Everyone's In San Francisco

All Roads Lead To San Francisco

One of our growth members & founders flew out this month to shoot a new series we're calling Founder Stories. Jordan Zietz got filmed straight out of his office running LemonLime, automated sales and marketing for small businesses that don't have the time to do it themselves. Ian Naccarella, Eric Riesel and Yankang Yang from 83 Sciences did theirs the same week, three Stanford, MIT and Harvard trained researchers mining decades of unpublished lab data for materials breakthroughs. Ryan Xue's team at Andco, who build the agents that pull medical records for personal injury law firms, filmed a day in the life out of the house they're all living in together while they build. We've always built for Silicon Valley startups but this month meant getting on planes, coordinating shoots and bringing the stories of the founders we work with to life.

Internal Hackathon

It started as a throwaway line in our slack, an internal hackathon where the only rule is build something that helps other Lyra devs, sold on the fact that Hypixel SkyBlock, the game millions of people have played, started life as an internal game jam. Anh didn't let it stay a throwaway line. By the end of the month the first Lyra internal hackathon was locked in, a full weekend, $1,000 for the winner, and judging from Eoin and Xavier, who run engineering at Paraform and ReadMe day to day, plus Alfie. Nobody's promising the next SkyBlock out of a weekend at Lyra, but there's already a small robotic arm sitting on a desk that someone built while testing ideas, so we like our odds.

Lyra Capital Keeps Growing

Combined portfolio valuation just passed $1B, and the roster now runs from Paraform all the way through to Atomarine, who are building floating nuclear powered data centers at sea. This month's newest check went to Prodigy Research, two brothers out of Berkeley, Michael and Yuhua Wang, who walked away from seven figure jobs at Jane Street, Google DeepMind, Salesforce and Apple to build an AI trading lab. Keep track of our journey here: https://lyracap.vc/

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Welcome

Chethin Weerakkody joined this month off the back of a strong interview and startup experience at papersetter.io, with hands on work building on open source models like GLM 5.3.

Adam Baqaie joined a little after, straight off an internship at Atlassian and work on Vettd, an SDR as a service startup.