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- The Power to Understand More, Faster
The Power to Understand More, Faster
Announcing Lightspeed’s Series A investment in Particle 🗞️
Welcome to the 5th edition of Buzzworthy!
Not sure about you all, but 2024 feels like it is absolutely flying by… We’ve had marquee moments across tech & pop culture — including Super Bowl LVIII in February smashing TV rating records (driven at least in part by Swifties) and the total solar eclipse in April which was the last we’ll see from the US for 20+ years — and we have much to look forward to with the Paris Summer Olympics kicking off next month, the (already heated) US Presidential Election slated for November, and maybe even the triumphant return of Fyre Festival (currently planned for December).
In today’s edition we’ll share a brief dive into our consumer AI app layer focus areas heading into back half of the year, updates from several of Lightspeed’s AI & interactive media initiatives, along with our feature story on a pair of exciting new deal announcements that sit at the intersection of content, AI, and news(letters).
Let’s jump in!
Today, we (alongside our partner Michael Mignano) are announcing that Lightspeed has led the $10.9M Series A in Particle, the company that’s on a mission to help everyone understand more about the world faster through AI, starting with the news. Lightspeed is proud to support founders Sara Beykpour & Marcel Molina and the Particle team on this next phase of their journey alongside investors like Kindred Ventures, Adverb Ventures, Ev Williams (Twitter co-founder), Scott Belsky (Adobe CSO), as well as Axel Springer – a leading global publisher and parent to Insider, Politico, Protocol, among numerous other media brands.
Particle co-founders Sara Beykpour and Marcel Molina
The news is broken
The news experience is increasingly broken for nearly all stakeholders. Misaligned incentives between publishers and readers often leads to a low quality and untrustworthy content experience. Stories are redundant among publishers and duplicated across countless broken and ad-littered websites that few want to visit. And no outlet delivers a personalized experience of high quality news tailored to a reader’s interests; instead, traditional publishers deliver stories against their editorial strategy in chronological order. All of this leads to a poor product experience, lower willingness to pay from customers, and a worse overall business for everyone involved.
AI can help
At the same time, AI is actively reorganizing the way people consume information on the internet. LLMs can quickly synthesize large amounts of information and share only the most important parts. They can strip out biases. They can fact check. They can personalize vast content experiences down to an individual level to ensure every experience is tailored to a reader’s interests. They can even answer specific questions about content, almost as if a reader had the ability to ask a journalist specific questions. And AI also has the power to eliminate layers of operational inefficiency, ensuring more of the value in media goes to the people who matter most. In the case of the news, that’s the people who write the stories (the journalists) and the people who consume them (the readers).
This is the exact vision of Particle. Sara and Marcel imagine a world in which Particle becomes the go-to destination people visit to be quickly yet deeply educated about any topic or story – with a highly personalized, efficient, and interactive experience, powered by amazing journalists. This starts with news and all of the content that supports it, but can expand to any category of media over time.
The team that built the social internet
The story of Particle began nearly 15 years ago, when the team’s founders were building some of the internet’s most foundational social media products and services. Nearly every time there was a new product innovation in social media, Particle’s CEO Sara Beykpour was there, playing an early and often founding role on teams like Twitter, Vine, Periscope, and Secret. And CTO Marcel Molina was one of Twitter’s earliest and most foundational engineers, contributing to features like Retweets and ultimately the platform services team, responsible for core systems like the Timeline service. After working closely together at Twitter, they both discovered the power of LLMs and became determined to join forces and reinvent news and media using these new AI superpowers.
The product they’ve built in the short time since is already nothing short of exceptional. Particle finds the stories across all the news of the day that matter most to each individual user through best-in-class machine learning and personalization. Then, it leverages LLMs to deliver the most efficient, unbiased, and truthful version of these stories. Users can then ask questions of the AI to drill further down in the story and better understand exactly what they want to know. And all of this is delivered to the user in either text format or audio, which is generated dynamically using AI – sort of like a personal podcast for every single user. It’s a magical experience that “just works” and makes you wonder why you ever consumed news any other way beforehand.
The vision for @particle_news is to become the go-to destination people visit to be quickly yet deeply educated about any topic or story – with a highly personalized, efficient, and interactive experience, powered by amazing journalists ✍️
— Faraz Fatemi (@f_fatemi21)
3:48 PM • Jun 11, 2024
Join the Particle beta today!
And of course…Sara, Marcel, and the whole Particle team are just getting started. News is just the beginning; the Particle experience will likely extend to other media categories, as well, making it far more enjoyable for anyone to make sense of all of the content each one of us is bombarded with every single day. If you want to help them build this future, the Particle team is hiring. And head over to Particle to join the app waitlist ahead of our official launch.
ICYMI: beehiiv closes $33M Series 🐝
Last June, we shared that Lightspeed was leading the $12.5M Series A financing for beehiiv (this platform!) — we were all-in on beehiiv’s mission to “pave the way for the next million creators, publishers, and companies to scale and monetize their audiences”.
Fast-forward to today, and boy has the company delivered…growing monthly revenue & active newsletter counts over 4x and clearing over one billion (!) emails sent per month from a wide range of creators, brands, and businesses including the Boston Globe, Brex, Overtime, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Josh Richards. On the heels of this momentum, beehiiv has partnered with NEA & Sapphire Sport who last month joined the beehiiv rocketship as investors in the company’s $33M Series B round.
beehiiv's founding team started the company to productize the newsletter, content management system, and audience management software stack they built as early employees at publishing company Morning Brew. With this unique domain knowledge, they’ve been able to architect a category-leading email engagement platform leveraging advanced customization, best-in-class monetization (including the ad network) & growth tooling, and of course AI.
It’s been un-bee-lievable seeing Tyler, Ben, Jake, Preeya, and the team’s pace of execution, world-class team buildout, and relentless focus on building a product that is universally loved by users and consumer alike. We are honored to double down on beehiiv’s Series 🐝 and welcome NEA & Sapphire to the ’hiiv!
🚨 New Product Launch Alert: Granola
The newest product our team is absolutely obsessed with is from Lightspeed portfolio company Granola, which just launched to the public late last month.
Granola is billed as an “AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings” and has been a gamechanger for the whole Lightspeed team, allowing us to be more present in meetings and freeing up hours of our admin time each & every week. And it turns out, we aren’t the only ones who love it — Granola has some of the strongest user engagement metrics (since the beta launched mid-2023) of any consumer or prosumer product we’ve seen at Lightspeed dating back to our Seed investment in Snap in 2012.
Granola works by integrating directly into a user’s calendar, analyzing the intent of the meeting (against a set of templates including customer pitch, board meeting, interview, etc.) and the participants involved, and combining audio transcription paired with the user’s own rough notes to synthesize not only meeting takeaways but more importantly key follow-up tasks as well. The long-term vision is to integrate even more deeply into existing business systems (e.g. email, CRM, data, document storage, etc.) and workflows, moving beyond recall towards automated task execution across an entire workforce.
Granola’s initial product today integrates with Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Slack, and WebEx, and is available for download on MacOS here. Check it out and let us know what you think!
Hot Topic: The Explosion of AI-Native Consumer Apps
With each platform shift in consumer, early innovation is focused on the underlying infrastructure component. In the internet platform shift, the world wide web and the emergence of notable browsers including Netscape & Internet Explorer were needed first in order to scale consumer adoption before scaled applications from Google to Amazon to Youtube could emerge. In mobile, there was a combination of infrastructure shifts including the adoption of cloud computing platforms like AWS, mobile payment platforms including Square & Stripe, and distribution platforms like Apple & Android app stores before the most lucrative consumer mobile apps could launch & scale. We're now in the AI shift, and much of the activity over the past few years has been focused on the foundation model layer as the core infrastructure for this wave.
One thing that's become clear however is that adoption amongst consumers has been significantly faster with this AI platform shift than prior platform shifts. ChatGPT as an example set the record for fastest-growing consumer platform in history to reach 100M monthly active users, and Character AI followed it up by scaling to over 250M monthly unique visits across desktop & mobile less than 9 months after public launch.
Now that a critical mass of consumer adoption has been achieved and the infrastructure has caught up, a much broader set of commercial opportunities at the application layer have been unlocked for 2024 & beyond…
In the application layer, much of the activity we've observed over the past year has been focused on the upper left “consumer technology & media activity” category here across formats including text, photo, video, and audio with category-leading platforms such as Inworld (gaming), Suno (audio), Pika (video) in the Lightspeed portfolio. As with prior platform shifts, we expect there to continue to be waves of opportunity here for years to come, democratizing access to content creation & unlocking net-new formats of content consumption along the way.
In addition to democratizing access to content creation, we believe AI also has the power to democratize access to services that were previously too time- or cost-intensive for all but a small portion of consumers. In the “work- and work-related” segment, these applications will automate entire workflows for prosumers & SMBs, serving to drive this higher productivity. In the “other non-work” (we use the tagline “personal utility” internally) segment, services such as personal assistants, trip planners, personal shoppers, 24/7 concierge doctors, and personalized wealth managers are just a few examples that will become much more broadly accessible thanks to AI technology.
What do you see as the most compelling opportunities today at the application layer in consumer AI?
What else is buzzin’ at Lightspeed…
Until next time!
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Buzzworthy 🐝 is a regular(ish) consumer newsletter written by Nicole Quinn and Faraz Fatemi, investing partners at Lightspeed Venture Partners. We cover a little bit of everything from tech & VC to travel & lifestyle trends, and we promise to never take ourselves too seriously 😊