Person
Venture capitalist and founder of Khosla Ventures, a prominent investor in technology and AI startups; co-founded Sun Microsystems.
Benchmark's partners told TechCrunch Disrupt that AI is straining venture capital's rule against backing direct rivals. Founders with board observers or investors in rival startups now have reason to decide what each of them can see.
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Vinod Khosla is backing Wajo, a personal-agent startup claiming 10x growth since its late-September launch, on the view that trust decides the category. Wajo's own list of safeguards mixes features that work today with ones it has only announced, so the trust case has to be checked one feature at a time.
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Factory CEO Matan Grinberg says he fired advisor Chris Degnan, who two hours later announced he is chief revenue officer at $48 billion rival Cognition. Founders whose investors also back their rivals carry the same exposure on their own boards.
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Vinod Khosla publicly sided with Cognition against Factory AI, which his firm helped fund in a $200 million round last month. For founders who share investors with a rival, the episode argues for writing observer access and investor conflicts into the contract.
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Factory CEO Matan Grinberg says board observer Chris Degnan passed confidential information to Cognition, the $48 billion rival that made him revenue chief. Degnan denies it, and the accounts published so far do not establish that anything changed hands.
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Factory CEO Matan Grinberg says he terminated board observer Chris Degnan for weeks of talks with Cognition, the $48 billion rival hiring him as revenue chief. Degnan and Cognition deny wrongdoing, so the fight turns on when an observer owes a board notice of talks with a rival.
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The JAMA Perspective says human review can degrade quality once a system beats unaided doctors. The cited evidence is almost entirely simulated, and none of it tests physician-plus-AI.
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Mazama Energy has $135 million to push a well at Oregon's Newberry site toward rock at 750F. The technology's first outside test is a generation demonstration at 15 megawatts per well, and the company is still seeking certification of the 10 gigawatt claim on the site.
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Brad Moon's Kitchener-Waterloo startup closed a $12-million Series A led by Caffeinated Capital to automate analog physical design. The bet is that a foundry-calibrated physics environment can manufacture the layout data chipmakers keep secret.
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The Swedish company's headset beat a sham device on remission at 10 weeks in a 174-person trial. In the US it is prescription-only and cash-pay, at $2,200 for the first course and $325 a month after that.
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Their JAMA review reads two years of literature and puts autonomous AI ahead of physician-AI hybrids by 2030, while the AMA's chief executive says some of those studies are simulations that do not all point that way.
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Sources cited by TechCrunch say the 44-person lab is in talks at a $6 billion pre-money valuation, weeks after closing at $2.3 billion. That is a 2.6x step-up, and more than 3x pre-to-pre.
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Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger's record bid is being read by outside analysts as a non-passive shield against carried interest. The pricing logic may sit in the tax code.
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