Perspectives

Perspectives, not platitudes.

Investment perspectives, market analysis, and growth playbooks from 30 years of backing Founders. What we've learned, what we're seeing, and what actually works.

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Tools, templates, and playbooks from operators who know what it takes to scale.
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AI Apps
Portfolio
Spot AI: Building the System of Engagement for Enterprise Video Intelligence
Enter Spot AI which is making computer vision practical for underserved users in everyday businesses and industries that power the real economy. Imagine a car wash trying to understand the flow of vehicles through their facility over the course of a day. Or a warehouse operator who wants to know the moment a truck has arrived at the loading dock to begin processing materials. Or even an industrial plant or construction site where a foreman or plant leader wants to monitor safety operations more comprehensively. 
 
Article
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Jeremy Kaufmann
Scale Studio
Trends
Scale Studio Flash Update: Economic Gravity Pulls on Software Startups
With the bulk of 2022 behind us, attention now turns to planning for 2023. The topic of conversation in every boardroom is the corresponding tradeoffs between growth and burn. Check out the tool that we built that helps you understand how you compare with other companies. Stay tuned as we’ll also be publishing our 2023 Whisper Numbers later this month. 
Article
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Dale Chang
AI Apps
Portfolio
Loops: Turning Data into Actionable Opportunities
Today, Scale is leading the $14M Seed round in Loops. By using Loops’ platform, product teams can cut through the noise and focus on insights that help them maximize their KPIs. Loops proactively identifies growth opportunities, which PMs can implement to drive growth, engagement and retention targets.
Article
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Ariel Tseitlin
AI Apps
Trends
Introducing: the Scale Generative AI Index
We are closely following the momentum of these overlapping but distinct trends. And to track our own work and share some of the knowledge we’ve accumulated, we’re introducing the Scale Generative AI Index, a list of nearly 200 companies in the space and details about what they’re building. We’ll keep adding to this market map as our research progresses. 
Article
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Jeremy Kaufmann
AI Apps
Generative AI Index Use Case Glossary
A quick glossary of our Generative AI Index use case definitions
Article
AI Apps
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Max Abram
AI Apps
Trends
Observations from the Field: The Future of Generative AI
We believe that in this moment of generative AI hype, nothing is more valuable than hearing directly from entrepreneurs and product leaders building in the Generative AI space. That’s why last month we hosted a panel with a group of entrepreneurs and AI practitioners to discuss the key challenges entrepreneurs are facing when it comes to building category-defining generative AI companies.
 
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Jeremy Kaufmann
AI Apps
Portfolio
Doubling Down on Cognitive Apps: Announcing Scale Fund VIII
Today we’re excited to unveil our new fund, Scale Venture Partners Fund VIII. This $900M fund gives us the opportunity to continue to invest in the category-defining technology companies that are being built today. We want to thank our amazing founders and investors, new and returning, for making this fund possible.
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Ariel Tseitlin
Trends
Building a Team at Scale
Since our inception, Scale Venture Partners has been on a mission to invest in the best entrepreneurs and support them as they build market-leading companies. And much like the companies we invest in, the team that's assembled to help accomplish the mission is the most important asset we have. In the 2 years following the announcement of Fund VII in 2020 we've spent considerable time and effort building the team. With today's announcement of Fund VIII, we are excited to announce several new promotions, the addition of new team members, and capabilities to our Scaling Platform.
Article
Trends
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Stacey Bishop
AI Apps
Trends
Foundation Models Are The New Public Cloud
Over the last few years, building an AI startup used to require “do-it-yourself AI,” which consisted of gathering training data, labeling it, architecting complex data transformations, tuning hyperparameters, and selecting the right model. It was a herculean task, similar in complexity to the workload of the Salesforce engineer above.  But in the last year or two, foundation models have emerged as a time-saving shortcut that enable entrepreneurs to do more faster. These foundation models aren’t specific to particular AI use cases, but are largely general and have something to offer almost anyone. Entrepreneurs can now decouple parts of the training data and model (which comes pre-packaged in a foundation model) from the application layer, which we at Scale call a cognitive application.
Article
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Jeremy Kaufmann
Go To Market
Scale Studio
Scale Studio Flash Update: Median Growth Steady, But Pullback in Growth of High Flyers a Warning Sign
Scale Studio Flash Updates analyze a representative sample of enterprise software startups to measure industry growth rates and the health of the SaaS market. The most recent updates were Q122, 2022 Whisper Numbers, Q421, Q321, and Q221. 
 
 Note that for this update — due to recent market fluctuations — we spent some additional time acquiring a broader sample than in previous editions of our Flash Updates. 
Article
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Dale Chang
Fintech
Trends
What Comes After Adyen and Stripe? The Future of Payments Orchestration and Optimization
Turns out, phones are quite good payment platforms. This poses a challenge for traditional consumer payments. Debit cards, credit cards, and other legacy payment methods are making way for Apple Pay, BNPL, QR code payments, Venmo, and Zelle — and that’s just in the U.S. Outside the U.S., super apps are beating Visa and Mastercard to the punch. China is a prime example, where WeChat and AliPay process more USD equivalent volume collectively than Visa. 
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Alex Niehenke
Go To Market
Scale Studio
Benchmarking startup growth and burn
This post walks through the data and methodology behind our growth and burn multiple benchmarks, summarizing some of the key decisions we made in calculating them and providing some benchmark tables that might be useful for venture-backed software startups.
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Edi Danalache
Go To Market
Trends
Steering with a Madman in the Car
Responding to the flow of venture advice
Article
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Rory O'Driscoll
Go To Market
Scale Studio
Growth and Burn Benchmarking Tool
A founder's tool to compare growth and burn across two years relative to similar-sized SaaS comps
Article
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Edi Danalache
AI Apps
Trends
Natural Language Generation
Writing this content is a desk worker’s low-skill labor, demanding little skill but lots of time. (The quality of GMail autocomplete, introduced in 2018, illustrates just how repetitive business writing is.) It’s this attractive target that makes Natural Language Generation (“NLG”) products so exciting, because this new technology has finally grokked the patterns interwoven in our prose.
 
 NLG products are newly feasible, enabled by linguistic “transformer” models like GPT-3 from OpenAI and Jurassic-1 from AI21 Labs.
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Max Abram

News from the Scale portfolio and firm

Investment perspectives, market analysis, and growth playbooks from 30 years of backing Founders.
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