Union Square Ventures

Obliterate, Don't Automate

In 2015, my partner Fred Wilson published a short blog post, Don't Automate, Obliterate, on how USV thinks about startup investments. The post was based on a 1990 HBR article by Michael Hammer by the same name. Specifically, Fred and the rest of USV partners found that the best investments were in the companies that were not just building software to automate existing markets… but to fully obliterate them instead. Since then, it's become a defining characteristic for how USV assesses startup investments.

Gritt

Infrastructure is one of the great accomplishments of human civilization. Early standout examples include the Roman road network and aqueducts and the even earlier sanitation systems of the Indus Valley Civilization. Modern life would be completely impossible without the extensive infrastructure which we now often take for granted, such as the electricity grid. To advance from here, we face a dual challenge: we need to construct new infrastructure, such as massive solar arrays, and we need to... Read more

Pascal

Over the last 24 months, prediction markets have grown rapidly, consistently defied expectations, and quickly become an indelible part of our social and economic fabric. Prediction markets receive a lot of criticism, some warranted, but ultimately we believe these types of markets are important, will meaningfully extend beyond just sports betting, and will be a positive force in the world. The idea that markets can surface information and help us develop a much clearer understanding of the future is powerful. Read more

Alqem

The universe of potential materials is vast. To get a sense for just how big it is consider the following: we want to combine three different elements (drawn from a subset of the periodic table of say only 10 elements) into a new material. A naive first estimation would be that we have 10x10x10 = 1000 candidates to consider. But wait, we can choose to have varying amounts of each element in the material. Again just to get a sense, simply assume that we can have between 1 and 100 units of the different elements to explore the possibilities. Read more

The Rebel Alliance

We believe that the AI opportunity is too big and too important to be owned by any one company. Instead, we see a massive ecosystem emerging around the agentic AI stack. We refer to it as the Rebel Alliance, and we believe it's not just competing, but is structurally positioned to lead. What began as a simple "chat app" experience has matured into the agentic era. More powerful models, combined with better tooling to orchestrate and connect them, have made it possible to build truly capable agents. Read more

Consumer Rebellion

We’ve been talking a lot at USV about the rebel alliance—the alternative to big model reliance—and the opportunities it creates for builders of the agentic stack. But the result of a strong rebel alliance also means we’re at the entrance to a bubbling and awesome agentic consumer explosion built on top of this new set of open tools and foundations. Michael Mignano @mignano For the first time in ~3 years, it feels like the AI table has been flipped over. Yes, the labs and hyperscalers will have to adapt. Read more

Fomo

For years, it has become increasingly clear that all assets are going to come on-chain, and eventually all of finance too. It is why we have continually invested in open financial infrastructure focused on ushering in that future such as Uniswap, Morpho, Hyperliquid, Relay, and more. In many ways, that future has arrived. Cheap public blockchains have unlocked an explosion of asset creation. Equities, commodities, and even pre-IPO assets – in derivative form – are now traded 24/7 on-chain, in secure environments. Read more

Generalist

Humanity has benefited greatly from mechanizing and automating previously manual tasks. There was a time when fields were hoed by hand. Then we invented the plow and later the tractor. Today with precision farm equipment we can have no-till planting, which retains and even builds topsoil, at scale. And yet, there are still some back breaking and highly repetitive tasks in agriculture. The same is true in industry. Despite massive progress, there is still manual final assembly of many products. Read more

Suno

USV is delighted to be participating in Suno's Series D round of financing. The last two decades of the internet have proven, more than any other period in history, that people are inherently creative. As smartphones democratized most creative mediums, many of us began posting our thoughts, photos, videos, and podcasts, too. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube became giant platforms, creating marketplace dynamics between creators and consumers. The one medium that took some extra time was music. Read more

Board

We’re delighted to share that USV has led a $20M Series A in Board, the world’s first face-to-face game console. As technology has continued to pull us more inward, many of us feel an increasing need to connect with others. In person, through real, shared experiences. Take gaming, for example. I grew up playing Nintendo and Super Nintendo, huddled around my living room CRT television with my sister, parents, friends. As I grew older, and the technology changed, so did my habits, and my gaming experiences. Read more