Eventual

Tomorrow at Ray Summit, we’re channeling Squid Game energy (minus the eliminations 😅). Swing by, spot the team in neon-pink jumpsuits and crocs, and enter to win an NVIDIA DGX Spark - the $4,500 mini AI supercomputer. Bonus points for a selfie with the helmets—tag us and #RaySummit so we can reshare!

Scaling multimodal pipelines is fundamentally different from scaling tabular analytics. 🖼️ Images + video inflate memory 100x ⚡ GPUs + CPUs need coordinated scheduling 📦 Object stores become bottlenecks Most distributed engines weren’t built with multimodal workloads in mind: - Spark was designed for large-scale tabular analytics, not memory-heavy images or embeddings. - Ray is a flexible data loading layer, but leaves multimodal pipelines to DIY stitching with custom code. That’s why we built Flotilla, Daft’s new distributed execution engine. Key design changes: - Micro-batch + streaming execution - Arrow Flight shuffle (measured up to 10× faster than Ray’s object store) - Better observability for debugging pipelines The goal: make multimodal pipelines *reliable and scalable* without endless tuning. Full details in the comments.

Big news! Today, I'm launching the Smart AI 100 List! This follows our summit on Tuesday with speakers including the President of Cisco, CRO of Nebius, VP of Microsoft, SVP of Vercel, and Partners from SignalFire, Bessemer, Insight, Index, Coatue, Pear, Gradient and more, alongside top startups like Horizon3, Pylon, Unify, Genspark, Composio, Higgsfield and more. From ~23,250 seed and Series A startups across the US, we identified the top 0.43%. This list was curated by our team at Smart Venture Media from over 400 nominations by top VCs, founders and top operators. The selection was driven by input from over 100 top VCs collectively managing $230B in capital. In addition to qualitative input, we also fact checked using proprietary data from CB insights. Since starting my podcast I’ve had over 500 conversations with top VCs, founders and tech executives on my podcast and hosted events with 800+ founders. This list reflects the backroom conversations happening in Silicon Valley, not just who is getting headlines but who the top investors think are strongest, who other founders respect, and who customers love. The metrics from CB Insights (shout out to Jason Saltzman): - $2+ billion raised collectively, with almost $1 billion this year alone - Average valuation of $88 million with 50% 6-month headcount growth - Average Mosaic score of 684 (upper quartile of all 10M+ companies on CBI) - 2.65 commercial maturity - over double the broader early-stage ecosystem - 29 companies in upper quartile of CB Insights' exit probability scores - Founded by multiple ex-Google, ex-OpenAI leaders - Market focus: Enterprise Automation (30%), Specialized Applied AI (25%), Vertical AI (25%), Infrastructure & Developer Tools (20%) See the full Smart AI 100 list here: https://lnkd.in/gU4uuFvV #SmartAI100 #TopFounders #AIStartup #Innovation #SmartVentureMedia #StartupLife #VentureCapital #AISummit #FutureofAI

Cornell Venture Capital is celebrating its 15th anniversary! 🚀 It’s incredible to look back at how far our community has come and the impact our members and alumni have made. In honor of this milestone, we’re releasing our special 15th anniversary edition of the CVC semesterly newsletter, featuring highlights from our past semester and a word from our current management team. Some recent CVCelebrations: >> Mintlify, co-founded by CVC Alum Han Wang, recently acquired Trieve to improve RAG search in documentation. >> Eventual, co-founded by CVC Alum Jay Chia, raised a $20mm series A led by Felicis. >> CVC Alum Josh Chin (AEM '19) was named a Principal at Ansa Capital. >> Emanuel Gordis (Physics ‘23) launched Trim, a general intelligence AI model that can simulate real-world physical systems evolving over time. >> Gurvir Singh (CS ‘25) and Rayan Garg (CS ‘25) recently launched Theta, RL infrastructure to train the next generation of models. >> Operand, cofounded by CVC alum Akhil Iyengar (CS & Econ ‘26) and joined by founding engineer Javier Vega (Gov & IS ‘24) raised $3.1mm in a round led by Felicis. >> Ava Poole (AEM ‘27) was recently featured in USA Today and NYT while building Paygent (Bain Capital Ventures Lab), in the FoundHer House. Read our newsletter here ↗↗↗ https://lnkd.in/gxZMYFSZ

🇳🇱 Join us in Amsterdam on August 27 for the Open Lakehouse Meetup! Discover how your lakehouse is ready for production-scale multimodal ML pipelines in "Your Lakehouse Has Everything You Need" with Sammy Sidhu, CEO & Co-Founder of Eventual! See how to process millions of images, documents, and videos in your lakehouse with Python and Daft—enabling scalable ML, deduplication, and batch inference using open table formats and familiar APIs. 🔗 Register now to save your spot: https://lu.ma/OLM-827 #opensource #oss #lakehouse #deltalake #multimodal #daft

🔥 The 2-Minute Drill (Vol. 294 / July 6, 2025). This week's edition from Crossover VC: military software stack (Onebrief), multimodal data system infrastructure (LanceDB), AI-powered early wildfire detection (Pano AI), a new data stack for the AI era (Eventual), and autonomous sales teammates to take on CRMs (Clarify).

🔍 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗸? Every week I'll be scouting for rocketships that are actively hiring so that you don't have to. Start-ups & scale-ups are the best place to get that real boost in your career, so apply fast before opportunities close! 🦾 Clarify – autonomous CRM running your sales backend 𝘌𝘶𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘦 & 𝘜𝘚 𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘵𝘦 - Engineering, Product, Sales & Marketing Raised 22.5M$ in june https://lnkd.in/dJE8VtYg 🤖 HappyRobot – AI & RPA for supply chain and logistics   𝘔𝘢𝘥𝘳𝘪𝘥, 𝘚𝘢𝘯 𝘍𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘰 & 𝘊𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘨𝘰 - Sales, Engineering, Strategy & Ops roles. Raised 16M$ in june https://lnkd.in/dk_XCq9B 💰 Kalshi – trade on the outcome of Real-world Events 𝘕𝘦𝘸 𝘠𝘰𝘳𝘬 𝘰𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘵𝘦 - Engineering, Product, Growth & Ops Raised 185M$ in june https://kalshi.com/careers 📦 Eventual – rebuilding Data Warehousing from ground up 𝘚𝘢𝘯 𝘍𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘰 - Engineering, Product, Marketing & Design Raised 30M$ in june https://www.eventual.ai/ 🔩 AllSpice.io – collaboration & automation for hardware engineers 𝘉𝘰𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘯 & 𝘚𝘢𝘯 𝘍𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘰 - Engineering, Product & GTM Raised 15M$ in june https://lnkd.in/d_aAEPEG We’ve got even more in the vault at CareerGenie 📱 but if you know more employers of the future that are hiring, tag them here! Y Combinator Techstars Microsoft for Startups

COMPANIES THAT JUST RAISED $10-50M (HIRING LIST) All 35 of these companies are backed by top-tier funds and actively hiring: 1) OpenRouter - unified interface for LLMs (US remote) 2) sintra.ai - AI employees (Vilnius) 3) Wispr Flow - voice dictation natural speech (Bay Area) 4) Eventual - data warehouse unstructured data (Bay Area) 5) Mandolin - automated EHR back-office tasks (Bay Area) 6) Superbill - medical billing processes (NYC) 7) Delphi - digital cloning (Bay Area) 8) Cluely - assistance on your screen (Bay Area) 9) SafetyKit - AI agents for risk and compliance (Bay Area) 10) Traversal - AI site reliability engineering (NYC) 11) Grifin - automatically invest with purchases (US remote) 12) HOPPR - deep learning medical imaging (Remote) 13) Wordsmith AI - AI legal workspace tools (Edinburgh / NYC) 14) Mealogic - prepared meal programs (NYC) 15) Profound - AI search optimization (NYC) 16) Astro Mechanica - next gen jet engine (Bay Area / Denver) 17) Warp - automated payroll compliance (NYC) 18) extend - AI document processing (NYC) 19) Polar - payment infrastructure (Stockholm / EU remote) 20) Browserbase - web browser for AI (Bay Area) 21) Gradient Network - decentralized computing edge infra (Remote) 22) Andrenam - maritime autonomy (Hawthorne / US remote) 23) Farsight- AI financial insights (NYC) 24) CloudQuery - cloud governance security (Bay Area / Remote) 25) Standard Nuclear - nuclear power solutions (NYC / Oak Ridge) 26) Aiera - investor event intelligence (NYC) 27) Tebi - integrated hospitality retail platform (Amsterdam) 28) Infisical - open-source secrets management (Bay Area) 29) Impart Security - API security runtime protection (Bay Area) 30) Rails - cryptocurrency derivatives trading (Toronto / Miami) 31) Flank - AI agents for legal requests (Berlin / London / Amsterdam) 32) Toma - AI-driven customer call management (Bay Area) 33) Thread AI- composable AI orchestration (NYC) 34) Blacksmith - faster continuous integrations (NYC / Bay Area) 35) Rally UXR - user research CRM (NYC / Bay Area / Boston / US remote) Adding direct links to their career pages in the comments 👋 follow me for more lists like this every week: Ben Lang ✨ thank you to Harmonic (startup database) for helping me source the list 💪 make sure to join Next Play if you're exploring what comes next in your career