Congrats to @zainasgar & the @gimletlabs team on their $300M Series B! 🎉

Every AI product runs on infrastructure. As AI gets more powerful & adoption grows, demand grows exponentially. Gimlet's infrastructure gets more out of existing hardware, serving massive volumes of AI at a fractiproud to partner with @zainasgar, Michelle Nguyen, @oazizi, @nserrino & James Bartlett. Watch @jai_das sit down with Zain to discuss Gimlet's journey. 🎥

Behind every funding round is a belief in the people the product serves.

@SapphireVC has now backed Tractian twice, most recently in the round that made us a unicorn. So we asked @aranum what keeps him excited about what we’re building.

We’ll let him explain.

Thank you to @Inc for naming us to the Founder-Friendly Investors list for the 6th year running!

Our approach hasn’t changed: be a true partner to the founders & CEOs we back, & earn their trust over the long haul.

Thank you to our portfolio founders & CEOs for letting us be part of youre full 2026 list: lnkd.in/ghgKbHwK

Disclaimer: “Founder-Friendly Investor List Inc. Magazine”, October 2026. Sapphire paid compensation to participate in the third-party analysis; Sapphire played no role in the compilation of the third-party analysis. The full extent of the scope of firms and data included in the related surveys or evaluations is unknown.

Congratulations to @igmarinelli & the @tractian team on the $130M Series D! 🎉

We’re proud to lead the latest round, deepening our partnership with Tractian as they work to eliminate unplanned downtime across industries.

As the AI boom drives new demand for data centers, theycritical industry, helping to keep them running - because downtime isn’t an option.

Read more from @aranum, Demi Obayomi, & Michael Hsu: sapphireventures.com/blog/sapphire-…

AI has changed what counts as real product-market fit, & it's forcing a rethink of the SaaS playbook that built the last decade. Two Sapphires are taking the stage at @TechCrunch Disrupt next week with plenty to say about the shift underway.

On Tue, @rajeevdham joins Anu Bhar& @rahulvohra (@Superhuman) for "PMF Red Flags: How to Tell If You Really Have It" moderated by @DominicMadori.

On Thu, @cgao joins @aaronej (@NEA) & @BarrMoses_MC (@montecarlo_ai) for "Rewriting SaaS: Why AI Breaks the Old Business Model" moderated by @RebeccaBellan.

If you're in SF for Disrupt, add both to your agenda: techcrunch.com/events/techcru…

Congratulations to @reactorworld! 🎉

We're proud to join the company’s expanded Series A as a strategic investor alongside @nvidia.

We’re excited to partner with @taiuti, @_bschmidtchen, & the Reactor team as they set the standard for real-time world model infrastructure.

Re@aranum, @jai_das, Adam Liu, & Jasmine Yang: sapphireventures.com/blog/sapphire-…

Congratulations to @mati, @dabkowski_piotr, & the entire @ElevenLabs team on their $300M tender offer & $22B valuation! 🎉

From a $9M valuation at founding in 2022 to $22B today, doubling since this past February, ElevenLabs has moved beyond single-purpose voice generation into a full ponversation, with enterprise leaders already putting it to work at scale.

We're proud to partner with @elevenlabsio. Here's to what's next!

🔗 lnkd.in/gzVjBPnN

Congratulations to @minnasong & the @elise_ai team on the $350M round at a $4B valuation! 🎉

Since first partnering with EliseAI in 2024, we have been committed to supporting their mission to transform industries crucial to sustaining our lives.

In just a couple of years, Minnutionized leasing & resident communications in housing, & are now also reshaping patient scheduling & care coordination in healthcare.

Learn more: eliseai.com/blog/intellige…

Robots have been "two years away" for 20 years. That's finally changing. For the first time, the ingredients for commercial-scale physical AI coexist:

🔹 AI models that can reason & act in the physical world
🔹 Hardware costs down an order of magnitude
🔹 Real demand from labor shorconstruction & healthcare

@adamdliu, Adrian Kania, Lou Segall & Jake Randall mapped the entire Physical AI landscape across 6 layers.

🔗 sapphireventures.com/blog/physical-…

The gap between durable companies & short-lived hype is widening fast, & when every startup claims to be AI-native, telling the two apart gets a lot harder.

@jai_das@jai_dasing to @HumanXCo Amsterdam to dig into exactly that. He'll be joined by @vidiborvc (@atomico@atomicohemusic panel, The AI Investment Reality Check, moderated by @romaindillet.

📅 Wed 9/23, Main Stage Panel: 15:40–16:00 CEST

Building strong, meaningful relationships with founders has always been at the root of venture. It's something @aranum hasn't lost sight of in his 14 years at @SapphireVC. His take on AI, what it means to show up for founders, & advice for those building today:

🔗 Read the full featFuture Nexus: heyfuturenexus.com/posts/scaling-…

The model layer is going plural. Intelligence is becoming cheaper, more abundant, & more interchangeable, & it's the throughline of our Summer 2026 Spotlight Newsletter.

Here's what we've been up to this quarter…

🚀 New investments in @harvey,@harveytl@gimletlabsen@basetenidiscovery, + follow-ons in @BlockdaemonHQ, @clay, @cyera_io, @HuntressLabs, & @mercury.

🎉 Congrats to @BioCatch (joining Visa), @contentful (joining salesforce), @dremio (joining SAP), & @MirantisIT (joining IREN) on their next chapters.

💡 Fresh takes on AI x drug development, AI x design, & physical AI's breakthrough moment from @CGao, @rajeevdham & the team.

📢 @CGao on @BloombergTV, @Jai_Das on The Room Podcast, & @aranum in @crunchbase on the open-weight debate, agent trust, & what separates winning AI startups.

🎤 Our partners took the stage at Startup Grind, Web Summit, RAISE Summit, & Step SF.

📩 Read the full issue + subscribe here: linkedin.com/pulse/cheaper-…

A big congrats to @SamarAtTemporal & the @temporalio team on the $550M Series E! 👏

We partnered with Temporal at the Series D, when AI agents were becoming more capable, but the infrastructure to make them reliable in production didn't yet exist.

Six months later, agents are runnoperations, & Temporal's durable execution layer keeps that work running no matter what breaks.

We are proud to continue our partnership with Temporal. Read more about why we first invested: sapphireventures.com/blog/the-backb…

Congratulations to @kareemamin, @vxanand, & the @clay_gtm team on the $115M funding round! 👏🎉

Over the past year, Clay has built out AI agents that can find ideal customers, monitor buying signals, & run outreach on their own, learning + improving with every use.

We're proud to contieem, Varun, and the entire Clay team as they build the next generation of agentic sales tools.

🔗 clay.com/blog/series-d

Huge congratulations to @winstonweinberg, @gabepereyra, & the @harvey team on the $550M funding round at a $15.5B valuation! 👏👏👏

Legal is one of the industries where AI is already delivering real, measurable value - work that's language-intensive, expensive, & full of repeatabd to AI.

With 75% of Am Law 100 law firms already using Harvey alongside many of the world’s leading in-house teams, we are thrilled to partner as the team transforms how legal & professional services operate with the power of AI.

🔗 harvey.ai/blog/harvey-ra…

Why are some of the best, most interesting companies hiding in plain sight?

The friction that makes them unattractive to most founders is exactly what makes them defensible.

@cgao & @adityareddy97 dig into this discussing:

🔹 Why you should never size a vertical AI market by whattware.
🔹 Why the most operationally complex markets are actually the best ones to build in (this is your moat against competitors and the frontier labs).
🔹 How vertical AI companies that start with one narrow use case end up owning an entire customer's budget over time.

For more on the topic, check out the blog by Cathy & Adi: sapphireventures.com/blog/the-bigge…