Lightspeed Venture Partners

So it's an interesting URL.

It's talk.shapes.inc. And it is a seed round led by, lo and behold, Lightspeed Venture Partners.

And what Shapes does is pretty interesting.

It's designed to be a way for people to leverage AI in groups, essentially in a group chat.

And you can use Shapesync for those purposes.

Obviously very consumer oriented.

Super early on, as I mentioned, it is a seed round of $8 million led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

But gosh, it's got a lot of the characteristics we're looking for.

Former Terramoto Biosciences Executive Solomon Reisberg is also a co-founder.

Lightspeed Ventures partners led the funding round.

Other investors include Premji Invest, Mayfield, IVP, Lux Capital and Menlo Ventures.

And the list doesn't stop there.

A brand called Different raises forty-eight million dollars to automate B2B demand generation.

Different emerged from stealth with a forty-eight million dollar seed round led by General Catalyst with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Its platform coordinates demand gen campaigns across channels, including advertising, email, landing pages, and answer engine optimization.

The company describes automated campaign planning, creation, optimization, and spending adjustments with human approval before publishing.

And the coalition of majors suing Suno over training data unleashed their thundering hordes this week on more organizations potentially caught up in the web of Suno's messiness.

One is Lightspeed Partners, one of the key investment firms that has been funding Suno's alleged training data misdeeds, and the other is DistroKid, which is, by volume, the largest supplier of AI-generated slop to the DSPs.

Whether or not anything comes of the Lightspeed subpoena? Well, here's another baseball metaphor.

It's a high-hard one aimed at Lightspeed and any other investment firms stepping up to the generative AI music plate.

But I'm just amused to see them pop up here again.

And then, of course, we have, you know, iconic Lightspeed Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, you know, all the usual players.

But yeah, Goldman Sachs is kind of, I guess, the most notable addition to the cap table here.

They're very discerning, you know, good at what they do.

And SpaceX bought the low-band spectrum in its goal to become a major mobile carrier in the US.

Plus, two updates from across the Light Speed universe.

Let's get into it.

Claire, we had two new models this week, both claiming to be the frontier.

models? Arena, the company behind the popular LM Arena leaderboard for ranking AI models, has raised $200 million at a valuation of $3.1 billion.

The Series B was jointly led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Coastler Ventures, and it nearly doubles the company's value in about 10 months.

Arena started as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley in 2023.

Millions of users compare model answers side by side and vote for the better one.