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Should you tip your AI agent? How software pricing is changing in a world of AI services
Capturing part of the value generated for customers has always been a north star in pricing. If customers don’t...
AI phone calling for verticals
Over the past year, AI phone calling has leapt from Hayes Valley hackathon project to remarkable market traction....
2025 Whisper numbers: The era of efficiency is here
Whisper numbers for 2025 signal a new chapter for startups: growth is reaccelerating, but this time with a sharp focus...
Building the next generation of hardware: Why AI-powered engineering tools matter
From hand-drawn sketches and scrapped prototypes to powerful AI-driven simulations at lightning speed, hardware product...
Q324 Flash update: Growth reacceleration holds steady
This quarter’s flash report shows more of the same from last quarter, and the forecast indicates a steady finish for...
AI GTM flash survey: How GTM teams are actually using AI
Over the past few years, excitement surrounding the use of AI in go-to-market (GTM) has reached a fever pitch, with...
Robotic Foundation Models are changing the way we build, buy, and fund robotics
For decades, robotics has captured the imagination of innovators and technologists alike. From Hal 9000 in 2001: A...
Q224 flash report: Growth is trending up
Our flash reports use real data from a representative sample of enterprise software startups and public companies to...
Building trustworthy AI systems: AI Reliability and Security are everyone’s problem
Two years ago it was unclear if AI security and reliability was anyone’s problem. Now, it’s starting to look like...
Insurtech GTM Scorecard: Selling to Brokers
Using technology to improve the insurance experience for brokers, agents, and their clients is complex and challenging....
Where is the growth coming from? A data-driven look into 2024
The theme of 2024 is cautious optimism. With improved ARR growth rates across the board and two consecutive quarters of...
The end of the tech recession?: 2023 ends with first quarter of accelerating growth in two years
Scale’s quarterly Scale Studio Flash Updates use our proprietary data platform, Scale Studio, to analyze a...
Beyond autocomplete: AI-enabled tools are changing what it means to be a developer
Software engineers have effectively been on a path of self-erasure from day one. Once upon a time, they noblely set...
2024 Whisper Numbers: The Year of Efficient Growth
As we kick off the 2024 annual planning season, we’re sharing an early view of what we’re seeing in early-stage...
“Year of efficiency” in review: How companies reduced burn rates in 2023
At the beginning of 2023, we saw CEOs and founders across the board herald the beginning of the year of efficiency....
The bleeding has stopped: Growth ticked up for the first time in 6 quarters
Scale’s quarterly Scale Studio Flash Updates use our proprietary data platform, Scale Studio, to analyze a...
New Ideas in AI: Getting LLMs to Reason Through Chain-of-Thought Prompting
The latest session of our New Ideas in AI Series brought together yet another exciting group of leading engineers,...
The path to innovation in security
In our recently published Security Perspectives Survey, we found that only 48% of enterprise security leaders said that...
Back to the future: Insurtech market is all about brokers and carriers
In 2017, we published our first piece on Insurtech, and opportunities for newcomers to differentiate themselves. We...
Growth ticks down again in Q223: Scale Studio Flash Update
Scale’s quarterly Scale Studio Flash Updates use our proprietary data platform, Scale Studio, to analyze a...
Cybersecurity Perspectives 2023
We’re pleased to share Scale’s annual Cybersecurity Perspectives Survey findings. Every year, we survey hundreds...
New Ideas In AI: Agents, their role, and viability in today’s world
Quick recap and video of the talk from our latest New Ideas in AI dinner series with guest speaker Joon Sung Park, who spoke about Generative Agents.
1,000 Engineering jobs in AI: Introducing Scale’s AI job board
Since 2015, 70%+ of our investing has focused on AI applications and infrastructure. We’re proud to have led early...
Slowdown Mirrors Public Markets: Flash Update Follow-Up
We can clearly see above that public tech companies are seeing similar drop-offs in NDR to private SaaS startups. The...
Growth slows beyond expectations in Q1: Scale Studio Flash Update
Q123 data indicates that the growth slowdown is continuing - and most companies failed to meet even the conservative...
Cognitive Collective: RLHF Is Not a Magic Wand for Alignment
it is nearly impossible to define alignment, let alone achieve it. Human beings, in all their variance, capacity, and...
These misconceptions about vertical software need to fade away
Segment-specific startups frequently outperform their horizontal counterparts and do so with greater efficiency, lower...
Stream processing becomes mainstream
We believe that we are at an inflection point where stream processing will become the standard that powers user-facing...
Growth Slows while Companies Sprint to Efficiency: Scale Studio Flash Update
No one can tell exactly what 2023 will bring, but one thing is for certain: there is a sprint to efficiency with...
Some Thoughts on Annual Planning 2023
Some high-level thoughts about how CFOs of technology companies should be thinking about their annual planning ahead of 2023.
2023 Whisper Numbers: Growth Expected to Continue at Around 2022 Levels
Here's the data we're sharing with our portfolio companies as they develop 2023 annual plans.
Scale Studio Flash Update: Economic Gravity Pulls on Software Startups
With the bulk of 2022 behind us, attention now turns to planning for 2023. The topic of conversation in every boardroom...
Introducing: the Scale Generative AI Index
We are closely following the momentum of these overlapping but distinct trends. And to track our own work and share...
Observations from the Field: The Future of Generative AI
We believe that in this moment of generative AI hype, nothing is more valuable than hearing directly from entrepreneurs...
Building a Team at Scale
Since our inception, Scale Venture Partners has been on a mission to invest in the best entrepreneurs and support them...
Foundation Models Are The New Public Cloud
Over the last few years, building an AI startup used to require “do-it-yourself AI,” which consisted of gathering...
What Comes After Adyen and Stripe? The Future of Payments Orchestration and Optimization
Turns out, phones are quite good payment platforms. This poses a challenge for traditional consumer payments. Debit...
Natural Language Generation
Writing this content is a desk worker’s low-skill labor, demanding little skill but lots of time. (The quality of...
The Opportunity in Usage Based Billing Infrastructure
Though usage-based models are not new—having first been championed by AWS (2005) and Twilio (2008) — there’s been...