The team at Roble Ventures hopes your 2025 has been off to a great start. Despite the onslaught of developments within and without the tech world, we’re excited by the energy we’re seeing from our founders and partners.
One such partner, Capital Factory, was a fantastic host during our Austin offsite to kick off the year.
The Latest From Our Founders
PORTFOLIO NEWS AND UPDATES
Holly officially launched, and was featured by Route Fifty in a piece lauding the company’s pilot program in Long Beach, California.
Using Holly’s platform to generate job descriptions enhanced by equitable hiring practices and agency-specific requirements, city officials can close workforce gaps and reduce hiring inefficiencies, allowing the public sector to compete with the private sector for top-tier talent.
Holly is looking for partners in state and local governments across the United States.
Remyx co-founder & CEO Salma Mayorquin spoke with Cerebral Valley, the largest in-person community of AI builders, investors, and talent based in San Francisco. They’re currently exploring ways to make their tool multimodal and adaptable to today’s LLM developer needs, effectively turning AI application engineers into the equivalent of high-level architects.
They’re also on the lookout for talent in the MLOps, ML development, or application development department.
Hyperbound has shifted operations from its cofounders’ apartment to a real live office just off South Park! Their team continues to expand, and they’re looking to bring on additional founding account executives, solutions engineers, and fullstack engineers to join them in-person in San Francisco.
Rising Team welcomed three new team members: a seasoned customer success leader, a skilled senior product designer, and a staff software engineer with over two decades of experience (including early days at LinkedIn).
Lens Into a Human-Enabled Future
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP HIGHLIGHTS
Our Principal David recently launched a LinkedIn newsletter examining each layer of the AI value chain. Read the first issue here, and subscribe to get his weekly vibe on the latest news across incumbents, startups, models, and more in the AI space.
This week’s tech vibe: “Everyone is trying to disrupt everyone.”
Sergio was also featured in Stanford GSE’s School’s In podcast, where he discussed how entrepreneurs need to be adaptable in today’s landscape in order to drive lasting change while maneuvering around the “Goliaths” already in their space.
When the U.S. jobs report dropped in January, Sergio broke down the effect of AI on the emergence of new roles and the evolution of hiring practices.
His recommendation: keep developing “AI-proof skills”—such as critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and problem solving—to stay competitive in the job market.
What Keeps Us Up at Night
KEY RISK FACTORS
By Sergio Monsalve
A few weeks ago, a Chinese open-source large language model (LLM) named DeepSeek came in and completely flipped the script on the status quo of AI in the U.S.
Marc Andreessen called it “AI’s Sputnik moment.” Sputnik wasn’t just a satellite launched by the Soviets during the height of the Cold War—its 1957 launch was a wake-up call for the U.S., signaling that the Soviet Union was ahead in the space race. The moment sparked a flurry of innovation, culminating in the American’s triumphant moon landing in 1969.
As a Cold War-era kid, I immediately felt the gravity of the comparison. Just as we couldn’t afford to be outpaced by the Soviets, today we can’t afford to fall behind China in AI innovation. Ultimately, the Sputnik moment made America better, so I love this as an opportunity, not a threat, to do better in AI.
As if to put the U.S. back on the map, the following weeks have seen countless announcements and innovations: OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT Operator and Gov, Google’s rollout of Gemini 2.0 Flash, and Hugging Face’s claims of an “open” version of OpenAI’s deep research tool, to name just a few.
LLMs are rapidly heading toward commoditization. DeepSeek just proved that innovation in the model layer can happen faster—and cheaper—than many expected. But this doesn’t mean AI in the U.S. is dead; it means its real value will emerge in the application layer—in what we can do with the data, not just the data itself. Much of the last 12-18 months has been focused on the compute (or hardware) layer headlined by companies like Nvidia, Broadcom, and AMD, or the hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
But with AI compute getting cheaper and cheaper, these input ingredients for applications to thrive will become more accessible to startups.
Before DeepSeek, many thought that AI applications faced prohibitive costs to develop due to the exceedingly high cost of building and maintaining underlying LLMs and GPUs. It’s clear now that application development costs will decrease over time, but there’s something else missing. The companies that win the AI game won’t just build applications; they’ll have to leverage data in a way that improves decision-making to solve real problems.
This is why we’re so excited to continue supporting entrepreneurs building in the application layer for specific verticals—like Walt AI for realtors, Teachy for educators, and Holly for state & local government hiring. Some of our other portfolio companies, like Remyx, are actively enabling the democratization of AI application development, supercharging today’s developers into tomorrow’s architects.
If you or someone you know is building something cool in this space, we’d love to hear from you. Let’s not just shoot for the moon—let’s plant our flag there.
What Caught Our Attention
NEWS AND RESOURCES
We Tried OpenAI’s New Agent—Here’s What We Found (Every)
OpenAI launches ChatGPT Gov for U.S. government agencies (CNBC)
Navigating AI, inclusion, and early-stage venture capital with Charles Hudson (Driving Alpha Podcast)
How “Venture Capital 3.0” Impacts Founders in the AI Age (NFX)
For more on what caught our attention just in the past week, check out David’s “This Week in AI and Cloud Software”. Read the first edition and subscribe here.
About the author
Roble Ventures is a future-of-work focused fund investing in technologies that enable people, teams, and organizations to achieve their most ambitious work.
