August's theme was ambition. We announced SPC’s $575M Fund IV, saw new fundraises across the portfolio, and members shipping everything from tactile gloves to a 3D simulation of San Francisco.
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Announcing SPC’s $575M Fund IV
This month we announced our $575M Fund IV, our largest yet. Fund IV allows us to continue supporting technologists working on the most ambitious projects. The mission stays the same: help exceptional people find and build their life’s work.
Events at SPC
In SF, we hosted AI & The Wet Lab with Tetherline, a packed panel with bio experts from Anthropic, Biohub, and Xaira Therapeutics on why AI for science is one of the most exciting areas of exploration right now. The month closed with a fireside chat with Hans Robertson, Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Verkada and former Co-founder of Meraki, on building enduring companies.
Fund Updates
Deep Cogito raised a $43M Series A led by TQ Ventures, with participation from Benchmark, Nexus Venture Partners, Atreides, and SPC, to advance research into AI post-training and recursive self-improvement.
Lambda Surgical emerged from stealth with a $6.5M seed round to bring LiDAR-based, sub-millimeter spatial sensing into minimally invasive surgery.
Rivo came out of beta and raised a $2.7M seed round to build self-driving money — agents that sweep idle checking-account cash into Treasury-backed yield.
Lica was acquired by Gamma, one SPC company joining another! Lica's co-founders, Priyaa and Purvanshi, will lead a new design research lab inside Gamma, working toward fluid, multimodal presentations for its 100M+ users.
Member Updates
Product Launches & Company News
First Contact launched their tactile sensing gloves, bringing high-fidelity touch data to robotics.
Nyne announced a partnership with Replit — two SPC companies teaming up.
Simular‘s computer-use agent Sai hit 73% on OSWorld 2.0 (beating Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol).
Personal Projects, Explorations & Publications
Kushal’s paper on agentic efficiency — why CLAUDE.md files grow unbounded, and how prompt comments fix it — hit #3 trending worldwide on alphaXiv.
Lucas published research on micro-world-models — compressing cognition into small models that run in real time, anywhere.
Rafi wrote This AI Thing: What Are We Even Building?, a thoughtful essay on the industry’s direction.
David built SFSIM, a 3D simulation of San Francisco.
Ranjini launched a new Substack with a debut essay on writing in the age of AI.
Christian released a preview of a Lean-to-CUDA compiler.
Coming Up
Recent Content
We released a new Minus One conversation on AI interpretability and safety with Tom McGrath (Goodfire), recorded the day after the OpenAI / Hugging Face news broke —in the room that was once Goodfire's first office. And Sridhar Ramaswamy (Snowflake) joined us to unpack the secret superpower of great founders.
Thanks for reading! The work continues.