khosla-ventures
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The Orange Box That Bet the Smartphone Was Optional
A $199 orange gadget promised to replace your apps with an AI that clicks the buttons for you. The launch went viral, the reviews went brutal, and rabbit is still shipping.
The Firm That Funds the Things That Probably Won't Work
Vinod Khosla left a top-tier partnership to write checks nobody else would. Two decades and one $50 million OpenAI bet later, the willingness to be wrong looks like a strategy.
Aleph
Aleph is an AI-native financial planning and analysis (FP&A) platform that lets finance teams keep working in the spreadsheets they already know while syncing live data from 150+ source systems. Founded in 2020 by Albert Gozzi and Santiago Perez De Rosso and part of Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch, the New York company pairs a web-based data platform with Excel and Google Sheets add-ins and AI that automates data cleaning, variance analysis, and reporting. Backed by Khosla Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Picus Capital, and Y Combinator, Aleph serves customers including Webflow, Turo, Notion, Zapier, Harvey, and Chess.com.
Hook
Hook is a New York-based music technology company behind an AI-powered social app that lets fans legally remix and mash up licensed songs into short-form clips for social media. By combining a catalog of over 20 million licensed recordings with AI tools for genre-shifting, tempo changes and video editing, Hook aims to turn unauthorized fan remixing into a channel that keeps artists and rights holders in control - and paid. Founded by former JioSaavn COO Gaurav Sharma, the company launched on iOS in early 2026 and raised a $10 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures.
Mazama Energy
Mazama Energy is a Frisco, Texas geothermal developer building Enhanced Geothermal Systems that tap superhot rock (SHR) - underground formations above 374 C - to deliver low-cost, round-the-clock, carbon-free electricity. Incubated by Khosla Ventures and backed by Gates Frontier, the company reached a world-record 629 F (331 C) bottomhole temperature at its Newberry Volcano pilot in Oregon and aims to produce power at under 5 cents per kWh, with 10x the power density, 75% less water, and 80% fewer wells than conventional geothermal.
Scaled Cognition
Scaled Cognition is a Mountain View AI company building what it calls the first Agentic Pretrained Transformer (APT), a model designed and trained specifically for taking reliable, policy-adherent actions rather than just predicting language. Founded by the team behind Semantic Machines (acquired by Microsoft in 2018), it targets enterprise customer-experience workflows where mistakes and hallucinations are unacceptable - financial services, healthcare, telecom, and insurance. In June 2026 the company raised a $100M Series A led by Khosla Ventures to expand its research team and accelerate enterprise deployments.
Traba
Traba is a technology-driven marketplace that matches light industrial businesses - warehouses, distribution centers, manufacturers and event venues - with vetted temporary workers who pick up shifts through a mobile app. Founded in 2021 by Mike Shebat and Akshay Buddiga, the company uses AI, geolocation and computer vision to fill shifts fast and cut the no-shows that plague traditional staffing agencies, reporting a 99% fill rate against a roughly 46% industry average. Backed by Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst, Traba has raised about $45.6M and positions itself as infrastructure for the industrial supply chain, with staffing as the starting point.
WithCoverage
WithCoverage is a New York-based insurtech that replaces the traditional commission-based insurance broker with a flat-fee, AI-enabled risk management team. Its platform pairs licensed insurance experts, attorneys and claims specialists with an AI audit engine that scans policies and operations to find hidden exposures, run competitive carrier bidding, and cut premiums - routinely saving clients over $100,000 a year. Founded in 2023 by Opendoor co-founder JD Ross and Compound alumnus Max Brenner, the company has replaced brokers for 550+ fast-growing businesses including Gopuff, Bombas, Blank Street and Eight Sleep, and raised a $42M Series B in January 2026 co-led by Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures.
Broccoli AI
Broccoli AI builds an AI-native operating system for home service businesses - plumbers, HVAC companies, and electricians. Its AI voice agents answer phones 24/7, book jobs in real time, follow up on leads, and flag emergencies, integrating directly with CRMs like ServiceTitan. Founded in 2021 by AJ Jain and Aditya Ketkar and part of Y Combinator's W22 batch, the company has grown to serve 800+ contractors and raised a $25M Series A led by Khosla Ventures.
Kognitos
Kognitos is a Mountain View-based enterprise AI company that lets business users automate back-office operations by writing instructions in plain English. Its patented neurosymbolic platform, Koncierge, pairs the language understanding of large language models with a deterministic symbolic execution engine, aiming to run automations that are auditable and free of hallucinations. Founded in 2020 by former Nutanix CTO Binny Gill, the company pitches itself as a modern alternative to legacy RPA tools like UiPath and has raised roughly $85M across seed, Series A, and a $25M Series B.
Vista AI
Vista AI (formerly HeartVista) builds AI software that automates MRI exams so any technologist can capture consistent, high-quality scans without a specialist on site. Spun out of Stanford's Magnetic Resonance Systems Research Lab in 2012, its FDA-cleared cardiac MRI product turns a manual, expert-dependent procedure into a largely automated one, and the company is expanding into brain, prostate and spine imaging. Backed by Khosla Ventures and a roster of major U.S. health systems, Vista AI positions automation as a fix for the gap between soaring MRI demand and a shortage of skilled technologists.
Foundry Robotics
Foundry Robotics is a San Francisco startup building 'The Everything Factory' - an AI-first, assembly-focused contract manufacturer that uses Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models to run flexible robotic assembly cells. Instead of retooling a line for every new product, Foundry aims to let general-purpose robots switch between building drones, robot dogs, battery packs and satellite components on demand. Founded in 2025 by ex-Ghost Robotics and Scale AI robotics lead Adarsh Kulkarni, the company positions itself as a dual-use manufacturer serving both commercial customers and the U.S. Department of Defense, backed by a seed round led by Khosla Ventures and Garuda Ventures.
Rejuvenation Technologies Inc.
Rejuvenation Technologies is a Stanford-spun biotech developing modified-mRNA therapeutics that temporarily switch on telomerase to lengthen telomeres and reverse cellular aging in specific tissues. Its lead programs target fibrotic and age-related diseases such as pulmonary fibrosis, chronic liver disease and bone-marrow failure, delivered by proprietary tissue-targeted lipid nanoparticles. Backed by Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, the company holds 50+ patents and is advancing toward Phase I clinical readouts.
TerraBlaster
TerraBlaster is a California agtech startup building a rugged, tractor-mounted soil sensor that reads nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, pH and other nutrients in real time using Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) - the same laser technique NASA uses on Mars rovers, licensed from St. Louis deep-tech firm Impossible Sensing. Led by CEO Jorge Heraud, who previously co-founded Blue River Technology (acquired by John Deere for $305M), the company aims to replace slow, sparse lab soil sampling with instant, plant-level nutrient maps so farmers can apply exactly the right amount of fertilizer - cutting waste, boosting yields, and protecting waterways.
Reflex Robotics
Reflex Robotics builds a wheeled, general-purpose humanoid that does real work on warehouse floors. Founded by MIT alumni with hardware chops from Tesla, Boston Dynamics, Anduril and Oculus, the company designs and ships affordable humanoids that start with a human-in-the-loop and learn their way to autonomy. Their robots are deployed in pilots with GXO and other Fortune 100 logistics operators, with a manufacturing footprint planned in Nuevo Leon, Mexico.
Vinci
Vinci (Vinci4D, Inc.) is a Palo Alto physics-AI startup building a foundation model that simulates how hardware will behave before it is manufactured. Its system runs full manufacturing-resolution physics - thermal, thermo-mechanical and warpage analysis for advanced semiconductor packaging and 2.5D/3D chips - up to 1,000x faster than traditional finite-element tools, without meshing and without training on customer data. Founded in 2023 by Dr. Hardik Kabaria and Dr. Sarah Osentoski, the company emerged from stealth in December 2025 with $46M in total funding and has been benchmarked by over half of the world's top 20 semiconductor companies.
Rhoda AI
Rhoda AI is a Palo Alto robotics company building foundation models that teach robots to act in the messy physical world by learning from internet-scale video instead of staged lab demos. Its FutureVision system - a Direct Video Action (DVA) model - watches an environment, predicts what happens next, and converts those predictions into motion in a closed loop that updates every few hundred milliseconds. Founded in 2024 and out of stealth in March 2026 with a $450M Series A at a $1.7B valuation, Rhoda targets high-variability manufacturing and logistics work.
Fireflies.ai
Fireflies.ai is a San Francisco-based AI meeting assistant that joins video and phone calls across Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams to record, transcribe, summarize and analyze conversations. Its bot captures speaker-labeled notes and action items, its AskFred assistant answers questions about past meetings, and its Perplexity-powered Live Assist offers real-time web answers during calls. Founded in 2016 by Krish Ramineni and Sam Udotong, the company reached a $1 billion valuation in 2025 while staying profitable and is used by teams across more than a million organizations.
Highlight
Highlight is a San Francisco AI company building a shared intelligence layer for teams and AI agents. Its cross-platform desktop app captures on-screen context, meetings, messages, and documents, then weaves them into a unified team memory that drafts next steps across tools like Linear, Slack, Notion, and calendars. Spun out of game-clip company Medal in 2024, Highlight has grown past 500,000 users and raised a $40M Series A led by Khosla Ventures in March 2026, when former Discord product VP Sergei Sorokin became CEO.
Loti AI
Loti AI is a Seattle-based startup that scans the public internet to find, verify, and remove unauthorized uses of a person's face and voice - including deepfakes, AI impersonations, scams, and leaked content. Founded in 2022 by Luke Arrigoni, Rebekah Arrigoni, and Hirak Chhatbar, the company began protecting A-list celebrities through talent agencies like WME and CAA, then opened a free consumer tier so anyone can claim control of their own likeness. Its automated takedown engine removes flagged content with roughly a 95% success rate, typically within about 17 hours.
Terra AI
Terra AI is a Palo Alto geoscience company building generative AI that turns the messy, expensive guesswork of subsurface exploration into fast, probabilistic 3D models of what lies underground. By fusing geophysics, geochemistry, and drilling data, its platform generates millions of geological scenarios in minutes, helping mining and energy teams decide where to drill, how many wells they need, and whether a project is worth the capital - shrinking exploration timelines and pointing capital at the critical minerals the clean-energy transition depends on.
Aven
Aven is a San Francisco-based fintech that built the first credit card backed by home equity. It pairs a Visa with a HELOC so homeowners can borrow against their house at mortgage-like rates while earning 2% unlimited cash back. Founded in 2019 by ex-Facebook and Square engineers, Aven hit a $2.2B valuation in 2025 after a $110M Series E led by Khosla Ventures and is building what it calls a 'machine banking' platform for American homeowners.
DevRev
DevRev is an AI-native platform that merges customer support, product, and growth into a single system. Built around a real-time knowledge graph and a fleet of AI agents called AgentOS, it replaces the seams between CRM, ticketing, and product tools so SaaS companies can ship faster and respond smarter.
Exaforce
Exaforce is a San Jose cybersecurity company building an Agentic AI SOC platform. Its multi-model AI engine and a crew of agents called Exabots handle detection, triage, investigation, and response so security teams stop drowning in alerts and start finding the real breaches.
Point One Navigation
Point One Navigation builds the precision-location stack behind autonomous vehicles, drones, robots and survey-grade tools. Its Polaris RTK network, Atlas inertial sensors and FusionEngine software fuse GNSS, inertial data and computer vision to deliver centimeter-level positioning across the US, Europe, UK, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea.
Spiritus
Spiritus is a climate-tech company building passive Direct Air Capture (DAC) systems - stacked trays of sorbent pellets arranged in modular 'Carbon Orchards' - that aim to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere for under $100 per ton, roughly a tenfold cost reduction over conventional DAC.