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NeurIPS 2025 in Review
Twenty thousand reviewers, twenty thousand submissions, and a parallel venue in Mexico City. NeurIPS has scaled—and the field is wrestling with alignment, RL, and what “good enough” AI means for the world.
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Merchants spent years blocking bots. Now they're paying to welcome them.
From Money20/20: agentic commerce is flipping the script—everyone is building consumer shopping agents, but relatively few are building for merchants. Three investment areas that stand out.
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Takeaways from the MCP Developer Summit
Supersaturation, nucleation, and production MCP: tool sprawl, enterprise identity, and rich UIs from Bloomberg, Turkish Airlines, and Shopify—plus why this feels inevitable.
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AI Agents will fundamentally restructure every organization
From Roman collegia to autonomous buyers’ agents: why agents are third economic actors, what happens when they sit at the apex of consumption, and where moats may still hold.
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The NDR Mirage: When Net Dollar Retention Only Counts Your Winners
NDR is the North Star of software investing—but the definition is slipping. A close read of how elite numbers get window-dressed, starting with a familiar name in a recent S-1.
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One VC’s Lament on the State of AI “News”
The AI discourse is loud, thin, and optimized for clicks—while the durable work happens quietly in contracts, fraud, diagnostics, and the small wins in engineering. A note on hype, signal, and what survives the froth.
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The rumors are true: AI is eating SaaS — What I learned from a 6-hour hackathon
Forty-eight teams, six hours, working clones of familiar enterprise tools: what a Vertex × CreatorsCorner hackathon showed about coding agents, multi-agent orchestration, and SaaS moats.
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How to find your next AI startup idea when everything seems possible
Generated with OpenAI As an early-stage investor, friends often ask me something like, “Hey, I have this AI startup idea. Do you think it’s a good one?” The ongoing AI revolution offers incredible possibilities, but als…
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AI lessons reinforced: How Google Translate proved scale trumps expertise
From IBM Candide to Google Translate: why Sutton’s “bitter lesson” keeps winning—and what it means for builders betting on rules vs. data and compute.
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Building to understand: Lessons from an AI hackathon
After joining an AI hackathon, a sharper lens on what breaks when you actually ship: nondeterminism, tooling gaps, and why Cursor is a smart intern—not a replacement for judgment.
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How to Make Investors and Your Board Love Your Usage-Based Revenue Model
How to make investors and your board love your usage-based revenue model “Your revenue isn’t predictable enough.” If you run a usage-based startup, you’ve probably heard this concern from investors and board members. Bu…
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Agents overlooked, scaling limits overblown: Key AI trends from NeurIPS 2024
At NeurIPS 2024 the conversation shifted from whether AI could transform industries to how to make it work at scale—agents, distillation, CRUD, and cross-domain teams.
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Building AI systems that deliver, not just dazzle
Notes from KubeCon: Kelsey Hightower’s “your product actually works,” why systems engineers are right to be skeptical of AI theater, and four practical tips for founders shipping platform AI.
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Taking prompt optimization from an art into a science
Taking prompt optimization from an art into a science: An interview with MIPRO’s Krista Opsahl-Ong Made with Napkin AI My Vertex Ventures US colleague Sandeep Bhadra and I are thrilled to share our conversation with Kri…
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How AI Companies Can Build Pricing Power and Capture Value
The key to durable business value is pricing power. The recent explosion of AI-first companies has highlighted a fundamental challenge facing AI founders and investors today: How do you build a business that not only cr…
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Unlocking Tax Credits for Everyone with AI: Our Investment in SPRX
Today, Vertex Ventures US is thrilled to announce our lead announcement in SPRX Tax ’s $12 million Series A round, with participation from Y Combinator, Restive, and Rebel Fund. SPRX and its AI-driven approach to the ta…
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Is usage-based pricing right for you?
The arrival of cloud computing precipitated a seismic shift in the software industry. It reshaped not just how software is built and delivered, but also how customers pay for it. The software industry largely shifted aw…
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Teaching AI to think like humans
An interview with one of the Stanford AI researchers behind KTO: Teaching AI to think like humans One of the many reasons I love AI right now is that every new discovery or new development seems like a peek into the fun…
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The bar for IPOs is only getting higher
As a dad of twins, I’ve learned that looks can be deceiving. The current tech IPO drought, now in its third year, superficially resembles the post-dot-com era (2001–2003) or the financial crisis (2007–2008). Some might…
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How AI startups should think about pricing their products
Image generated by DALL-E. Prompt: “abstract, aesthetically pleasing image that represents strategies in pricing for AI products, earth tones, simple design, dimensions appropriate for Medium or LinkedIn” Pricing. The t…