🌐 The front door is open
Here's something that stopped us mid-scroll this week. When Meta built its personal agent, Muse, it modeled it on OpenClaw, an open-source agent. And a couple of weeks ago, Meta released an open-weight model built for coding and agent tasks.
Think about that for a second. One of the biggest companies in tech is borrowing from the open-source crowd, not the other way around.
So here's our hunch for this issue: open source isn't the side door to the agent economy anymore. It's the front door.
🔭 The big picture: agents adopt what they can read
Last week we said the next fight would be over the layers between infrastructure and apps. This week gave us a clue about how that fight gets won. Spoiler: it happens in public.
Agents pick tools they can understand. A coding agent can read open code, try it out, and wire it in. No sales call, no demo request, no waiting for a reply.
Open source is a discovery engine. Asymptote Labs, which raised a seed round last week, says an investor first found it through its open-source project, Beacon. Their code did the pitching for them.
The playbook is "open first, hosted next." Give developers something they can run themselves, earn their trust, then offer the version that saves them time.
Our read: in the agent era, distribution starts on GitHub, not in a sales deck. And honestly? We love that. It means the best builders get found.
🚀 Startup Spotlight: InsForge
Giving every AI agent its own computer
If you've ever left a coding agent running overnight on your laptop, you know the pain. The fan screams, everything else crawls, and the moment you close the lid, the agent stops.
The InsForge team felt that pain too. They started out building an open-source backend for AI coding agents, and kept watching those agents get stuck on people's laptops and Mac minis.
So on October 14, they launched InstaBox: cloud computers made for AI agents.
It's fast. A machine spins up in under a second.
The agent can actually use it. There's a desktop and browser the agent can drive on its own.
Nothing gets lost. Files and setup stick around between sessions, and you can snapshot a setup to copy it.
Here's the part that made us smile: two weeks after launch, InstaBox is already serving more than 80,000 VM hours a day, and access is still invite-only. Give it a try : Here
Curious about the companies in our portfolio? Drop a note to [email protected] and we'll share more.
📡 Signal vs. noise
A few other things we couldn't stop talking about this week:
Upwind raised a $400M Series C at $3.8B to protect cloud and AI infrastructure. If you're keeping score, AI security checks just keep getting bigger.
Infisical, the open-source secrets manager, raised a $40M Series B at $600M. It's "open first, hosted next" playing out in real life.
Hyperbolic raised $30M to connect scattered AI cloud providers. When compute is hard to find, whoever helps you find it wins.
Hyphenate raised a $45M Series A to bring AI agents into the CFO's office. Agents are officially working their way up the org chart.
🔁 Remember Nscale?
Last week we told you Microsoft walked away from Nscale's Essex data center. Well, Nscale isn't slowing down. It's still aiming for an IPO of roughly $30B, even though some investors think $16B–$19B is more like it. We'll keep watching.
🔢 One number: $75B
That's roughly what IPO watchers think Anthropic could raise after filing its public S-1 on October 26. However you feel about the AI boom, the public markets are about to put a price on it.
🤔 Contrarian corner: your next customer won't read your landing page
We know, it sounds a little dramatic. But hear us out.
More and more, the first "visitor" checking out a developer tool isn't a person. It's a coding agent deciding what to install. And that agent never sees your beautiful hero image. It goes straight to your docs and README.
InsForge actually put a note on its homepage written just for AI agents, telling them where to start. We think more teams will do the same. In the agent era, your docs are your product page.
Quick story: last year, we sorted through 500 startup demos. (Yes, five hundred.) This November, top 20 takes the stage in San Francisco.
It's presented by Open Source for AI, in partnership with Gravitational Ventures and AWS, and it's built for people working in tech full time. We'd love to see you there.
💬 Your Turn
For founders: what's one open-source tool your agents can't live without?
For investors: curious about the companies in our portfolio and how we think about investing? Just reply. We're always happy to chat.
Know someone who'd enjoy this? Send it their way.
Interested in exploring our investment portfolio? Feel free to send an email to [email protected] for more information!