HarryStebbings about:
- Mercor growing from 1 to 100m in 11 months
- How the lessons from Brex growing from 0 to 100m in 18 months helped.
-From bootstrapping a leading mobile game developer to investing
-Why moving to silicon valley increases the chances of a big outcome
-The traits Benchmark looks for in iconic founders
-What jobs AI will replace first?
100x in less than a year. Apply if you are interested in growth.
Mercor scaled from $1M - $100M in annual revenue run rate in 11 months, making us the fastest growing company in the world. We averaged 41% monthly growth in 2024, then grew 55% in January, and 87% in February.
We also profited $1M+ last month, but the largest barrier to growth is finding exceptional people to join our team.
Apply today if you're interested in joining us. We'll reach out inviting you to an interview.
x.com/i/jobs/190221924432419…
Progressing fast!
Mercor is solving talent allocation in the AI economy.
The difference between greatness and failure is the right person being in the right place at the right time. Putting them there is the hardest unsolved problem in capitalism.
We’re excited to announce our $100M Series B at a $2B valuation from @felicis, @generalcatalyst, @benchmark, DST and @MenloVentures.
victor lazarte retweeted
We have incorporated HeyGen's avatar model to work seamlessly with Sora, and the results are truly next-level. This is probably the most advanced talking avatar video to date—outperforming real actors in many scenarios. With this, we can precisely fine-tune movements, expressions, and actions without the hassle of repeatedly reshooting real actors. Plus, there's no limit to how long these videos can be.
This isn't a digital clone—it's a fully AI-generated human avatar.
Check it out!
I am excited to lead Benchmark’s $25m investment in Decart and partner with @DLeitersdorf and @MosheSshalev , building the future of AI social experiences.
At 23 Dean had earned his PhD and produced award winning research on efficient distributed algorithms in sparse matrix multiplication. A lot of the current AI revolution is explained by parallelizing computation and speeding up matrix multiplication, so Dean knew the techniques he invented could bring new products to life.
In the beginning, Decart helped companies train large models 3x faster netting the startup multi million dollar contracts, but the founders quickly realized that by being faster and cheaper, they could create experiences that were not possible before.
That led them to launch Oasis, the first real time video model in the world. For the first time you could show a video game to a model and the model would infinitely expand it, allowing you to play without the need of a game engine. On top of that, Oasis is a full 10x cheaper than the most popular video models.
At a time when companies are charging as much as $200 a month for cutting edge capabilities, Oasis is completely free, with no ads. If you haven't tried it, you can do it now at decart ai.
The last decade saw very little innovation on social. AI will change that, by allowing experiences we only dreamed of. Oasis sparked the imagination of millions of people who played it. I believe the next application of this model will be 10x bigger.
Grateful for the opportunity to be a part of this journey alongside @shaunmmaguire and @orenzeev .
victor lazarte retweeted
I really enjoyed having this discussion about the current state of AI and the implications for private and public market investing with Patrick and Modest. Hope you have a chance to listen!
Whenever I’m curious about 1) what’s going on in AI technology frontier and 2) what the many important business and market implications are, I go to @chetanp and @modestproposal1
We cover everything we can think of, just in time for all the OpenAI announcements
Enjoy
victor lazarte retweeted
I'm beyond excited to announce our new Avatar Looks feature at @HeyGen_Official ! 🎉
Now, with just one verification, you can upload as much footage as you want to unlock unlimited styles for your avatar. Change up your backgrounds, outfits, stances, and camera angles to make your videos more engaging than ever before. We've also added 50+ new avatars and 400+ new footage clips to inspire your creativity. 🎬
I can't wait to see the amazing content you'll create with it.
Unlimited looks, unlimited creativity! ✨
victor lazarte retweeted
Really fun to reflect on investing in the AI era with @HarryStebbings
Thank you for having me on!
2. The Most Exciting and Disorienting Time in History
The prize is so big, if it works there will be giant outcomes.
With that logic we can justify ridiculous investments on any fundamental basis.
BUT we also haven’t fully captured that much market value yet.
Love to hear your thoughts on this @honam @dafrankel
