It’s the dog days of summer (hence the bimonthly issue), and the team at Roble has been heads-down identifying new trends, sourcing and closing new investments, and working closely with our founders as they continue to scale.
We have two new investments in vertical applications of AI and the developer AI data space that we’re excited to share more about soon.
In a similar vein, we’ll be gathering investors and founders from the Roble community for our fall webinar on raising your next VC round. Expect tips on structuring your fundraise, KPIs, pitching — and how to make sure you’re picking the right term sheets.
Lens Into a Human-Enabled Future
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP HIGHLIGHTS
Sergio broke down Salesforce’s recent “Agentforce” product announcement, including its relevance to the overarching development of Generative AI and its ongoing quest to convince the rest of the world of its potential for value creation:
The Latest From Our Founders
PORTFOLIO NEWS AND UPDATES
Teachy became the second Brazil-led team in history to win the Stanford Impact Founder Award from Stanford GSB.
Awardees are recognized for high-impact ventures addressing social and environmental problems; Teachy’s tool is helping over 300k teachers save hours of time developing lesson plans that meet national standards.
Mosaic ranked #1 in Momentum Leader for CPM Software Report, underscoring the financial software solution company’s “rapid growth, innovation, and increasing market presence.”
Rising Team founder Jen Dulski was recognized as one of Capchase’s Top 25 SaaS Founders of 2024:
Towards the end of July, Dragonboat held their annual ACCELERATE virtual summit, showcasing how utilizing the right product operations platform can create a huge impact. You can now watch the summit’s content on demand here.
You can also read the key takeaways from world-class product leaders here.
Hyperbound has kicked off Beat the Bot 2.0, their annual cold-calling competition where sales reps compete against their AI bots in simulated sales conversations:
They’ve also announced a partnership with WorkRamp to develop their L&D platform, as well as the addition of a founding engineer, founding ML engineer, and founding marketing lead to the Hyperbound team.
After almost 9 years with the company, CTO & Co-founder Mike Moone has stepped down from FlowEQ’s day-to-day operations.
Tiny Comet has been acquired by fellow YC developer Altera — congratulations to the whole team! We’re excited to see founder Emily Tierney and her team bring a new level of interactive experiences to players everywhere, amplifying Altera’s mission of building digital humans that enhance, not replace, human-to-human interactions in the age of AI.
What Keeps Us Up at Night
KEY RISK FACTORS
By Sergio Monsalve
I’ve talked in previous issues about the increased risk of fraud that AI introduces; in an era where artificial intelligence can generate increasingly convincing media, we face a critical challenge: how do we distinguish between human-created and AI-generated material? This isn't just an academic concern – it has far-reaching implications for our digital ecosystem, from e-commerce to social media, and even our democratic processes.
Consider the potential for fraud on travel and shopping websites. AI-generated reviews, photos, and product descriptions could mislead consumers on a massive scale. We urgently need a solution akin to Meta's AI detection technology, but one that's open-source and widely available. Just as online purchase protection has become standard, we need AI detection to become ubiquitous across the internet.
We believe that blockchain technology could play a pivotal role in this space. By leveraging it alongside metadata tagging, we could verify the origin of all digital content.
The importance of such a system becomes even more apparent as we approach major elections. The ability to quickly identify and debunk deepfakes is crucial in preventing the spread of misinformation.
As we navigate this new frontier, the technology that Meta uses to verify AI-generated content is much-needed, but the degree to which it is needed is what’s been keeping me up at night.
It’s possible that government agencies could demand that all content carry an authenticity stamp, powered and validated by something like the blockchain (allowing this tech to truly, directly better humanity), but there’s a lot of opportunity here for startups to step in and provide these verification services as well.
What Caught Our Attention
NEWS AND RESOURCES
The Next Big Opportunity in Consumer Tech: Solving the Love-Hate Dynamic (LinkedIn)
How AI Will Turn Capital into Labor (a16z)
What could kill the $1trn artificial-intelligence boom? (The Economist)
More Americans rely on side hustles (LinkedIn News)
AI’s impact on income inequality in the US (Brookings)
How teaming up talent and AI will shape the future of work (Fast Company)
The Four Barriers to AI Adoption (LinkedIn News)
The great acceleration: CIO perspectives on generative AI (Databricks)
Techstars Workforce Development Announces 2024 Class of Pioneering Startups (Techstars)
Are you a founder currently raising in the future of work space, or know someone who is? Pitch us here.
About the author
Roble Ventures is a future-of-work focused fund investing in technologies that enable people, teams, and organizations to achieve their most ambitious work.
