Today, its market cap is $46.5B.
I love this because it underscores that especially in the beginning, just simple brute force is often the best and only way to go.
There is no system, no algorithm, no process, etc.
It is not effortless.
In fact, it's all effort.
When we started CB Insights, the first 50,000 financing and M&A transactions were done by hand in a giant spreadsheet.
It was just manually copy/pasting data about transactions from various sources into rows & columns.
We could have waited to find an engineer who could automate that or we could just get going.
And the reality was that those 50,000 rows served as invaluable training data for the eventual machine learning algorithms we built to automate our data extraction efforts.
Sometimes, you gotta “embrace the suck.”
Separately, if you’re curious where Y Combinator is investing today, we got you here.
On the road
AI FOMO is real.
Enterprises are racing to overhaul their infrastructure to support the deployment and management of genAI models.
They are increasingly turning to AI development platforms for their AI needs — from data preparation, training, and validation to model deployment and continuous monitoring.
We spoke with 50+ buyers of these platforms — like Databricks, Hugging Face, and Scale AI — to understand:
- How they’re deploying AI models
- What they’re paying
- What the future holds for the landscape
Explore our findings in our Enterprise AI Roadmap report.
