Tagged: 8vc
14 results
Harish Abbott: Building the AI Teammate Rewiring Global Logistics
On Joe Lonsdale's American Optimist podcast, serial entrepreneur and billionaire Harish Abbott, co-founder and CEO of Augment, explains how his AI teammate 'Auggie' is transforming the fragmented $10 trillion global logistics industry. Abbott, who previously built Deliverr (sold to Shopify for roughly $2.1 billion) and helped build Amazon's fulfillment network, argues that AI's reasoning models and expanding context windows finally make it possible to automate the endless emails, phone calls, and texts that move freight. Auggie already helps manage roughly $25 billion in freight, works 24/7 across email, phone, Telegram and WhatsApp, and follows written workflows like a human employee. Abbott lays out a massive opportunity: not just tens of billions in productivity gains, but a $300 billion U.S. (nearly $1 trillion global) chance to cut waste from an industry hobbled by low-bandwidth, asynchronous communication.
Mendra
Mendra is an AI-native biopharmaceutical company based in San Francisco that acquires, develops, and commercializes therapies for rare and ultra-rare diseases with high unmet need. Founded in 2025 and launched publicly in January 2026 with an $82 million Series A, the company is run by veterans of BioMarin, Palantir, and other rare disease programs. Rather than discovering compounds from scratch, Mendra systematically scans, scores, and acquires shelved or under-resourced rare disease assets from academia, small biotechs, and big pharma, then uses AI to accelerate patient identification, clinical trial enrollment, and global market access.
Saris AI
Saris AI builds agentic AI workflow agents that automate the repetitive, high-volume back-office work at banks and credit unions - lending, underwriting, compliance, and operations - without replacing the core systems institutions already run. Founded in 2024 by the ex-Oohlala Mobile team, the Montreal- and San Francisco-based company trains agents on each institution's own workflows to execute multi-step tasks under human supervision. In May 2026 it raised a $28.8M Series A led by 8VC to scale deployments and deepen integrations with partners like Fiserv, MeridianLink, and Encompass.
Anjali Sardana
Anjali Sardana is the 24-year-old founder and CEO of Pronto, a Bengaluru-based instant home-services startup that brings household help - sweeping, mopping, dishwashing, laundry - to a customer's door in about ten minutes. A Georgetown biology graduate and former investor at Bain Capital and 8VC, she launched Pronto in 2025 and scaled it from roughly 1,000 daily bookings to more than 25,000 within a year, reaching a $200 million valuation with backing from Epiq Capital, General Catalyst, Bain Capital Ventures and Lachy Groom. Her stated mission is less about speed than dignity: giving India's invisible domestic workforce a formal identity, real pay, and standing.
John Tenet
John Tenet is the co-founder and CEO of CHAOS Industries, a Los Angeles defense technology company he started in 2022 that reached a $4.5 billion valuation in three years on the strength of its Coherent Distributed Networks - a synchronization-based platform that spots airborne threats like drones and missiles roughly ten minutes faster than legacy radar. A former finance and venture operator at Allen & Company, Valar Ventures and 8VC, and a co-founder of counter-drone pioneer Epirus, Tenet has raised over $1 billion for CHAOS and recruited his father, former CIA Director George J. Tenet, as executive chairman.
Bobyard
Bobyard is a San Francisco AI company that automates construction takeoffs and estimates. Its proprietary computer-vision and NLP models read blueprints and automatically count symbols and measure areas and lengths, cutting bid-prep time by more than half. Founded in 2023 by Michael Ding, the company started with landscaping - one of construction's least-digitized trades - and has expanded into electrical, finishes, mechanical, and plumbing. It raised a $35M Series A led by 8VC in December 2025.
Geoffrey Chaiken
Geoffrey Chaiken is the co-founder and CEO of BlinkRx (Blink Health), a New York-based digital health company rebuilding how prescription drugs get priced, paid for, and delivered. The son and grandson of physicians, he gave up a career in medicine to attack what he calls the real bottleneck in healthcare - not discovering new cures, but getting existing ones into patients' hands at a fair price. With his younger brother Matthew, he has raised more than half a billion dollars to digitize both the patient front end and the pharmaceutical industry's back end, partnering with drug makers and tens of thousands of pharmacies to strip middlemen out of the medication supply chain.
John Melas-Kyriazi
John Melas-Kyriazi is the co-founder and CEO of Standard Metrics, a San Francisco financial data platform that automates reporting between venture investors and their portfolio companies. A Stanford-trained engineer who once tinkered with guitar pedals in his basement, he spent six years investing at Spark Capital before noticing that the venture industry ran its data on spreadsheets and email. He left to fix it, building a networked system where startups and investors collaborate on the same numbers. He is also an active angel investor in 40-plus companies.
Katon Luaces
Katon Luaces is the co-founder and CEO of PointOne, an AI time platform that passively captures, classifies, and validates billable hours for law firms. A former Google and Applied Intuition engineer and Columbia machine-learning teaching assistant, he started PointOne in 2023 with CTO Jeremy Ben-Meir to fix the most-hated chore in law: the six-minute billing increment. The Y Combinator Winter 2024 company raised a $16M Series A led by 8VC in March 2026, bringing total funding to roughly $20M, with firms reportedly capturing 6 to 11 percent more billable time per day.
Flux
Flux is a browser-based, AI-native hardware design platform that turns text prompts into manufacturable printed circuit boards. The San Francisco company calls its product an 'AI Hardware Engineer' and is rewriting how electronics get designed by combining an electronic CAD environment with an agentic copilot that researches parts, draws schematics, lays out boards, and prepares files for fabrication.
Dylan Serota
Dylan Serota is the CEO and Co-Founder of Terminal, a global tech talent marketplace that connects elite remote engineers with high-growth companies. After building a 100-person engineering team in Mendoza, Argentina during his time at Eventbrite, he co-founded Terminal in 2017 at the Atomic venture studio alongside Joe Lonsdale (Palantir co-founder) and Jack Abraham. Terminal has raised over $27M in funding including a $17M Series B led by 8VC, serves 100+ clients including Hims&Hers, iCapital, and Grindr, and is on track for nearly $50M in gross revenue. Serota took over as CEO in 2024 and has become a prominent voice on AI's impact on engineering talent and the future of distributed work.
Ryan VanGorder
Ryan VanGorder is the CEO of Opto Investments, a private-markets platform for wealth managers co-founded by Joe Lonsdale and backed by 8VC. A former BlackRock managing director who spent his early career at Seattle hedge-fund-of-funds Quellos, he is also a veteran adventure racer who has competed in more than thirty multi-day expedition races and once survived heat stroke in the Utah desert at 126 degrees.
Michael Ding
Michael Ding is the founder and CEO of Bobyard, an AI platform that uses computer vision to automate construction takeoffs and estimates. A Stanford-trained engineer and award-winning mathematician who grew up in Cupertino, he earned his California general contractor license as a teenager before dropping out of Stanford to launch Bobyard in 2023. By teaching machines to read blueprints the way an experienced estimator would, he's helped hundreds of contractors cut takeoff time by 65% and add over $1M in annual revenue per estimator. In December 2025, Bobyard raised a $35 million Series A led by 8VC, cementing its position as the leading AI platform for construction preconstruction workflows.
Joe Lonsdale
Joe Lonsdale is a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded Palantir Technologies, Addepar, OpenGov, and 8VC — a firm managing over $6 billion in assets. A chess prodigy turned PayPal intern turned Peter Thiel protege, Lonsdale built his empire around the belief that the most important companies are the ones governments and defense establishments can't function without. Based in Austin, Texas, he hosts the American Optimist podcast, co-founded the University of Austin, and runs the Cicero Institute — all while backing defense tech titans like Anduril at a $30.5 billion valuation.