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Announcing Pear Fund V: $333M to back founders before it’s obvious.
Pear was founded 13 years ago on one belief: the best time to meet a founder is before the world knows they’re great.
Fund V is a continuation of that conviction, and we’re just getting started. 🍐
Congrats to @phinity_ai on raising a $5.2M seed round led by @uncorkcap!
We first partnered with @sonyashijin and @aadi_nash at pre-seed when they joined our PearX S25 cohort.
Today Phinity is building the future of autonomous chip design and they're just getting started. 🚀
Pear VC retweeted
@sonyashijin and @aadi_nash launched Phinity Labs: AI agents that design and verify chips, 10x faster than expert engineers.
The future: every important problem gets its own chip and software stack.
Proud to back them from day one at Pear 🚀
Excited to finally share that @phinity_ai is now out of stealth! We're announcing our seed fundraise and that we’ve reached 8-figures in annualized run rate.
We’re already working with some of the largest foundation model labs. Our mission is to build fully autonomous chip design so AI can help us search beyond the limits of human engineering and discover computational systems we would never find on our own.
We’re fortunate to have the support of @uncorkcap, which led our $5.2M seed round, with participation from @Moxxie including @JeffDean, following our pre-seed led by @pearvc!
It’s been an amazing few months, and I couldn’t be more grateful for the opportunity to build the future of chip design with such a talented team.
You can read more about what we’re building and why in our full announcement. phinity.ai/blog/introducing-…
We’re hiring across all disciplines - if you’re interested in working with us, please reach out to me or @aadi_nash.
Thank you @TechCrunch @MTemkin for joining us! 🚀
TechCrunch attended Pear’s latest demo day and discovered which startups generated the most buzz, from spatial models to chips for local AI.
spr.ly/6012BGLgD8
PearX Demo Day was yesterday & this batch blew us away. 🚀
S26 teams are building:
🖥️ A new chip architecture for edge inference
🤖 The visual cortex for robotics
🧬 A novel cancer vaccine therapy
And more. Watch every pitch at demoday.pear.vc
It's a big week at Pear. 🍐
This morning we launched our new brand identity. Then we welcomed PearX founders, past & present, to Alumni Demo Day for a sneak peek at our S26 cohort.
👉 If you want to be there next time, apps for PearX W27 close Oct 4. pear.vc/pearx/
Congrats to @ListenLabs on joining @salesforce!
We first backed co-founders @itsalfredw & @florian_jue at seed—and again at Series A & Series B—and we could not be happier for the whole team.
Let's go! 🚀
Listen Labs is joining @Salesforce!
A year and a half ago we launched Listen, an AI platform for understanding customers, and it’s been a crazy ride ever since.
Today, we work with some of the largest companies in the world, including Microsoft, Anthropic, and Sweetgreen.
What started as an AI interviewer is now a full platform for understanding customers. Listen finds the right people, interviews them, analyzes what they say, and even simulates how they'll behave.
Listen’s growth quickly accelerated and while we were raising our next round, we met @Benioff.
Marc is a hero of mine. I've taken countless ideas from Behind the Cloud and watched him framemog every AI CEO on the planet. We're honored to get framemogged next.
With Salesforce, we can bring Listen to every company in the world, much faster.
To our customers, our mission remains the same.I stay CEO, @Florian stays CTO and the same team will keep building the product you rely on, now inside Salesforce AI Labs. Thank you for believing in us early.
To our team, families, and everyone who believed in us before there was much to believe in, thank you.
These years have been the most fun years of my life, and it’s still only just the beginning for Listen.
Now back to work. 🚀
🚨 PearX W27 applications close on October 4th! Want to get your questions answered before the deadline?
Join us tomorrow for a virtual info session and AMA with @ajaykam and Brian Singer of @incalmo_ai.
👉 Register here: luma.com/5puek4b0
🚨 PearX W27 applications close next month— and we want to make sure you have all your questions answered before the deadline.
Join us for a live info session and AMA on September 24th!
👉 Register here: luma.com/5puek4b0
What do an AI takeoff platform for trade contractors, AI-native platform automating SOX controls testing, and swipeless dating app powered by AI have in common?
They all got started at PearX. 🚀
👉 Applications to join W27 are open until October 4: pear.vc/pearx/
Pear VC retweeted
In the current PearX cohort, teams are:
•Building a new chip architecture designed to unlock massively more compute for edge inference
•Building the visual cortex for robotics
•Developing a novel cancer vaccine therapy
Three companies. Three completely different frontiers: compute, robotics, and biology!
We can’t wait to reveal these incredible teams at our demo day!🍐🚀
Pear VC retweeted
Next up in our Request for Startups by Icons series: @AnahitaTafvizi , Chief AI & Data Officer at @Snowflake
If you're building in this or a similar area, let's talk!
Autonomous Governance Sandboxes for Enterprise AI
Enterprises are racing to enable employees to build and experiment with AI agents for productivity gains. However, security teams are hitting the brakes due to concerns around data leakage, compliance, and "shadow AI" risks. Right now, setting up a safe environment to test an LLM against corporate data is a highly manual, weeks-long IT process involving data masking and rigid provisioning. I would love to see founders start thinking about how to solve this through autonomous security platforms that can instantly spin up secure "shadow sandboxes." These platforms would connect to enterprise data layers, automatically mirror production data with high-fidelity synthetic equivalents, and continuously audit prompt and response logs in real time. By giving every employee an instant, zero-friction virtual playground with compliance built in by default, this infrastructure would transform security from the biggest barrier to enterprise AI adoption into the foundation that makes it possible.
🚨 ICYMI. Early apps to join PearX W27 close TONIGHT!
🚨 The Early Application Deadline for PearX W27 is right around the corner!
Apply by 𝗦𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘆, August 16th 𝗮𝘁 𝟭𝟭:𝟱𝟵 𝗣𝗠 𝗣𝗦𝗧 and hear back from us by early September. pear.vc/pearx/
