CapitalG

15 years ago, Raj and I founded AlphaSense to solve a problem we experienced firsthand: critical business decisions were being made without the full picture. Research was slow, knowledge was fragmented, and even after hours of work, it was hard to know whether you had the information needed to make – and defend – a decision with confidence. Today, we're announcing three milestones that reflect how much that problem – and the market around it – has evolved. - A $350M funding round at a $7.5B valuation, nearly double our previous valuation - More than $600M ARR as of Q1 2026, up from $500M just six months ago - A strategic partnership with Accenture to bring AI-powered market intelligence and workflow automation to enterprises globally Many thanks to Ben Glickman at The Wall Street Journal for exclusively covering this important milestone. Read the story here: https://lnkd.in/eNMcsXDt We're also introducing SuperAnalyst, an always-on AI agent that completes multi-step research projects, monitors markets, and delivers decision-ready outputs grounded in premium, trusted content. Taken together, these announcements point to something bigger. Organizations don’t just need better answers. They want systems that continuously monitor, analyze, synthesize, and act on information as it changes. As AI accelerates product development, competition, and market change, decision-making itself becomes the bottleneck. That’s why we’re seeing unprecedented demand for trusted proprietary data, domain-specific AI, and workflows embedded directly into how enterprises operate. This new capital allows us to invest even more aggressively in our content flywheel, AI, workflow automation, and global expansion. Most importantly, it allows us to continue building toward a future where market intelligence isn’t something you search for – it works continuously on your behalf. Thank you to our investors, customers, and the entire AlphaSense team. We’re still early in this transformation, and I’ve never been more excited about what’s ahead. Vitruvian Partners, Accenture, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, The D. E. Shaw Group, Pinegrove Opportunity Partners, CapitalG, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Viking Global Investors 

Today we're launching Gusto Cofounder — an AI teammate built natively into Gusto, so it already knows your business from day one. Most AI is a glorified search engine. You ask it questions, it gives you answers. That's not what we were promised. Here are the core concepts of Gusto Cofounder: Automations: Automations are the heart and soul of Gusto Cofounder, and you can customize them in natural language for your unique business needs. They’ll run on any schedule you want. Connectors: We recognize that small businesses are using multiple systems to run their business, not just Gusto. Automations connect to your systems outside of Gusto, such as Notion, Google Sheets, or Quickbooks. Channels: Communicate to Gusto Cofounder via SMS or Slack. Automations can give you updates or ask you questions over SMS, and you can reply back. If you've used OpenClaw, you know how magical that can be. …And of course, it comes out of the box with ideas on how to automate all the things that you already do on Gusto. You don’t have the “blank canvas” problem that many of the “Hi! How can I help you today?” AI tools have today. Here’s how it all comes together: - Tell it to pull sales data from your Google Spreadsheet, calculate bonus and commission amounts, and then run payroll on Gusto. And do it every two weeks so you never have to do it again. - Set your time-off rules once and it will handle every request just like you would. - Tell it to text you anytime a time-off request will leave a gap in your shift schedule.  - Tell it to look up the weather every day, and if it’s forecasted to be below 50, email your customers reminding them to dress warmly. - It proactively flags what's coming before you have to ask: compliance deadlines, payroll anomalies, scheduling conflicts - Text it or Slack it. Cofounder works from wherever you are. We built this in eleven weeks with a team of five. We had no roadmap, no docs, no Figmas, no JIRA tasks, no project managers, and no meetings. Just five builders, an always-on Zoom, and AI. Shoutout to the Gusties who made it happen: Katie Kovalcin, Matan Zruya, Jeff Carbonella, and Ngan Pham. We're opening early access to a small group of Gusto customers now. Head to the comments below if you want to get in.

Scaling a business used to require labor and capital. But AI is quietly dismantling that logic. This is what stuck with me the most from my conversation with CapitalG partner Mo Jomaa, who joined me this week after the firm's $113 million Series B investment in OpenRouter. "The moat to create a real company used to come in the form of labor and capital. Now those two things aren't necessarily as mission-critical as they were before — because you've got access to intelligence that can get a real, functioning business off the ground," he told me. His comment touches on a much bigger shift — AI isn't just making professionals more productive, it's giving them more agency. The barriers that used to stop the solo founder, the two-person startup, the developer with a side project, are coming down fast. And if this is true, the next wave of company formation may look very different from what we've seen so far. Are you already building something that wouldn't have been possible without AI? What's changed for you? Weigh in below.

Analog Devices (NASDAQ: ADI) and Empower Semiconductor today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which ADI will acquire Empower. We are excited about the future of ADI and Empower together, working to accelerate power solutions for the AI market. https://lnkd.in/gG6UxWrE

Six years ago, Grant LaFontaine and Logan Head rented a house in Phoenix, locked themselves in to build live video infrastructure from scratch, and sold $5,000 worth of Funko Pops on Whatnot's first show. Fast forward to last year: sellers on Whatnot generated over $8B in live sales, and Whatnot now holds nearly 60% of the live shopping market in the West. Jennifer Conrad at Inc. Magazine talked to our founders, sellers like Wild Ginger Vintage and Pursuit Farms, investors, and analysts for this profile on how Whatnot made live shopping finally click in the West and where it goes from here. A few things from the piece that we think about a lot: you can't fake community, the next decade of commerce will be built on real human connection rather than algorithms, and dogfooding the product (every employee goes live once a quarter, answers customer service requests, gets a monthly buying budget) leads to better decisions. From Grant LaFontaine: "If your culture recedes, you end up doing things like every other company, and you're not going to be, by definition, an exceptional company." https://lnkd.in/gwnK_nCF #LiveShopping