Software developers have long touted the ability to automate boring, repetitive work. Now they are increasingly coming to more complex tasks.
Mayfield Fund 1 is among the corporations that are following this trend and investing in increasing the number of information staff using artificial intelligence-enabled tools for knowledge staff.
Cognition as a Service (CaaS) will “transform productivity. It will allow people to do new things,” he said Navin Chaddamanaging partner at Mayfield.
To that end, Chaddha led the company’s investment this spring NeuBird, a service for IT operations that adds an AI-enabled “companion” named Hawkeye. Hawkeye analyzes software stack problems based on engineering input, talks to the team, and provides solutions.
“Each of us will have a genie. They will have a teammate and we will do everything together,” Chaddha said. “So this is the era we are entering. Where technology is not a tool, it is actually our teammate.”
He anticipates that Loose shall be energetic with many teammates.
People first
Chaddha was last ranked fourth Forbes Midas List 2024moving up one place in comparison with 2023. He led early investments in Lift, Poshmark AND HashiCorp, which became public. He was also an early investor Brideof which he is a co-founder Apple engineers to build chips for the phones and mobile devices they sold Qualcomm for $1.4 billion in 2021.
Chaddha invests first in people and then in the market. Its distinctiveness is financing the idea at an early stage.
While Mayfield and Chaddha are excited about AI-powered productivity apps, this is just one area of the AI ”stack” the company is investing in.
Mayfield’s 55-year-old fund has ample funds to take a position. It then announced three funds in 2023 ChatGPT launched: Fund 17 price USD 580 million for Series A investments; $250 million AI seed fund; and a $375 million Series B selective investment fund.
Stack
Investors approach the AI sector as a layered stack – a layer of semiconductors in the cloud, creators of generative AI models, corporations providing data and model management tools, and applications at the top that eat the stack.
At each layer of the stack, investors see opportunities in corporations that may succeed.
Mayfield invested in Frore systems, which develops cooling chips found in AI edge devices. Investments have been made in the safety of the model Safe. In the data layer, the portfolio company Revifi is the co-pilot for data engineers. In the middleware layer they are positioned MindsDB enabling developers to make use of any model and data source to build applications and Sema4.aiplatform for creating, running and managing agents.
At the application level, it has invested in a contract review platform LexCheck, Outreach for sales and customer engagement, and Qventus for activities related to hospital care.
AI team members make up the top layer of the stack, including NeuBird, and investments made by the company have yet to be announced.
Entrepreneur for investor
Chaddha grew up in India and moved there Stanford University, where he obtained a master’s degree in electrical engineering. With the advent of the Internet, he became an entrepreneur and co-founded 4 corporations. His first company VXtreme, enabled video delivery over the Internet. It was acquired by Microsoft in 1997, Chaddha headed Windows Media and was an associate of Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella.
An investor since 2004, he has witnessed the waves of social, mobile and cloud computing that have created latest corporations. And then he saw the silence before the moment of generative AI.
The biggest impact AI has seen so far is in customer support, product development, and search and discovery.
“This will turn humans into superhumans as boring, repetitive tasks will be performed by machines, expanding our capabilities and enhancing our creativity,” Chaddha said.
Beyond the large models and the GPU and CPU stack, investment opportunities are wide open, he said.