2023: we invented the AI interviewer. 2026: we invented the AI user. Digital Twins by @OutsetAI is live today. Accurately simulating humans is now possible. But it has done by building one-to-one synthetic twins anchored on real humans, not just asking a foundation model to regurgitate population level responses. That's why we did it. We reinvented the way companies understand their customers a few years ago. We built the most rigorous and high scale mechanism to capture and process customer data. And since then, we've captured millions of deep, multimodal human responses around the world. The future of insights will be a combination of understanding and simulating human experience. We're doing both.

EXCLUSIVE: 8VC leads $16M Lazarus round to build modular supercritical CO₂ turbines for America’s data center buildout. Today, @LazarusEnergy, the Hawthorne-based startup, has secured an oversubscribed $16M seed round led by @8vc, with additional investment from Marlinspike, DST Global, Neuron Power Ventures, and @relentless_inv, as well as follow-up investment from @fiftyyears and @sidedoor_vc. The company is betting that a new turbine architecture can help solve one of the biggest constraints on America’s data center buildout, power. Supercritical carbon dioxide could decide America’s AI sovereignty. CO₂ crosses into the supercritical phase above 31.1°C and 73.8 bar, where liquid and gas collapse into a single fluid with liquid-like density and gas-like flow. It plays a special role in closed-loop Brayton cycle turbines, which could become core to data center power generation. Turbines are becoming increasingly important for data centers as power demand exceeds grid capacity and operators look for reliable on-site power. The traditional turbine market is behind, with wait times exceeding 5 to 7 years and OEMs even turning down new orders because capacity is maxed out. Lazarus is attempting to shift the supply curve. The LA startup was founded by George Kitromelides (CEO) and Luke Malcolm (CTO), both formerly on the propulsion team at Anduril, alongside team members from Siemens Energy, Williams International, and Ursa Major. The startup is developing turbines that enable a forward-deployable power plant fitting inside a shipping container. “Supercritical CO₂ lets you reduce the size of your components significantly,” according to George Kitromelides (CEO), thus enabling the distributed form factor. Traditional turbines are optimized for specific heat sources. Lazarus designed its system to be heat-source agnostic, allowing it to convert heat from nearly any major energy source into electricity. Lazarus has created a natural edge. It can serve today’s data center market with proven inputs like natural gas while remaining positioned for future heat sources like small modular reactors. Deployment is another edge. Traditional turbine players can require months or years of construction to set up on-site, while Lazarus’ platform is fully assembled at its facility and requires zero on-site construction. In areas like nuclear, this can be key. Luke Malcolm (CTO) states, “SMRs are supposed to be compact, modular, deployable power. And when you build your compact reactor and then spend a year building all your steam infrastructure on-site, that kind of defeats the whole purpose.” Lazarus is focused on two end markets, data centers as the beachhead market and small modular nuclear reactors as the secondary market, both with unique business models. In the data center market, “The OEMs are straight up rejecting new orders. They’re turning customers away because they just can’t keep up with demand,” according to George Kitromelides (CEO). Lazarus wants to provide power-as-a-service in the data center market, where it would own and operate the asset instead of the data center operator incurring CapEx. Additionally, the own-and-operate/PPA model allows Lazarus to generate significantly more long-term revenue than a one-time equipment sale. Under a power purchase agreement (PPA), customers pay for the electricity generated by the system over time rather than purchasing the power infrastructure upfront. Lastly, behind-the-meter power is surging as data centers seek dedicated, off-grid generation to avoid grid delays and secure reliable power. Lazarus enables that by delivering compact on-site power systems built for data center demand. On the nuclear side, Lazarus would integrate with SMR companies to supply the power cycle, with nuclear heat going into the Lazarus cycle and electricity coming out. This model would focus on selling units to reactor companies, followed by multi-year maintenance contracts. Lazarus is developing a true picks-and-shovels play for the AI power gold rush. But the broader opportunity extends well beyond data centers. As the forward-deployed stack expands across compute, manufacturing, medical units, and logistics, compact containerized power could become critical infrastructure for Department of War installations, remote mining operations, disaster response, and any site where reliable power needs to move closer to the edge. The team of six full-time engineers is focused on firing a 1-megawatt sub-module of its system by late this year or early next year. The system will be powered by natural gas. Additionally, the startup has secured an MOU with a nuclear customer and has received strong interest from the data center market.

1/ Today, @Primero_ai is announcing its public launch and a $12m seed, one of the largest seed rounds in LatAm. Primero is the AI transformation company for Latin America's largest enterprises.

Standard Metrics (@metrics_co) has raised a $20M Series B led by 8VC (@8vc) to accelerate innovation in the private markets! Trillions of dollars of economic activity in the private markets still run on spreadsheets, email threads, and PDFs. This critical ecosystem remains surprisingly analog and inefficient despite financing many of the world’s most innovative companies. This problem matters. A better-functioning innovation economy would lead to new big technological breakthroughs, life-saving medicines, jobs, and game-changing new products. AI expands both the urgency and the scope of this opportunity. New AI models have fundamentally changed how data can be organized, analyzed, and acted upon, and they are beginning to drive rapid software adoption in an industry that has historically lagged behind. We believe AI-native infrastructure will reshape the private markets over the coming decade. Two years ago, we bet our company on the idea of building the AI-native portfolio management platform for venture capital and private equity. That was the single most consequential decision in our history: it led us to create the first MCP server in our space, launch an AI-driven document processing service, and build cutting-edge agentic reporting and analytics tools. Today, we’re proud to support more than 150 investment firms who collectively manage over $400B, along with more than 10,000 of their portfolio companies. 30% of the Forbes Midas List are customers of Standard Metrics. But we’ve still only scratched the surface: we work with roughly 1% of active global VC/PE firms. We’ve raised roughly $50M to date. Most of that capital has come from our customers. Investors in this round alongside 8VC include Salesforce Ventures, Spark Capital, January Capital, First Trust Capital Partners, Socii Capital, Kindergarten Ventures, Calm Ventures, Gaingels, and more. It’s been an honor to partner with some of the world’s most forward-thinking investors on this journey. Thank you so much to our team, customers, investors, and supporters. We’re just getting started!