The Rise of the AI Cognitive Plumbing Layer


As the AI era moves from early adopters to the enterprise, I see the plumbing layer rising again.

Mayfield’s conviction in infrastructure investments began 25+ years ago, as I have been a believer in the power of plumbing to help consumers and businesses realize the benefits of technology waves. During the Web era, I joined a long line of tech industry school dropouts to co-found my first company in 1996 with my PhD advisor at Stanford University. VXtreme made it possible to stream video over the Internet, and after its acquisition by Microsoft, endures as Windows Media. While at Microsoft, I invested in Akamai, which delivered infrastructure to scale the Web.

In 2014, as the cloud era got into full swing, Mayfield partnered with Armon Dadgar and Mitchell Hashimoto, the open source superstar founders of HashiCorp, whose mission was to elevate the devops professional with a simple and comprehensive multi-cloud infrastructure platform. HashiCorp’s public offering in December 2021 valued the company at $15 billion, and it continues to power major cloud-based businesses today. Over the last decade, we have partnered with many bold enterprise founders including those at CloudSimple, CloudGenix, Elastica, Gigya, Portworx, NUVIA, Rancher, StorSimple, and Volterra who successfully realized their mission to cloudify the world.

As AI shifts from early adoption to widespread enterprise use, the importance of the “plumbing layer” is resurgent. The transformative potential lies in four layers of the tech stack: models/middleware/tools, data, infrastructure, and semiconductors/systems. The breakthrough of GenAI is in elevating humans by providing a natural language interface and doing cognitive tasks — an era I think of as AI+Humans = Human Squared. In this context, cognitive plumbing unlocks the easy creation of agents, applications, and services that can be built on the foundational technology.

Looking forward to partnering with many more cognitive plumbers of the AI age — we are People-First investors with over $1.1B in capital for new early-stage investments who are excited to guide your inception-to-iconic journey.

 

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Accelerating GenAI Adoption Through a Data Operations Cloud

Revefi Announcement

I first met Sanjay Agrawal and Shashank Gupta in the summer of 2021. They had built storied careers at companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Yahoo, solving tough data analytics and infrastructure problems. They were part of the founding team at ThoughtSpot, one of the industry’s pioneering business analytics companies. They had decided to join forces to pursue their passion around data and embark on a new journey as CEO and CTO of Revefi, a next generation data operations cloud company. We led their $10.5 million seed round and partnered with them as they built the team and product.

Today, they have announced the Revefi Data Operations Cloud, which serves as a zero-touch co-pilot to data teams to monitor data quality, spend, usage and performance. By enabling data teams to get the right data into cloud data warehouses reliably, promptly and affordably, their organizations are able to use the data to make critical business decisions. They have already found product-market fit with a no POC/self trial model, and are demonstrating measurable ROI. Within weeks, one customer saw six figure savings, by using Revefi to uncover insights that allowed it to save nearly 30% on its total data warehouse spend while at the same time increasing its usage of the cloud data platform by 35%.

Three reasons I am excited about the next phase of the Revefi journey:

  1. Data quality is a mission critical problem that has only become more real in the age of AI: According to Gartner, an enterprise incurs an yearly loss of $13-15M on an average due to data quality issues. According to Forrester, less than 10% of respondents believed data met quality standards. According to HBR, it costs ten times as much to complete a unit of work when the data are flawed in any way as it does when they are perfect.
  2. Elevating data ops teams with a zero touch model will unleash their power.
    Data Ops teams spend a significant amount (in one case it reached a high >40%) of time on investigating and root causing SLA violations, and other data quality issues. With the exponential increase in the amount of data in the age of AI, and an ever-increasing number and variety of data sources, this pain is getting worse. On the flip side, if a business user sees a business-critical report where data does looks unexpected, the process of figuring out whether it’s even a problem, and if yes where (whether it’s in data, or semantics), will it resolve on its own (data is delayed) or needs intervention (unexpected nulls), results in more tickets against and thus more load on the Data Ops teams.
  3. Building a company, vs just a product, is a superpower of serial entrepreneurs who understand the value of institutionalizing culture and surrounding themselves with excellence.

We look forward to partnering with Sanjay, Shashank and the Revefi team as they accelerate the adoption of GenAI.

Mayfield Announces $250 Million AI Start Seed Fund and Adds New Partner

Mayfield, a top-tier early-stage venture capital firm, today announced the $250 million AI Start, the first seed fund in its history, to partner with AI-first founders starting at Day Zero. The Firm also added Vijay Reddy, an AI-focused investor with a decade of successful seed stage experience, as a dedicated AI Start Seed Fund partner.

Mayfield Launches New $250 Million AI-Specific Seed Stage Fund

Longtime venture capital firm Mayfield Fund is launching a new investment vehicle specifically to back artificial intelligence startups.

Announcing The $250 Million Mayfield AI Start Seed Fund

Today we are announcing the $250 million Mayfield AI Start, our first seed fund, out of which we will invest in AI-first founders starting at Day Zero.

Mayfield Raises $955 Million Across Two New Funds Dedicated to Early Stage Investing

Announcing $955 Million Across Two New Venture Funds

Since the turn of the millennium, the tech industry has navigated a few downturns – the post-2000 Internet bust, the 2008 financial crisis – including today’s challenging times of a market slowdown and a banking crisis. Through it all, our team has been powered by two beliefs: that great companies are created in tough times and that great venture capital firms are guided by a set of values and operating principles that are independent of market conditions.

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