Saam Motamedi
@saammotamedi
venture capitalist investing in the future | GP at Greylock | @GreylockVC
708 Following 6.6K Followers
Eight years ago, we made a bet at @Abnormal that understanding normal behavior would outlast every rule, signature, and threat feed. That bet keeps paying off, and today it takes its biggest step yet:
The most dangerous attacks don't look like attacks. A hijacked session looks like a normal login. A rogue AI agent looks like productivity. A fraudulent job candidate looks like a great hire. Each one blends in. The security tools built to catch known-bad never see them coming, because there's nothing "bad" to match.
The one thing an attacker can't fake is behavior. You can steal a credential, forge an identity, spin up an agent…but you can't reproduce how a real person, account, or system actually behaves. That's been our thesis since day one, and it was never limited to one part of the enterprise.
Today, we're launching three new products:
- Identity Threat Protection
- AI Governance
- Infiltration Prevention,
AND plus the AI App Store to activate them in a single click.
Our behavioral model now protects not just email, but also identities, AI systems, and the hiring pipeline attackers are exploiting right now.
The behavioral security era is here, and we’re proud to be the ones defining it.
My blog post:
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Why Greylock capped its new fund at $1.5B when it says it could have raised more
Today, we are announcing Greylock 18, a new $1.5 billion early-stage venture fund.
A company begins when a founder sees a future others cannot yet see. There is no team, product, or revenue. Only a deep insight and the courage to start.
Being early is lonely work. For years, being right can look exactly like being wrong. Greylock has spent more than six decades partnering with founders through those earliest moments to build enduring companies. Airbnb, Facebook, and Palo Alto Networks all began as improbable ideas driven by founders determined to make them inevitable.
AI has made the map blank again. Every part of the economy is now open to reinvention. We believe many of the defining AI companies do not yet exist.
We invest selectively and partner deeply with the founders we back. Each Greylock partner makes only one or two new investments a year because the work demands depth. We bring the full attention, network, and resources of Greylock to every partnership.
We are builders backing outliers. Founders have their choice of investor. When a founder chooses to partner with Greylock, we understand the weight of that choice and the profound responsibility that comes with it. We seek to be a founder’s first believer and long-term partner.
Greylock 18 is our commitment to what does not exist yet.
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Live customer conversations are no place for agents to learn on the job.
Cresta Training Simulator replaces scripted role-play with live, dynamic AI simulations that help human agents practice before going live.
Learn more ➡️
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We expect agents to act like senior engineers, but most benchmarks still evaluate them like interns.
Excited to introduce Senior SWE-Bench, an open-source and @harborframework-native benchmark that assesses agents as senior engineers on long-horizon tasks with realistically under-specified instructions.
We expect agents to build real features going on just a quick Slack message, nothing like the super technical instructions most benchmarks provide. Senior SWE-Bench fixes that.
Claude Opus 4.8 is the current leader at 24% high quality solves, but it took 117K tokens on average to get there. Claude Sonnet 5 looked like it was going to swoop in for the top spot, but we found it cheated on 26% of trials.
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Congratulations to @clattner_llvm, @iamtimdavis, and the entire @Modular team on today's announcement that Qualcomm has agreed to acquire the company for ~$4 billion. We at @GreylockVC have been fortunate to back Chris, Tim, and the team since their seed round, and it's been a privilege to partner with them from the start.
Chris and Tim are an incredibly rare combination of world-class systems thinking and product taste, that can take deep technical complexity and make it highly usable for millions of developers. When they started Modular a little over four years ago, they had a prescient thesis that AI needed an open platform to runs models at state-of-the-art performance across heterogeneous hardware, without requiring developers to rewrite anything. They delivered it with Mojo and MAX, and now they'll accelerate that mission by pairing their software with Qualcomm's silicon leadership.
We're grateful to have invested alongside @davemuni @GVteam, @deepnishar @generalcatalyst, and Chris Ré, and we're excited for this important milestone for Modular.
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Congratulations to @alvaromorales, @kshithappens, and the entire Orb @useOrb team on their definitive agreement to be acquired by Adyen.
We at @GreylockVC were fortunate to lead Orb's seed financing and from our very first meeting it was obvious that Alvaro and Kshitij were special. Long before AI accelerated the move to usage- and outcome-based pricing, Alvaro and Kshitij saw where the world was headed and built accordingly. Deeply technical and relentlessly customer focused, they and their team built the platform that today powers billing at AI leaders like Vercel, Supabase, Fal, Replit, Glean and many others. Now they'll accelerate their customer footprint and impact as part of Adyen.
More from Alvaro 👇
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Today, we announced that @useOrb has entered into a definitive agreement to join @Adyen.
@kshithappens and I have spent the past five years building Orb alongside some of the fastest growing companies in the world. The clearest thing we've learned: how companies price is changing faster than how they bill. AI has accelerated the shift toward consumption and outcome-based models, and the infrastructure underneath hasn't kept up. That gap is why we founded Orb, and joining Adyen is how we close it at global scale.
Today's announcement doesn't change our commitment to our customers. Orb will continue operating as a stand-alone product, there will be no interruption in service, and our customers can continue to choose to work with their preferred payment processing partner. We're here for the long run, ensuring that our service continues to uphold "billing must be correct" as our customers pursue their most audacious revenue design goals.
So why Adyen? Over the past several years supporting our customers' global growth, we've learned that billing at serious scale is only half the equation. The other half is moving money across markets, currencies, and enterprise requirements. Adyen has already built the foundational financial infrastructure that makes this possible. Joining them lets us build offerings that bring to life the vision of self-driving infrastructure for revenue optimization. We’re incredibly excited for Orb to only get better from here.
To our team: thank you for all the hard work that you do every day for our customers. It has been, and continues to be, the pleasure of my professional life to work with all of you. To our customers: thank you for trusting us to support your growth and letting us partner with you. Thank you to our investors and supporters who’ve been with us on the journey. And thank you to my family for putting up with me talking about so, so many billing edge cases!
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New @GreylockVC Change Agents is out today featuring @tuhinone from @baseten
We discussed all things inference:
- Moving from rented to owned intelligence
- How the most advanced AI companies are post-training OSS models to give them more control over performance, runtime requirements, and cost
- With agents, inference is evolving to a set of tools for continuous learning vs just "run this model"
- Capacity constraints are worse than you think, and nobody is willing to take a hit on capability
Full episode below
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We're launching @niteshiftdev – the full-stack cloud for coding agents
Verification is the new bottleneck.
Software teams can now define their dev environment and verification tools once. Then run any frontier agent in the cloud: Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode
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Being an Agent Lab also means collaborating with the best in the industry to define what comes next in agent observability.
Replit has been running this at scale for months👇
Topics, from Braintrust ❤️
Today we're making Topics GA, but we're also laying the foundation for the next chapter of Braintrust.
Our goal is to turn AI observability into active observability: a platform that works behind the scenes, constantly, to find answers to questions without you having to ask them ad-hoc.
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we're entering the era of AI for the physical sciences:
@altaratech comes out of stealth today with a scientific intelligence platform that helps R&D teams go from data to insights in minutes.
They're already working teams across semiconductor, battery, and advanced materials to accelerate the process from experimentation to commercialization. Their agents ingest and reason across the complex, multimodal data: semiconductor wafer maps, high-resolution inspection data like SEM images, large-scale instrument time series data, scattered spreadsheets, unstructured research documents, and domain-specific legacy systems – all without requiring years-long migrations to new systems of record.
We at @GreylockVC led their $7M seed, alongside our friends at @neo, @BoxGroup, @Liquid2V and incredible angels like @JeffDean and execs at OpenAI and AMD.
@catherinehyeo and @evatuecke are building an exceptional team (ex-NVIDIA, SpaceX, Applied Intuition, Jane Street, Microsoft, Warp, ++) in SF. If you want to work on one of the hardest and most consequential problems in technology, check out their careers page
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Introducing Altara: the scientific intelligence platform for the physical world.
Today @evatuecke and I are excited to announce our $7M seed led by @GreylockVC, joined by @Neo, @BoxGroup, @Liquid2V, and angel investors including @JeffDean and leadership from OpenAI & AMD.
We’re already working with early customers in semiconductors, batteries, and advanced materials. More below.
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$100M ARR is just the beginning. @cresta is transforming customer experience for some of the world's largest companies, and the momentum is only accelerating.
I’m excited to step into the role of Chairman of the Board and work with the team through its rapid growth phase.
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