Union Square Ventures - Page 5

Presto

Feb 6

Electric vehicles are a prime example of how electricity will be used in more complex ways as we electrify everything to reduce carbon emissions. As batteries, they enable shifting electricity usage in time, and as vehicles, they enable shifting usage in space. At USV, we’ve been interested in facilitating this future of more programmable energy. The EV opportunity today is especially attractive for commercial fleets. They have predictable routes, are sensitive to maintenance costs, and can s...
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Reservoir

Feb 5

Over the last decade, there has been a proliferation of new blockchains and onchain assets. This trend is just accelerating as our online world is increasingly built on blockchain rails. Today, creating new chains and tokens is cheaper, faster, and safer than ever. While this fragmentation of chains and assets has enabled diversity and scale in the blockchain ecosystem, it has also made development across it complex. A future of hundreds of chains – each with their own unique assets – require...
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Miren

Feb 4

What a time to be building! Writing computer code has never been easier. We now have AI models that have memorized every conceivable API and can assist us or even write code for us outright. Especially the more recent so-called “reasoning models” have taken another big step in this direction. At the same time, hardware has become incredibly performant. There are now 1U servers that come with 2 processors with 144 cores each, 96 MB of Cache and 2 TB of RAM and 244 TB of SSD disk space all for ...
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2024 USV Core Fund

Jan 27

We recently started investing out of our newest USV Core Fund. As with each of our previous funds, while it is a new vehicle, our approach will stay the same: small fund, thesis driven, high conviction, and low velocity. We’ll focus on being long term and dedicated partners to a small number of teams creating projects and businesses that are aligned with our thesis. We’ll continue to commit once and then partner with the companies throughout their lifetimes. We run a collaborative partnership...
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Four Futures

Dec 17

We are in a moment where the future is both wildly exciting and highly uncertain. The future state and greatest opportunities are likely determined by the axes: rate of advancement and the openness of the frontier models.
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Our Investment in Glow Protocol: DePIN at the Edge of Energy Markets

Oct 31

At USV, we invest in networks that help coordinate human behavior at scale, particularly at the edge of large markets experiencing transformative pressure. Today we're announcing our investment in the Glow Protocol, which incentivizes the deployment of solar infrastructure. Glow’s approach is radically different from existing subsidy systems for green energy, drawing inspiration from Bitcoin’s open and highly competitive incentive model. Glow addresses a fundamental challenge in solar infrast...
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Supp

Oct 17

The healthcare system can sometimes feel like it’s not working on our behalf, leading to a loss of trust. When trust erodes, we lose our sense of empowerment. Our sense of agency disappears. Outcomes deteriorate. This isn't inevitable. Instead, people-driven exploration, sharing, and collaboration around health are ways to bring back trust. And when trust re-emerges, changes in the system occur. Moreover, a new system can be built. Our investment in SuppCo, a company founded by Steve Martocci...
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Daylight

Sep 24

As crypto has evolved and matured over the last 15 years, many of its promises have – contrary to popular opinion – come to fruition to a nontrivial degree. Every day millions of users globally bring their wallets to applications where they take onchain actions, with sovereignty over their own assets and data. Many of these actions happen as a result of a user interacting with an app, protocol, or asset directly. But crypto’s open, composable, and permissionless nature means that all of these...
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What we’ve learned about AI learning

Sep 19

It's been over a year since Albert shared his vision for 'tutors for everyone,' and we're all the more convinced that AI will not only make knowledge more accessible, but also unlock radically new learning experiences. The sad truth is that our institutional education system remains fundamentally broken and unable to keep pace with the technological changes happening all around us. This isn’t anyone’s fault per se, but simply the very nature of institutions being better suited for incremental...
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Consensus

Aug 14

Let’s explore two themes we believe are deeply important at USV: the fragmentation of search and broadening access to and accelerating our collective...
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