Enterprise Weekly #511: New Work-Bench Research, GTM Tactics for Technical Founders & More
Work-Bench is an enterprise software VC firm leading Seed rounds. If you are or know anyone thinking about founding an enterprise software startup — we’d love to meet! Please reach out to chat. 📩
Our teammate, Priyanka, has been on 🔥 recently.
At Work-Bench, she leads our efforts across Cloud Native Infrastructure and Developer Tools. After 5+ years on the team, she’s become one of NYC’s go-to minds in the infra world.
In addition to writing her monthly newsletter, The Data Source, Priyanka recently dropped two new content series:
Your Technical GTM Blueprint: Actionable GTM Strategies for Technical Startups
The Rise of Agentic Systems: The Future of Agentic Infrastructure
Your Technical GTM Blueprint dives into real-world GTM strategies from experienced technical founders. Her first three posts cover topics like:
Transitioning from open to closed source: Messaging the shift to your community (featuring Graphite)
Structuring BYOC: Meet enterprise security needs without slowing down product development (featuring Cockroach Labs, Okta, Earthly Technologies, and ParadeDB)
Open source monetization: Strategies that hold up against cloud hyperscaler competition (featuring InfluxData)
The Rise of Agentic Systems explores how agentic software is transforming infrastructure and sparking new protocols, frameworks, and open-source tools. The first two posts cover topics like:
Part 1: Visualizing agent vs CRUD architectures, computational economics for AI workloads, and more
Part 2: The agent-centric computing model, state management, memory-compute disaggregation, and beyond
If you’re pre-seed or seed-stage founder building in AI/Cloud Infrastructure reach out to Priyanka to chat.
Despite macro uncertainty, exit activity may be heating up. OpenAI is reportedly in talks to acquire Windsurf for around $3B — a clear move to own more of the full-stack developer experience, not just supply the underlying models.
The situation is messy. OpenAI is already tightly partnered with Microsoft through GitHub Copilot, yet a Windsurf acquisition would position it more directly as a competitor. It also follows two failed attempts by OpenAI to acquire Cursor, another fast-growing coding assistant. Instead, Cursor-maker Anysphere (an OpenAI Startup Fund portfolio company) is reportedly raising at a ~$10B valuation with ~$200M in ARR, far ahead of Anysphere’s ~$40M ARR.
Paired with the news that Figma filed confidential IPO papers this week, there could be some much needed exit activity 🙌
Lastly, we’re thrilled to share that our portfolio company, Goodfire has raised a $50M Series A, led by Menlo Ventures with Lightspeed, Anthropic, and others. Following our Seed investment last year, we're proud to support their mission to bring greater model transparency to AI through their interpretability platform, Ember. Their efforts are working to fundamentally reshape our understanding of how we can interact with and leverage AI models.
🗓️ Join more Work-Bench events:
April 24th: Work-Bench AI Agent Breakfast. Email Priyanka to join (9am, NYC)
📚 Read more news:
WSJ: Marketers Are Putting More Content and Quality Control in the Hands of AI
VentureBeat: BigQuery is 5x bigger than Snowflake and Databricks: What Google is doing to make it even better
🧵 Read more (th)reads:
Company: SKUSafe
Role: Customer Success Manager at SKUsafe
Technology: Operating System for Food, Beverage & CPG brands
Funding: $4.3M from Work-Bench, Bienville Capital
🌟 Company of the Week 🌟
Bauplan raises $7.5M led by Innovation Endeavors
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Seed • San Francisco, CA
Co-founders: Ciro Greco, Jacopo Tagliabue, Mattia Pavoni
Inephany raises $2.2M led by Amadeus Capital
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Pre-Seed • London, UK
Ideem raises $2.4M led by Everywhere Ventures, Hustle Fund and Others
Risk / Security • Seed • Kansas City, MO
Octolane raises $2.6M led by Y Combinator, General Catalyst Apex and Others
Sales / Marketing • Seed • San Francisco, CA
Atomic raises $3M led by DVx Ventures and Madrona Ventures
Future of Work • Seed • New York, NY
Telli raises $3.6M led by Cherry Ventures and YC
Future of Work • Pre-Seed • Remote
Finch raises $3.8M led by Sequoia Capital
Future of Work • Seed • New York, NY
Portia AI raises $5.8M led by General Catalyst
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Pre-Seed • London, UK
Nexad raises $6M led by Prosus Ventures
Sales / Marketing • Seed • San Francisco, CA
Friday Harbor raises $6M led by Abstract Ventures
Future of Work • Seed • Seattle, WA
Pillar Security raises $9M led by Shield Capital
Risk / Security • Seed • Tel Aviv, Israel
Blue Onion raises $10M led by Viola FinTech
Future of Work • Series A • New York, NY
NetRise raises $10M led by DNX Ventures
Risk / Security • Series A • Austin, TX
Corvic AI raises $12M led by M Ventures and Bosch Ventures
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Seed • Mountain View, CA
Deck raises $12M led by Infinity Ventures
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Series A • Montreal, Canada
ConductorAI raises $15M led by Lux Capital
Future of Work • Series A • Biddeford, ME
Scout AI raises $15M led by Align Ventures and Booz Allen Ventures
Risk / Security • Seed • Sunnyvale, CA
Doss raises $18M led by Theory Ventures
Future of Work • Series A • San Francisco, CA
Tapcheck raises $25M led by PeakSpan Capital
HR Tech • Series A • Plano, TX
Virtue AI raises $30M led by Walden Catalyst Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners
Risk / Security • Seed & Series A • San Francisco, CA
LiveKit raises $45M led by Altimeter Capital
Collaboration / Productivity • Series B • San Jose, CA
Exaforce raises $75M led by Khosla Ventures, Mayfield, and Thomvest Ventures
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series A • San Jose, CA
Hammerspace raises $100M led by Altimeter Capital
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series B • San Mateo, CA
Honeycomb acquires Grit for an Undisclosed Amount
Infrastructure / Dev Tools • Acquisition • San Francisco, CA