We’ve all experienced the uncanny valley: the slight discomfort when watching an AI avatar speak, the sense that something fundamental is missing despite impressive technical capabilities. Today’s AI can reason brilliantly and generate human-like text, but when it comes to emotional intelligence, AI remains surprisingly tone-deaf.

That’s where Nuance Labs comes in. We at Lightspeed are excited to invest in their seed round alongside Accel as they build what we believe will become a foundational layer for emotional intelligence in AI.

As IQ becomes commoditized through increasingly capable language models, emotional quotient (EQ) emerges as the critical differentiator. Yet we believe current AI systems fundamentally miss this dimension. AI avatars feel robotic, not because of pixel quality, but because they lack the subtle emotional expressiveness that makes human faces compelling, and they are far from real-time responsiveness.

Nuance’s breakthrough insight mirrors that of large language models: just as LLMs learned to understand meaning by predicting the next word, AI can understand emotions by learning to predict human emotions and behavior.

Nuance Labs is building a unified foundation model for real-time generation and understanding of realistic human expression across multiple simultaneous modalities, including text, speech, and video. This unlocks new categories of AI interaction:

• Real-time emotional generation: Lifelike avatars that don’t just speak words but convey appropriate emotional responses through coordinated facial expressions, vocal inflection, and body language. Imagine AI therapists that pause thoughtfully, offer encouraging expressions, and adapt their demeanor to your emotional state, all in real-time.
• Real-time emotion understanding: AI systems that can read subtle emotional cues as they happen, enabling applications like live coaching systems that detect when you’re losing confidence during a presentation, or interview AI that understands not just what candidates say but how they say it.

The team brings exceptional depth: Fangchang Ma and Edward Zhang previously built research teams at Apple, contributing to products like Vision Pro’s Digital Persona system. Their combined expertise in computer graphics, robotics, and machine learning, along with thousands of academic citations, strongly positions them to solve this technically complex challenge.

We’re entering an era where AI interactions will be measured not just by accuracy or speed, but by emotional authenticity. Any interface where humans interact with AI, from customer service and education to entertainment and healthcare, will benefit from emotional intelligence. We believe Nuance Labs is building the infrastructure that will power this next generation of AI experiences.

The uncanny valley stands as a barrier to natural human-AI interaction. Nuance Labs is building a bridge that will enable an entire ecosystem of emotionally intelligent AI applications. We’re thrilled to support their mission to make AI interactions as natural and emotionally rich as human conversation itself.

Excited to bring emotional intelligence to artificial intelligence? Nuance is hiring.

The content here should not be viewed as investment advice, nor does it constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities. Certain statements herein are the opinions and beliefs of Lightspeed; other market participants could take different views.

AI agents and AI-native products are here. These AIs need access to information, critical context that helps them perform at their best. “Garbage in, garbage out” still applies — no matter how intelligent the model, its reasoning is contingent on the availability of fresh, accurate data. In other words, they need search. Application builders are rapidly integrating and embedding search capabilities into a range of AI products – from consumer apps to B2B tools. This is where Exa comes in.

Exa is an applied AI lab training a search engine optimized for AI agents to perfect web search and improve upon the “ten blue links” paradigm that Google defined in the early days of the web. Exa’s goal is to create the world’s most powerful search technology, and unlike Google, they aren’t bound by optimizing for consumer clicks and SEO.

When Lightspeed led Exa’s Series A round last year, agents were only just beginning to take off. Now, they’ve taken over.

Exa has become the leading search engine for AI. For example, AI coding products like Cursor use Exa to retrieve technical documentation to output well-informed, up-to-date code. Today, thousands of developers, AI startups, and enterprises are building on top of the Exa API.

It’s why we’re excited to double down on our investment as part of Exa’s $85M Series B round, led by Peter Fenton at Benchmark Capital, alongside participation from YCombinator and NVIDIA Ventures. Peter served on the board of Elastic, the last major search company built, so we are delighted to see he shares our conviction about this massive opportunity.

Agents are merely large language models paired with appropriate tools. We believe search is one of the two big “killer tools” for agents, along with code execution. With code execution, agents become “Turing complete”, enabling them to write programs on the fly. With search, agents become “information complete” — they can acquire any public information needed to accomplish a task.

While AI models are trained on increasingly vast sums of data, AI models cannot perfectly memorize all the information on the public web, as their recall is unreliable. Further, there’s always a “last mile” of data — private data, alternative data sources, etc. — which will never end up in the training data of these models. For AIs to work with and reason about this data, they require search capabilities.

Exa is strategically positioned to power search for AI. Exa indexes billions of web documents, processes through them all with their custom models, and serves them through a state-of-the-art search and retrieval stack. The quality and craftsmanship of the Exa team is evident through benchmarks, where Exa is best-in-class in terms of relevance and latency.

This incredible performance is no longer limited to AI consumption — Exa now serves human users too via its new product, Websets, an agentic search tool for extracting structured information from the unstructured web. Non-technical users can write a query asking for lists of people, companies, and more (e.g., “US-based startups that have raised over $10M USD focused on longevity healthcare”) and get hundreds of results matching the exact criteria, verified by Exa’s AI agents. Websets has become incredibly popular for recruiting, lead generation, and market research use cases.

But they aren’t stopping there: the Exa team has set out an aggressive product roadmap for the coming years, with the goal of powering every AI app, indexing beyond the public web, and becoming the AI world’s data layer.

We are heading toward a future where AIs search far more than humans, where most search queries actually originate from an AI of some kind rather than a human. We believe this new world will require AI-native search infrastructure to support this new, rapidly growing consumer of the web.

That’s Exa — a single API to get any information from the web, built specifically for AI products. Lightspeed is proud to continue supporting Exa’s vision of perfect search. If you want to work on industry-changing, high-impact, massive-scale challenges, apply here.

The content here should not be viewed as investment advice, nor does it constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities. Certain statements herein are the opinions and beliefs of Lightspeed; other market participants could take different views.

True tipping points in technology are rare. Over the past few decades, we’ve witnessed the rise of software, the internet, the cloud, and mobile, each wave reshaping how companies operate and how people live. The impact has been extraordinary but so too was the noise that surrounded them, as the technologies matured and the true winners emerged.

AI is different. Its potential to transform our lives is even more profound. As the past three years have shown, the pace and intensity of change have been almost relentless. Amid this whirlwind, Anthropic has stood out as a steady force. Their mission is simple yet powerful: to scale intelligence that is both trustworthy and safe. The team’s execution against that vision has been exceptional, and it’s why we’re proud to deepen our partnership with Anthropic in their Series F.

Singular Focus – Clarity in the Chaos

Amid the daily noise in the AI world – Anthropic’s vision has remained simple and clear from the beginning:

1. Scaling Intelligence: Anthropic’s team has been laser-focused on advancing frontier foundation models, driven by the conviction that core model performance, not “application scaffolding”, is the key to unlocking new capabilities. When the world seemingly panicked as DeepSeek launched their models in early 2025, Anthropic stayed disciplined pushing forward on the fundamentals of advancing intelligence.
2. Safety & Reliability: Anthropic’s obsessive focus on safety and reliability is more than good citizenship – it’s their ultimate competitive advantage. At some point we’ll see a “WannaCry moment” in AI, just as the 2017 ransomware attack forced enterprises to take cybersecurity seriously. When it comes, the world will demand the safety and alignment capabilities Anthropic has been building since day one.
3. Enterprise: Anthropic’s enterprise focus flows directly from its priorities on responsibly scaling intelligence so it is both powerful and reliable and safe. Nowhere else is trustworthy intelligence more valuable than in businesses and government institutions. For these stakeholders and institutions safety isn’t theoretical. It’s existential. We believe Anthropic’s mission-driven approach to safety makes them a natural and valuable partner in the enterprise market.

When Focus Meets Opportunity

When a clear strategy meets an opportunity of unprecedented scale, the result is adoption at a speed rarely seen in history. At the start of 2025, fresh off their Series E, Anthropic had already reached run-rate revenue of ~$1B, less than two years after publicly launching their first model. Today, the company has surpassed $5B, making Anthropic the fastest growing technology company ever.

This growth is a direct result of scaling intelligence. Each leap in model capabilities, unlocks new use-cases and opens trillion-dollar markets for innovation. We are now seeing this acceleration across healthcare, legal, financial services, biotech and drug discovery, and nearly every type of knowledge work.

Nowhere is this shift clearer than in software development. Over the past 18 months, Anthropic’s models have gone from simple code completion to more than seven hours of independent, autonomous coding. Claude’s agentic coding product, Claude Code, has grown from research preview to >$500M in run-rate revenue in just three months. Claude Code exemplifies the paradigm shift underway – while apps package existing capabilities, it is core model intelligence that creates new ones. The value is in the model.

Our Partnership: Backing the Future

For over two years, Lightspeed has backed Anthropic’s singular mission through three consecutive investments. We believe they represent the rare combination of incredible ambition, technical excellence, and unwavering commitment to beneficial outcomes.

Anthropic’s talent-dense team understands that intelligence matters more than features, depth more than breadth. Their technology aims to enhance our public institutions, supercharge economic activity across enterprises, and help individuals solve their most complex problems.

As frontier AI advances exponentially, Anthropic is positioned to become one of the most transformational companies of our generation. We’re proud to support them on this journey to scale intelligence for the benefit of all.

The content here should not be viewed as investment advice, nor does it constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities. Certain statements herein are the opinions and beliefs of Lightspeed; other market participants could take different views.