Essence Venture Capital

A big thank you to Zack Li, Ian Macartney, Paras Jain, Loic LE FEUVRE, Jay Chia and ComfyAnonymous for sharing their latest product developments at our Multimodal AI Conference yesterday 🙏 We had a great audience and appreciated all of the engaging questions during the Q&A Panel hosted by Timothy Chen! For those you couldn't attend or had to jump out early, the full recording is available on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gTpupyA8 Nexa AI Convex Genmo Rosebud AI Eventual Comfy Org #multimodal #llm #ai #data #infra #comfyui #aitown #daft #oss #evaluation #inference #ml

Today is the day! Our virtual conference on Multimodal AI goes live in 1 hour ⏰ Join us live and learn something new from our stellar lineup: - Ian Macartney of AI Town & Convex - Jay Chia of Eventual - ComfyAnonymous of ComfyUI - Paras Jain of Genmo - Zack Li of Nexa AI - Loic LE FEUVRE of Rosebud AI + Timothy Chen of Essence Venture Capital will host an open Q&A panel with our speakers to answer audience questions and share predictions on the future of #multimodal #ai. See you there! https://lu.ma/jrs0o8yc

📣 Tomorrow is our Multimodal AI Virtual Conference  📣 Nexa AI CTO and Cofounder, Zack Li, will join us live to share a deep dive of: -> Nexa's Octopus models -> Nexa's Coral SDK -> Nexa's Octoverse product -> Opportunities to join their team Nexa AI develops energy-efficient and multimodal lightweight LLMs for building AI Agents both on device and cloud. Nexa AI's Octopus-V2 model boasts significant performance improvements over RAG plus open-sourced LLM solution, achieving 35 times faster inference speed and 70 times more energy efficiency. + Timothy Chen will host an open Q&A panel with our lineup of technical founders & leaders to talk through the most exciting trends they're seeing across #multimodal #LLMs and the greater #AI #startup #ecosystem. Check out the rest of our speaker lineup and RSVP at https://lu.ma/jrs0o8yc

In just 2 days, Rosebud AI's Head of Engineering, Loic LE FEUVRE, will present at our Multimodal AI Virtual Conference. Rosebud AI is building the AI Roblox. They make it dramatically easier to craft the game of your dreams by going from text description to code to game. Loic will share what they've built and more importantly how they built it, focusing on what it takes to harness the power of LLMs and make it available to Rosebud��s users (evaluations, tests and experiments, prompt engineering). Essence GP, Timothy Chen will also lead an open Q&A panel with our entire speaker line-up on the future of multimodal LLMs 🧠 Check out the rest of our lineup & RSVP -> https://lu.ma/jrs0o8yc If you'd like to play an AI generated game, Trench Run is a personal favorite 🕹 https://lnkd.in/gjWWdc_p #llms #multimodal #ai #gaming #startup #engineering #developers #ml

🚀 We're gearing up for our Multimodal AI virtual conference this Thursday 🚀 We have a great line-up of technical leaders building multi modal LLMs (or building cool things on top of them), including Paras Jain, the co-founder and CEO of Genmo. Video is one of the most powerful mediums of communication. Genmo is a fundamental research lab dedicated to advancing the frontier of video generation. https://lnkd.in/gaCgT_Hp Join us live to hear Paras discuss key challenges and innovations towards high fidelity video generation from text. Our very own Timothy Chen will also lead an open Q&A panel with our entire speaker line-up on the future of multimodal LLMs 🧠 RSVP: https://lu.ma/jrs0o8yc

⏰ ⏰ Less than one week from our Multimodal AI virtual conference ⏰ ⏰ Curious how you can utilize AI beyond text generation? Meet the startups disrupting gaming, video, graphics, audio and more: -> Genmo, presented by Cofounder & CEO Paras Jain -> Nexa AI, presented by Cofounder & CTO Zack Li -> Bland AI, presented by Cofounder & CEO Isaiah N. Granet -> Rosebud AI, presented by Head of Engineering Loic LE FEUVRE -> AI Town (a Convex project), presented by Product Engineer Ian Macartney -> ComfyUI, presented by author & maintainer ComfyAnon

🚨 Only 1 week out from our Multimodal Virtual Conference 🚨 Today we are featuring the most mysterious speaker in our lineup, comfyanonymous. comfyanonymous is the author and maintainer of #ComfyUI, the most powerful and modular stable diffusion GUI, api and backend with a graph/nodes interface. He's also the co-founder of comfy.org, the team dedicated to advancing and #democratizing #visual #AI access through open source tooling. They work with OSS model builders (see Comfy's recent support for SD3), and organize community efforts to efficiently build OSS tooling for all. To learn more, RSVP: https://lu.ma/jrs0o8yc

We are excited to announce a major milestone today: The release of open-source 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝟭.𝟬, Early access to 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗖𝗹𝗼𝘂𝗱, And our $𝟳𝗺 𝗦𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝗥𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱, led by Redpoint, supported by Essence Venture Capital and firstminute capital https://lnkd.in/emXSMJ9T We go over each of those points in detail in our blog post: https://lnkd.in/euDxqer4 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝟭.𝟬 (https://restate.dev/) is the latest version of our 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗳𝗹𝗼𝘄𝘀-𝗮𝘀-𝗖𝗼𝗱𝗲 / 𝗗𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗘𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺: Low latency, lightweight single binary (Rust), serverless compatible. Easily self-hostable, no dependencies, great local dev ex. It is amazing. Restate takes durable execution far beyond workflows, to make also RPC handlers, event handlers, and services reliably. It adds state management (virtual objects), reliable communication between, and durable promises/futures. https://lnkd.in/ewsZtdhg 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗖𝗹𝗼𝘂𝗱 (https://cloud.restate.dev) is a way to use Restate without running the server yourself. Especially if you want to work with FaaS, you probably like a serverless runtime as well. You sign up for the free tier in just a few clicks: https://lnkd.in/eQY3z3jW Building a technology like Restate is hard and takes time. So we are excited to share that we 𝗰𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗮 $𝟳𝗠 𝗦𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝗥𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 and have great investors supporting us on this journey, like Erica Brescia and Jordan Segall from Redpoint, Timothy Chen from Essence Venture Capital and Sam Endacott and Lorcan Delaney from firstminute capital. Finally, this is the work or an absolutely amazing team of people. Each and every one outstanding. This is really your achievement. And a big thank you to everyone who tried out the bleeding edge versions and helped us mature Restate. This wouldn't have been possible without you! ❤️

In the days leading up to our #Multimodal #Virtual #Conference we'll be taking a moment to feature each speaker and their work individually. Today we'd like to shine the spotlight on AI Town: an open-source virtual town where #AI characters live, chat, and socialize 🌎 It was developed by Product Engineer Ian Macartney at Convex in collaboration with Andreessen Horowitz. AI Town is inspired by Stanford University's research paper on #Generative #Agents. This open-source project aims to democratize the creation of simulated environments with AI agents. AI Town provides a customizable and extensible platform supporting shared global states, transactions, and a simulation engine, suitable for projects ranging from simple experiments to scalable, multi-player games. Join us live on Thursday, June 20th, to learn more about how Ian developed AI Town + meet the minds behind ComfyUI, Genmo, Nexa AI, Rosebud AI & Bland AI. RSVP: https://lu.ma/jrs0o8yc

Looking forward to tonight's VC Panel with Sarah Catanzaro of Amplify Partners, Cassie Miao & Jonathan Frankle of Databricks and our very own, Timothy Chen. If you're in town, join us in the main room of the The Moscone Center 👋 Mosaicx San Francisco, part of Data + AI Summit by Databricks: https://lnkd.in/gEq2HbTe