Fly is a venture capital firm that invests in technical founders solving hard problems from day-zero to seed stage across Europe.

The Fly Wheel

Fly is a first check VC for technical founders solving hard problems. We invest from day-zero to seed, backing founders from all over Europe.

We are fortunate to have been on the zero to one journey with portfolio companies who have raised in excess of $2Bn in follow-on funding from some of the world’s best VCs.

Scape Technologies

Side

Finiata

Bloomsbury AI

Fly Ventures

Patience and the Power Law. From Seed to a $1.05 billion Series C.

Our team at Fly Ventures co-led the Seed of Wayve back in 2017 together with Compound.

This was at a time where someone opening a call with “AI in cars needs to reason when it’s not sure about something” (yes, that was you Amar) and Alex Kendall speaking about his SegNet paper would make most VCs leave the room. 

The Wayve team met many VCs in London. Everyone could see that they are brilliant but very few people were ready to make a bet.

Today Wayve announced their $1.05 billion Series C led by SoftBank with contribution from NVIDIA and Microsoft.

For our small €35M Fly Fund I, this is the Power Law at work. Many VCs, LPs, and researchers love to pontificate about the Power Law on LinkedIn or Medium posts, et al. 

What gets a lot less coverage is the Patience it requires. It takes a long time to achieve technical breakthroughs. OpenAI was started in 2015, not with the release of ChatGPT in 2022. Wayve was founded in 2017 and only now can deliver an Embodied AI product for production vehicles. 

If you are embarking on a 7 year “overnight success”, a true hard problem at inception stage, we are always happy to speak gabriel@fly.vc  

Links and the many people we have to thank for this in comments.

💾 The AI Software Engineer Part 2 is out! What can you expect?

👩💻  We will use four simple examples to display the current limitations of LLMs, preventing them from generating software from a prompt.
🚧  We’ll discuss three main obstacles in the path toward a model-centric approach
🏔 We'll look at the two ways people are tackling this challenge (full mega model and hybrid) 
🏅 We'll have a look at the current contenders

🔗 Link: https://lnkd.in/egRxu3A3

This is a super interesting space on the edge of research, if you too are researching it, let me know, and let's exchange!

😅  After dedicating over 50 hours to research, I'm excited to share the results of our deep dive into the intersection of AI and software engineering. 

🤖 We'll discuss GitHub Copilot, StarCoder, Devin, Magic, Ring attention, ..., and why I’m betting on a hybrid approach to win this problem space. 

🔗 Link: https://lnkd.in/e94bbpUW

Thanks to all the people who were patient enough to educate me. This is such a cool problem space, if you care about it from the technical or investing perspective, add a comment so we can chat, I'd love to keep learning

Patience and Rewards: Thrilled to see the $20M Series A at Lakera announced. We had the opportunity to partner with David, Matthias, Mateo in 2021. Lakera is on an important mission as we enter the phase of enterprise deployments in GenAI.

The team started working on AI Safety in 2016 - before these two terms were used in conjunction by almost anyone. Their reward today is having the best product in this space globally.

As part of their Series A fundraise, the founders also overcame one of the wildest experiences in European venture land I could have ever imagined. For those involved, you know who you are and your reward is that this will be remembered.

The team emerged from this stronger and with the best possible partners for their Series A. Welcome to the awesome team Atomico, Citi, Dropbox.

Check out "The AI Developer" by our partner Marie Brayer

Thrilled we could co-host the THE MERGE speakers dinner with our friends at GitButler last week. What an amazing group of people coming to Berlin: Tom Preston-Werner, David Cramer, Jana Iris, Kyle Daigle, JZ Zhang, Robby Russell, Cassidy Williams, Jay Simons, Daniel Thompson-Yvetot, Leah Culver, David Edoh-Bedi, Saron Yitbarek. Special thanks to Megan for organizing everything and, of course, Anne, Scott and Kiril for co-hosting.

Very proud of our portfolio company Orbital Materials on their $16 million Series A led by Radical Ventures.

The Orbital team is pushing the frontier of material science by developing a first of its kind AI foundation model for chemistry. Jonathan Godwin, James Gin-Pollock and Daniel Miodovnik are exactly the founders we live to back - deeply technical that refuse to think incrementally.

Together with Compound we've been lucky enough to be alongside the journey since their pre-seed and can't wait to see what's next.

https://lnkd.in/gqs_YsYP

✨ Unveiling our third and last speaker: Léo Dreyfus-Schmidt ✨
Leo will discuss the challenges of building with LLMs "in real life" over a real customer case study.
 
With a PhD in mathematics, Léo's academic journey took him through prestigious institutions in Paris, Oxford, and UCLA. Transitioning from academia, he joined Dataiku in its early stages as a startup. At Dataiku, now a thriving scale-up, Léo has been instrumental in developing data-driven solutions for customers (predictive maintenance, recommender systems,...) as well as ML features for the Dataiku platform.
Currently, as VP of Research, Léo leads the Dataiku Lab, focusing on ML tool development for wider use and contributing to the academic ML community. The Lab's projects span model drift, uncertainty estimation, causal ML, and of course LLMs, showcasing a diverse research portfolio.

📆 Meet Leo at Binary Stars: this Friday at 12 PM UK / 1PM Paris
🔗 Register here: www.binarystars.org
👋 Our awesome partners AI HOUSE and Papers Club by Gathers

VC:FLY

Fly

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