8VC

And I haven't mentioned the funds we've invested into, from Kleiner to Sequoia to Lightspeed to General Catalysts.

Menlo, 8VC.

So we've invested into a lot of tier one VC firms.

NEA.

If that lineage argument holds up, licensing new training data doesn't clean a model descended from an unlicensed predecessor, a theory that reaches past Suno to any vendor selling a clean successor built on a prior in-house model's outputs.

Val's AI, seeded by 8VC and Bloomberg Beta, has now raised a $40 million Series A from Andreessen Horowitz.

It sells paid, confidential benchmarks across law, finance, coding, cybersecurity, and biosecurity, designed as the opposite of public leaderboards that models can train against.

Revenue is up eight times, and headcount has tripled to 25 this year, and OpenAI already cited Val's results in its Astra for Law launch.

Uh, they just see this as a way to assume power.

Lonsdale, of course, is also founder of 8VC.

Uh, here he is.

He went on, um, Jesse Watters last night, and he went after Josh Hawley, which was interesting.

One of his sons, Finn, started a venture capital fund this year that says it builds and invests in generational health companies and was reported to have solicited funds to invest in healthcare AI.

Last year, Finn Kennedy worked for 8VC, a venture capital firm run by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire ally of President Trump's.

The younger Kennedy co-authored articles at the firm, saying that AI doctors don't work for free, suggesting that the companies that create the technology should be paid.

He laid out the federal overhaul needed to deploy them, which included appointing a person at the FDA to focus specifically on artificial intelligence.

Mr. Seehafer, a Political appointee who has been at the agency about a year has been described by people who worked with him as wanting to pare back the agency's oversight of medical AI.

Mr. C. Hafer's appointment drew notice in Silicon Valley investment circles.

Great choice from the HHS team, Sebastian Kaliri of 8VC.

The Fix, now playing in theaters.

Efficiencies is, you know, code for getting rid of people.

um to you know to to really um to really leverage this this opportunity so there'd be no reason to have sequence involved here in my opinion if if they weren't going to do that because then dell's office or just these uh 8VC Lux Capital conviction, they would just go direct or Michael Dell's DFO management would just go direct and buy it.

There'd be no reason for this sequence holding to be involved here.

Got it.

Its list of investors include Lightspeed, KOTU, Insight, Sequoia, Founders Fund.

Thrive Capital, Redpoint, Ribbit, GV, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Contrary, Spark, Altimeter, Bessemer, Iconic, Robinhood Ventures, VCX, 8VC, Citi, and the list goes on and on and on.

In April, Business Insider reported that RAMP hit $1.4 billion in annualized revenue and is preparing for an IPO.

No timeline was given, but if this pace keeps up, retail investors may not get a chance to invest until after all the value has been created.

And there's been a lot of serendipity involved with, with Saronic where stars have aligned at the right times, right places.

But I was actually doing some consulting work for 8VC and Joe Lonsdale.

And I had also just met Dino on a, on a hunting trip.

We're connected through a mutual friend and we just hit it off kind of veteran to veteran amongst this group of people.

And John has a tremendous amount of experience in healthcare tech.

from Epic Systems, executive in residence at 8VC, and then his experience at Digital Diagnostics.

He understands both the FDA clearance side and the reimbursement side, which gives him a unique perspective in this area.

John, I want to talk to you about AI today, but I really want to thank you for joining the show.

And I got to learn a ton.

After about 13 years, you know, started to get a little bit itchy, wanted to find a new adventure.

And I ended up in my travels running into the founder of Palantir, Joe Lonsdale, who was just starting and scaling 8VC.

They had a small fund out that was really doing angel checks and they're like, you know, it's getting bigger.

The financing is still under negotiation, so neither figure is final, and the reporting did not identify investors.

For context, Cognition closed a round of more than $1 billion in May at a $26 billion valuation, co-led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst and 8VC.

If the new terms hold, the company will have nearly doubled its price tag in about four months, inside one of the most crowded corners of the market.

Dell Technologies delivered a blowout quarter on AI server demand, reporting fiscal second quarter results.

Yeah.

8VC and Apollo.

8VC and Apollo.

Yeah.

So you mentioned venture capital started out being this reverse pyramid where there's a partnership at the top and you had an operating team supporting it.