Katie Haun
@katie_haun
Consigliere to founders. CEO @HaunVentures. Former federal prosecutor and Supreme Court clerk. Prev @a16z, @Coinbase, @Hacker0x01 board. Teach & alum @Stanford.
897 Following 143K Followers
AI is transforming every field, chief among them science. Having backed @kevinweil's last couple of adventures, the founder bet was easy, but the mission of keeping core scientific capabilities here at home feels especially urgent in this new age. Excited to be an investor and to see how @warpsciences transforms drug discovery.
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💥 Introducing Warp Sciences, a new company applying AI and robotics to help the world develop new medicines faster.
We’ve raised a $215M Series A led by @lightspeedvp to bring frontier AI out of the browser and into the lab, and build scientific capacity here in America.
I co-founded Warp with my long-time friend @dpatil, FAIR co-founder @manohar_paluri, and drug hunter Sol Reisberg. The early team is full of incredible people like @bkspears9, who helped achieve Q>1 fusion at LLNL.
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💥 Introducing Warp Sciences, a new company applying AI and robotics to help the world develop new medicines faster.
We’ve raised a $215M Series A led by @lightspeedvp to bring frontier AI out of the browser and into the lab, and build scientific capacity here in America.
I co-founded Warp with my long-time friend @dpatil, FAIR co-founder @manohar_paluri, and drug hunter Sol Reisberg. The early team is full of incredible people like @bkspears9, who helped achieve Q>1 fusion at LLNL.
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Hosted a small dinner last week. Accidentally assembled the future. @markkhrapko @LiamFedus @lachygroom
This lawsuit only underscores the stakes of an eventual Supreme Court decision about whether Kalshi and Polymarket sports event contracts are swaps. An adverse ruling from SCOTUS could expose these companies to significant liability. Other states could follow Utah’s playbook and seek huge penalties from these companies for operating for many years without licenses or paying state taxes. It’s also telling that Utah is suing market makers like Susquehanna too for operating on these platforms—a sign that the litigation will escalate and expand until SCOTUS steps in
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Agencies will always play an important role and this is a valuable point, but federal courts will be the most important actor in most such debates going forward. In a post-Chevron world, the judiciary is going to have the final say in these contexts and founders need to update their thinking to reflect this shift
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Hyperliquid Founder Jeff Yan Says US Regulation Should Target Market Operators, Not the Underlying Blockchain
Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan told Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast that US regulators should treat Hyperliquid's Layer 1 blockchain as financial infrastructure rather than a traditional exchange, with regulatory obligations falling on firms that deploy and operate markets on the network. Yan argued that oversight should apply to entities exercising control over those markets, allowing the protocol to function as a shared liquidity and trading infrastructure layer. Bloomberg noted that Kraken parent Payward plans to offer derivatives to US investors using Hyperliquid technology through a regulated exchange. Yan said Hyperliquid aims to provide infrastructure for Wall Street institutions rather than replace them. Hyperliquid remains unavailable to US users.
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Every serious frontier tech company - big or small - should assume it has insider threats. And they don’t need to be that sophisticated. I saw it in government. I saw it with crypto. OpenAI is the latest. Founders tend to assume good intentions while speaking about some of their most sensitive information out loud: capabilities, unreleased products, strategic plans, government relationships.
Employees are the most obvious vector. The more sophisticated operations target founders, execs, and vendors through romantic, family, and social relationships. And on small teams, one compromised person can do a lot of damage.
With former federal prosecutors and ex-FBI agents as part of our team, we spend a lot of time on these issues. Here’s some of what we’re telling our founders:
1. Expect to see more private-sector versions of SCIFs and clearances, where the most sensitive conversations and work are physically isolated and under stricter access controls.
2. Agencies may know about a specific insider threat at a company but can't share that info unless someone at the company holds a clearance like TS/SCI. Lead times to get a clearance are long. Plan now.
3. Restrict access to sensitive meeting schedules, disable unused ports on conference-room equipment, and regularly sweep rooms used for confidential discussions for surveillance devices.
You don't need OpenAI's budget to be ready. But you do need to start.
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I met @moritz_stephan when he was working at Cognition. It was clear he is a special builder, and he’s since assembled a team @hone that’s every bit as impressive as he is. I feel fortunate to be backing Hone at the starting line. The caliber of people choosing to build together here says a lot about how special this opportunity is. If you want to be a part of it, they are hiring product and systems engineers. Learn more here:
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Today Hone launches Engines: AI that owns business outcomes.
Chatbots give answers. Agents do tasks. Engines deliver outcomes, and we hold them responsible for creating real value, measured in actual dollars instead of tokens or vibes.
You point it at a business metric, and the Engine figures out the rest. It onboards itself, builds the necessary agents, skills, and memories, collaborates with the right people, and gets better with experience.
From AI leaders to global enterprises, our customers have already used Engines to:
• Uncover millions in procurement savings
• Optimize product funnels
• Manage credit risk
• Increase qualified pipeline in new territories
• Accelerate implementations and improve account management
To scale this impact across the economy, we’ve raised a $60M seed led by Benchmark and Index with participation from Elad Gil, Hanabi, Definition, Diffusion, Lux, SV Angel, and Align.
AI’s raw capabilities are far ahead of the value it creates in the real world, and Engines will help close the gap.
Here’s how they work…
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This week marked the start of a new Term at SCOTUS and one question on everyone’s mind is whether the Justices will rule that Kalshi and Polymarket’s sports event contracts are swaps. But the more interesting question for now is when they’ll rule.
There will be petitions from both sides soon urging the Court to take this question. But the CFTC has told us that they’re coming out with a new rule for regulating prediction markets in a few months. If SCOTUS wants to wait for this rule, it tells us a decision likely won’t come out until the spring of 2028 and that the Justices will be looking for guidance from the agency on how to define what a swap is under the Commodity Exchange Act.
If they step in now, however, and don’t wait for the CFTC’s new rule, it's another sign that after the Loper Bright decision (2024 decision that ended Chevron deference, the rule that courts defer to agencies' reasonable readings of ambiguous statutes), federal courts, not agencies, decide what federal statutes mean.
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Great to join @EricNewcomer at the Machine Earning AI Summit. As the agent economy takes shape, hard questions about liability and responsibility are coming, and the answers won't come from one place. Regulation will be shaped across all three branches of government including the judiciary. Thanks for having me, Eric.
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At Machine Earning today @NewcomerMedia
Former federal prosecutor and VC @katie_haun predicts Supreme Court could side against prediction markets in their attempt to sidestep state regulations + notes that people could be found to be legally culpable for reckless instructions to personal agents
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Agents are only as good as the data they're trained on and Proximal is seizing on that opportunity in frontier AI. Congrats @calvinchen & team. Excited to see what you and your team build.
Proximal builds infrastructure that enables AI to improve from real-world experience.
In the past year, we have grown to more than $200M in annualized revenue helping frontier labs and enterprises improve coding agents. Now, we are expanding beyond software engineering.
Recent progress in mathematics demonstrates what happens when models are trained in domains with massive amounts of public data and easy verifiability, making it easy to find weaknesses, generate training tasks, and iterate quickly.
We build infrastructure that enables this feedback loop in other domains: we are excited about a world in which AI systems design targeted drugs, accelerate chip design, and rewrite legacy software that still runs hospitals, power grids, governments, and other critical infrastructure.
Since starting, we have assembled a small team of researchers and engineers and built world-class infrastructure for post-training and synthetic data research to overcome the challenges of scaling manual data curation.
Our team comes from Cursor, Google DeepMind, Meta Superintelligence, Prime Intellect, Citadel, and Jane Street. More than half are former founders.
We’re fortunate to be backed by investors who share that vision, including @generalcatalyst who led our $15M Seed Round at a $300M valuation, as well as @chemistry, @svangel, @dvlamoen and individuals like @LiamFedus, @kevinweil, and @bernhardsson
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Cognition has crossed $1B in annualized revenue run rate.
This milestone belongs to our customers. Here's how a few of them are building with Devin.
When @eldsjal first told me about Neko, the idea felt almost too obvious. The fact that no one had built it yet was a huge opportunity, and one I wanted to invest in. Proud to have backed this team early — congrats to @HNilsonne, @shak and everyone at @Neko on today's NYC launch.
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The most valuable hour you can spend on your health.
Neko Health is now open in NYC.
I first met @ScottWu46 over breakfast 2+ years ago when Cognition was a handful of hackers living and working out of a house. Today, the company announced a Series E and has built one of the most talent dense teams in tech. Proud to be an early investor and advisor - congrats to the whole Cog team.
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The world needs far more software than it can build. Cognition exists to change that.
We’ve just raised over $2B at a $48B valuation, led by a16z, Accel, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and Avenir.
Since our round in May, run-rate revenue has grown from $492 M to almost $900 M.
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Congrats @iampaulgrewal on the next move. Getting to work alongside him at Coinbase was a privilege. Looking forward to more of that as he builds the next chapter at Cognition.
Devin just got new counsel. Today I’m joining @cognition as Chief Legal and Global Affairs Officer.
Proud to have personally joined this cap table earlier this year. @Neko is rewriting the rules on early detection and preventive care. Can't wait until Neko scans are available in the US later this year. Congratulations to @eldsjal,@HNilsonne, @shak and the team.
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We've raised a $700M Series C, led by @lightspeedvp and co-led by O.G. Venture Partners.
Since 2023, more than 350,000 people have signed up for a Neko Health Scan, and 100,000 people have experienced one.
Today, our approach to redefining how people understand and act on their health is already working: for returning members, our data shows that 5 out of 7 of their key health markers showed statistically significant improvement between scans.
This funding will scale our research into the hidden causes of disease and the development of proprietary technology to detect it before it has time to develop. It will also fund our continued expansion, including to the US, where our first clinic is set to open in New York this year.
This round comes weeks after our biggest update yet to the Neko Health Scan, with body composition measures and clinician review of wearable data now included in all scans across our clinics in the UK and Sweden.
We're grateful for the continued support of @atomico, @generalcatalyst, and Lakestar, and welcome new investors including Liberty City Ventures, Positive Sum, and BDT & MSD Partners.
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When a team ships this much, at this velocity, across product and works this hard to grow and delight customers across the globe, my job is pretty easy.
Congrats to everyone at @airwallex on this milestone.
Personally delighted to have the @katie_haun and the @HaunVentures in the fam 🥰 (they are existing investors btw).
Follow: @lancectk @t0finance @bzlwang @cclayporter @metalntwx @shannonscott
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Really enjoyed sitting down with @emilychangtv at the @BloombergLive Tech Summit last week. We talked about how we’re putting our new $1 billion fund to work, what the convergence of AI and digital assets actually looks like in practice, and early cases I prosecuted. Thanks for having me.
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"We're planning to back founders building what we're calling the new economy, the future of finance, certainly digital assets are part of that." Founder & CEO @HaunVentures' @katie_haun. #BloombergTech# @emilychangtv
⏯️
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Every team serious about building a high-performance chain has spent years reinventing the same primitives, often before writing a single line of product code. Constantinople changes that calculus entirely, and you can deploy it yourself in weeks. 👇
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70k tps
400ms finalization
browser light client
native passkey wallet
… now available (for free)
A must listen with the one and only @jackiereses
BREAKING: Inside Lead Bank - $56M Investment Now Worth $1.5 BILLION
Jackie Reses is on an iconic run.
@Lead_Bank is the $1.5B tech-first bank powering Stripe, Walmart, Ramp, Affirm & Revolut
Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Greycroft, ICONIQ, Khosla Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Zeev Partners, plus Larry Fink, Rob Goldstein & Larry Summers personally.
CEO & Co-Founder Jackie Reses (@jackiereses)
We cover:
- Sitting on Alibaba's board with Jack Ma, Joe Tsai + Masayoshi Son
"Masa would come in & be like, 'Yes, it shall be blessed.'"
- Taking an HR role at Yahoo, then turning it into Chief Development Officer
- Jack Dorsey: "He'll sit in meetings & not say a word. There's real wisdom in his ability to 'just zip it.' "
- Why she's skeptical of the de-banking narrative
- Building Lead to $280M in revenue with no sales team
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Jackie Reses, CEO of Lead Bank
(01:06) The swiss army knife of Silicon Valley
(02:46) Inside the Alibaba boardroom with Jack Ma and Masa
(05:23) Being one of the only Americans on Alibaba’s board
(10:29) What Jack Ma and Masayoshi Son are really like
(12:32) The biggest lessons Jackie learned from Alibaba
(15:12) From Goldman Sachs to Silicon Valley
(17:44) Why Yahoo hired a PE investor to run HR
(22:53) Yahoo was a hot mess
(25:33) The deal that recovered billions for Yahoo
(26:31) How Jack Dorsey recruited Jackie to Square
(29:53) Three engineers, three days, one crypto platform
(33:51) What Jack Dorsey is really like
(36:13) Being Jack Dorsey’s HR lead during Twitter chaos
(40:03) How to spot real innovation vs hype
(42:21) Why debanking is a myth
(48:10) Why buy a 100 year old bank
(51:23) Growing a bank with no sales team
(54:11) The APIs powering the future of finance
(56:03) How AI is transforming banking
(57:07) The JD Vance connection
(58:39) What it feels like inside the White House
(01:02:53) The biggest misconception about government
(01:04:21) Why Lead Bank’s culture feels different
(01:05:35) The next chapter for Lead Bank
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