Hemant Taneja retweeted
Appreciate the call out @gokulr
To clarify: CVF only gets paid if the specific cohort pays back, if it doesn’t, we bear the risk on each individual cohort, with no recourse to any other part of the company. As a result, while the cost of capital is capped, it is a function of the outcome on each cohort as we’re aligned with the company. CVF is risk-bearing capital, so we can’t work with companies where the unit economics are not there.
On compute: we already finance compute if it is part of GTM and the investment has a measurable ROI (lots of token spend is GTM-related).
The challenge is when there is no measurable ROI yet or the ROI is very high volatility, and you have to rely on the price of a GPU persisting to recoup the investment or find a way to hedge it. You can always YOLO and make money on a few trades because GPU prices have only been going up, but we’re more interested in a real solution, so looking hard at the problem from that lens.
Hemant Taneja retweeted
If you're a startup with a good handle on your CAC / payback period, and cohorts that reflect this stability, General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund is an excellent way to raise non-dilutive capital (@ 12-15% interest rate IIRC) to scale sales and marketing. Kudos @pranavsinghvi and team on this innovative product - great for both founders and LPs.
Given AI startups have relatively small product development teams, most equity fundraise proceeds are used to (a) Scale GTM and (b) Scale Compute.
The CVF is a great solve for GTM. I'm hopeful we'll see a good debt solve for Compute soon.
And then, startups can truly scale infinitely without expensive equity financing beyond a couple of early rounds.
(Example of company using CVF in link)
Hemant Taneja retweeted
👋 Hello world! We're Mandl, a new AI company rebuilding the engine of commercial insurance from the inside out.
Insurance has always been the quiet force that lets ambition outrun risk: global trade, industrialization, and our modern economy were built on a foundation of innovative risk analysis and promises kept (the modern fire station got its start because of advancements in urban insurance!).
But as any hard-working business owner can attest, the system has now become just another risk that ambition has to outrun: overpriced and generic policies, delayed or denied claims. Even everyday things like pulling a COI still take forever.
At Mandl, we are taking on this entire system, part by part:
→ Underwriting: To advance our understanding of risk, we built @NirvanaTechInc. Now just a few years in, we're leveraging more than 50 billion miles of driving data, all matched to real claims outcomes and the most intelligent models in the industry. The business has grown to more than $300 million in run-rate premium with top-tier loss ratio performance.
🤝 Honesty, it turns out, is the best policy.
→ Claims: A claim is the moment you learn whether your insurance company keeps its promise to get you back to business. In less than two years, Vega has already made claims resolution 4x faster than the industry standard. We're proud of that, but we are not done advancing commercial resilience.
⚡️ Our mission is to resolve a claim in minutes.
→ Operations: To unleash insurance professionals so they can do their best work, we built Cooper, an AI operations platform for the commercial insurance office.
💰 It's early days, but we've already helped customers process more than $1 billion in premiums.
While we're only just getting started, we have ambitions to go deeper where we already operate and expand into more of the industry, investing wherever AI can make commercial insurance work the way it should.
Thanks to our team, customers, and partners for building with us, and to our world-class investors @generalcatalyst, @lightspeedvp, and Valor Equity Partners for backing us along the way.
You can read more from our CEO & cofounder @rushilgoel: mandl.ai/news/introducing-ma…
Hemant Taneja retweeted
Last week, @htaneja joined @hirshjain at our office for a fireside chat on the state of AI and venture.
Hemant talked about the moment ChatGPT launched. It was the first time a single technology had every CEO, in every industry, in every country, grappling to figure out what to do with it.
For General Catalyst, that came with a recognition: the world was going to be transformed, and the real question was what role to play in that transformation.
The principle of "inclusive prosperity," where you empower everyone to do the transforming themselves, ties closely to Percepta's mission.
That's why we started with healthcare, government, and financial services: the categories that actually touch people's lives. And Hemant's bet, one we share, is that as software gets democratized, relationships become the advantage that's left standing.
Hemant Taneja retweeted
Before we knew how our space series was going to start, we knew how it would end
House5 (the unofficial name of GC Creative) wanted to really capture the childlike wonder that space inspires in each of us
To get there it will take a tremendous amount of capital, ambitious teams, and seemingly impossible dreams
If you haven't yet explored the series, it truly has some beautiful highlights
An introduction by the one and only @carlorovelli
The opening of launch outside of SpaceX
A conversation on Orbit with EON
@brycestrauss reflecting on his time at Lockheed Martin supporting NASA
Thank you to our partner on this @astrmn_studio for helping us shoot this on the gorgeous PANAVISION lens
Here's a behind the scene look at how this came together 🚀🚀🚀
Hemant Taneja retweeted
Our short film started with one line: "I want to ride my bike on the moon."
When it comes to the creative case for investing in space, imagination precedes ambition. What looks naive in scientific progress is remembered as inevitable, but only if someone funds the gap in between.
Hemant Taneja retweeted
In 2024, we made the unprecedented decision to acquire a hospital system. It was an opportunity to create a blueprint for healthcare transformation to make American healthcare proactive, accessible, and affordable.
@SummaHealth and our Health Assurance Transformation Company (HATCo) revealed their technology transformation stack, partnering with some of our portfolio companies @aidocmed, Clarium, @CommureOs, @poweredbyfabric, @hippocraticai, @judihealth, @transcarent, and @versemedical. @percepta is serving as a transformation partner, unifying the tech stack into a seamless Al-native operating system.
We believe the future of healthcare is health assurance with tech founders and health system leaders working together to reimagine healthcare in the US and beyond.
Hemant Taneja retweeted
I sat down with Hemant in his garden to discuss River AI's vision and our bets for how to democratize control of the AI systems we use every day.
.@river_ai_inc has a new vision for personal AI. We co-led River’s $1.1B funding round because we believe in @ibab's ambition to build open-weight models that individuals can train and improve continuously.
Watch @htaneja in conversation with Igor.
Chapters
02:22 — Co-Founding xAI
04:36 — An AI Experience You Own
05:59 — Betting Early on Open Weights
07:47 — How Do You Make Money on Free Models?
09:25 — Why the US Needs Its Own Open Models
11:27 — Enterprises Want to Control Their AI
13:36 — What Is Continual Learning?
16:56 — An API That Updates the Weights
19:17 — A Personal AI for Everyone
20:46 — The 20-Minute Training Run
Hemant Taneja retweeted
In his Quarterly Review for Q2, @GeneralCatalyst CEO @htaneja writes that the quarter was largely about scale and concentration of power and access, with three deals — @OpenAI, @AnthropicAI, and xAI — drawing around two-thirds of all AI funding.
And that’s why, he argues, we need a counter-move to build toward greater access to spread the benefits wider.
In healthcare, that’s going to require more public-private collaboration. “No government can transform healthcare alone, and no technologist or health system can do it alone either,” writes Taneja. “Building an affordable, accessible system takes all of us. And the stakes reach well past medicine. A health system is the largest employer in most American towns, the anchor of its local economy as much as its care. Get this right, and you deliver three things at once: better health, lower cost, and the jobs with agency that a community needs.”
I couldn’t agree more. And given that we spend one-third of our lives at work, the workplace can be a critical part of that collaboration to transform healthcare.
You can read it in full here: hemant-taneja.com
Hemant Taneja retweeted
Had a great chat with one of my favorite investors, @generalcatalyst
General Intuition x General Catalyst - The Next Phase of Pre-training
“The digital world lacks physical information. The physical world lacks dense digital information. Games perfectly merge these two together, and we believe that’s just the next phase of pretraining.”
Every few weeks @gen_intuition ships new emergent capabilities that are orthogonal to anything you see in the LLM world.
Watch GC’s @max_rimpel in conversation with @PimDeWitte.
Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
00:10 — The World's Biggest Private RuneScape Server
03:09 — From RuneScape to Ebola
07:41 — Mapping the Unmappable
09:47 — Why LLMs Can't See the World
13:45 — The Accidental Foundation of General Intuition
19:10 — Turning Down a Life-Changing Acquisition Offer
21:12 — One Foot in Front of the Other
24:04 — Atoms to Atoms
27:33 — The Talent Flywheel
30:20 — Protecting the Last Weird Corner of the Internet
Hemant Taneja retweeted
Wait this is so awesome!! Both 1) the C compiler to LLM weights and 2) the logarithmic complexity hard-max attention and its potential generalizations. Inspiring!
Hemant Taneja retweeted
1/ We’ve been long India. Not as a side bet - but as a core market on a single global platform.
Hemant Taneja retweeted
A Decade of Reflection on Meesho
It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly 10 years since we, at Venture Highway, signed that first seed check for @Meesho_Official in 2016. With the news of their upcoming IPO, I’ve been looking back at the email threads, the early product demos, and the "aha" moments that started it all.
What that decade has really reinforced for me is that Meesho’s journey was anything but linear: the company evolved through multiple product iterations—from the early Fashnear experiment in late 2015, to reseller-led commerce, and ultimately to the direct-to-consumer marketplace Meesho is today—while the core insight and our conviction in the founders stayed constant.
For me, the conviction to partner with @viditaatrey and @barnwalSanjeev wasn't just about e-commerce. It was about a behavior I had witnessed firsthand while building WhatsApp.
The "WhatsApp" Insight
During my time at WhatsApp, I saw something fascinating happening in India. Small business owners—boutique owners, home chefs, local artisans—were "hacking" WhatsApp to run their businesses. They were creating groups, sharing photos of inventory, and closing deals via chat. There was no shopping cart, no payment gateway, just trust and conversation.
When I met Vidit and Sanjeev, they weren't trying to force a Western e-commerce model onto India. They had noticed the same behavior. They understood that for the next 500 million Indians, commerce wouldn't look like a catalog; it would look like a chat.
The "TAM" Trap & The Valley of Death
But the path wasn't a straight line. After Y Combinator, Meesho hit a wall. They struggled to raise capital. Investors were passing left and right.
I distinctly remember a call from Ravi at Elevation Capital. He asked me, "Neeraj, why is no one funding this company? These are good guys, they are executing, and they are making progress. What am I missing?"
I told him the truth: "Investors are getting stuck on TAM (Total Addressable Market). They are looking at this through a Western lens where transaction values need to be high to make sense. But that is the wrong way to look at this deal. This isn't about basket size; it's about frequency and behavior."
Most people saw a small market; we saw a massive, unorganized economy waiting to be digitized.
These were also the moments when founder conviction mattered most. Even as the product evolved, Vidit and Sanjeev stayed anchored to their core user insight, and our job as early investors was to lean in through that ambiguity rather than step back and “wait for the final form” of the company.
Shared Roots
Vidit and Sanjeev being from IIT Delhi (where I also studied) gave us a shared starting point, but what really built our conviction was their resilience during those tough months. They were technical and data-driven, yet remarkably humble and willing to pivot. They were building for India, not just in India.
The Thesis that Built Venture Highway
Investing in Meesho in 2016—and doubling down in subsequent rounds—was more than just a portfolio decision. In many ways, Meesho was the thesis that led me to scale Venture Highway.
Back then, the narrative was often that Indian startups were copycats. Meesho proved that India could produce category-creating, world-class companies that solve uniquely Indian problems at scale. That conviction drove us to build Venture Highway to support founders capable of building enduring institutions, a mission the entire VH team has worked hard to support.
Going Global with General Catalyst
It is fitting that as Meesho steps onto the public stage, Venture Highway has also evolved. Our conviction in Indian founders is what led us to join forces with General Catalyst. What drew us to GC was how closely their seed philosophy mirrors what we lived through with Meesho: seeing seed as the unveiling of a hidden truth, backing exceptional people early, and leaning in when the path is still murky. Meesho’s evolution—from its Fashnear beginnings to the scaled direct-to-consumer marketplace it is today—is exactly the kind of non-linear founder journey that GC is set up to support: where others see risk in change, GC sees learning, resilience, and conviction. By merging our local expertise with GC’s global platform, we are now even better equipped to support the next generation of Vidits and Sanjeevs—helping them build world-class companies from India for the world.
To the IPO and Beyond
Watching this journey from a seed-stage pitch deck to a public listing has been one of the greatest privileges of my investing career. We have been there since the seed round and are proud to remain shareholders today, as the company enters this new chapter.
Vidit and Sanjeev, you have validated our belief that India is a cradle for world-class innovation. You’ve also reminded us that the most enduring companies are rarely built in a straight line - and that the real test of partnership is in those lows (and not the highs). Here’s to the next decade of building.
Hemant Taneja retweeted
General Catalyst ran a screener of 70 industries for their AI Roll-Up strategy.. they only selected 10.
That discipline is paying off:
even 20% revenue growth with a flat cost base + 20–30% task automation turns a 10–15% EBITDA business into ~30% margins.. doubling the FCF.
Marc Bhargava (@marcbhargava) , Managing Director at General Catalyst explains:
"We're already seeing in many of the case studies that if you look at the first couple companies they acquired, even if they've only grown revenue 20%, if they've kept the cost basis flat using AI, but then bring up people to kind of do 20% more tasks, around 10-15% EBITDA-margin businesses can become 30% EBITDA-margin businesses. You can roughly double the free cash flow, and we're seeing that happen in many of our businesses in a one-year period.
So for us, at the heart of that is: is the AI automation enough?
And obviously we decided not to go forward with 60 of the 70, so we held a really high bar to: is this an industry where AI automation actually can make a meaningful difference?
Then, can we actually go and buy and roll up these companies, get their data, improve the models, improve our software, automate 20-plus percent of tasks, free people up to cross-sell, get more revenue?
And the result is a higher revenue base with a very similar cost basis, which generally translates to a really large improvement in EBITDA margin."
@generalcatalyst
BREAKING: Inside General Catalyst’s $1.5B AI Roll-Up Engine: The Creation Strategy
Marc Bhargava, Managing Director at General Catalyst leads the Creation Strategies for incubations, transformations, & venture buyouts, as well as leading early stage crypto & fintech investing.
He breaks down one of the most significant shifts happening inside venture & private markets today: AI Roll-Ups.
As one of the 3 largest venture players with ~$40B AUM, General Catalyst has quietly built a $1.5B AI roll-up engine reshaping a $16 trillion market – historically defined by low margins & slow modernization.
To date, Marc has led GC's investments in Long Lake, Rox, Eudia, Titan MSP, Dwelly, Pallet, Kick, Serval, Vivere, Cartesia, Aaru, Civic Roundtable, Physical Intelligence, Agora, etc. as well as sourced Mercor, Windsurf, Together AI.
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Marc Bhargava, General Catalyst
(02:54) Inside the $1.5B Creation Strategy & why AI rollups emerged
(05:42) Early successes: Crescendo, Long Lake, Titan MSP, Eudia
(08:15) The 4 categories of task automation
(10:42) How GC narrowed 70 industries → 10
(13:18) The $16T services AI opportunity
(15:46) Competing with traditional PE: long-term compounding vs. short-term flips
(18:11) Funding mechanics: incubate → automation proof → acquisition → scale
(20:33) How GC builds hybrid teams: AI-native + PE + operators
(22:47) Why Fortune 100 AI transformation often fails
(24:55) Will AI shrink or expand the workforce?
(27:22) How GC decides when to build an AI rollup vs. invest in SaaS
(29:49) Global expansion & where talent lives today (32:10) Why AI rollups are still massively underrated & what's coming next
(44:19) Global Expansion & Talent Distribution
(47:13) General Catalyst's Investment Philosophy
(48:56) Looking Ahead: The Future of AI Rollups
Hemant Taneja retweeted
legendary execution by @mansourtarek_ and team. congrats!!
Kalshi raised $1B at an $11B valuation.
A decade ago, only a few thousand people knew what a prediction market was.
Eighteen months ago, most prediction markets were banned - until we overcame the government to set them free.
Over the past seven years, our community has opened up an entirely new category.
Today, Kalshi is trusted, used, and loved by millions of people. It’s a part of everyday culture, and it’s driving one of the most important shifts in consumer behavior in recent history.
The time has finally come for prediction markets to achieve their full potential and we are intent on making that happen.
To all the believers and the early adopters: thank you.
Hemant Taneja retweeted
Percepta is hiring for research (RL, modeling, OR), engineering, and product roles in Europe and on the US East Coast. A few of us are at NeurIPS this week. Reach out to me, @EugeneVinitsky, @ChristosTzamos, @justintchiu, or @zzzzgq to learn more!
Hemant Taneja retweeted
We're hosting a happy hour on Dec 4th with our friends at @nvidia! Join us. Registration link below:
Hemant Taneja retweeted
We believe access to cutting-edge semiconductors is essential for national resilience. @substrate is bringing advanced semiconductor manufacturing capacity back to America—a mission that led us to back its seed round. With its innovative design offering a faster, better, and less expensive alternative to Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, Substrate is on a path to shift the global competitive landscape.
We first partnered with @jamesproud and the Substrate team more than three years ago because of James’s deep hardware expertise, first-principles thinking, and unwavering resolve to address critical national security challenges. His vision to reimagine semiconductor manufacturing is exactly the bold, systems-level approach we think is needed to restore U.S. leadership.
We’re looking forward to supporting James and the team as they usher in a new era of American chipmaking.
Why we invested by Paul and @htaneja → generalcatalyst.com/stories/…
Hemant Taneja retweeted
"I think the US is very well positioned, we have energy, we have AI, we have the largest market.
The thing I worry about is what is the sentiment in the appetite of the world to embrace US companies."
Love to hear your thoughts on this @garrytan @rabois @chrija @shaunmmaguire @mttgrmm and whether Trump has done more to help or hurt the global position of the US?