Bain Capital Ventures

Yesterday we opened our first Wonder location in Staten Island—our 35th and final opening of the year. What makes this opening extra special for me is the coincidence that it’s just minutes from where I grew up. To see Wonder come full circle like this is so exciting.  Staten Island, welcome to the Wonder family!

Eric Newcomer got a look inside our LP meeting presentation from September. We covered our Industrial thesis and (you guessed it!) AI, with content from Enrique Salem, Ajay Agarwal, Aaref Hilaly, Slater Stich, Rak Garg and many more not featured in this deck snippet. Read on!

From our booth, to happy hour with E14 Fund, to Cafe Compute with Greylock and SF Compute, it's been a packed house at #NeurIPS24. Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth to discuss how we can work together to move the frontier of ML forward!

We are thrilled to be doubling down on our seed investment in Cofactr by leading the $17.2M Series A. Cofactr has built the first modern end-to-end procurement and supply chain solution for electronic components. Leading companies, both large and small, in industries such as aerospace, defense, and automotive have implemented Cofactr to accelerate product development cycles while reducing cost. We love working with cofounders Matthew Haber and Phillip Gulley and excited for the significant growth ahead! Bain Capital Ventures

Hiring is hard. A we approach the end of the year, it’s easy to think about change. Seasons change. Goals change. But even after years and years of change, hiring is still just plain hard. There’s a reason - if you want a team of great people, those people are hard to get. Properly assessing for “great” is hard to do. And as a startup founder or leader, devoting the amount of time needed to hire “right” seems impossible. In an effort to embrace the cringe, I put together a few unfiltered thoughts on the hard things actually worth doing when you’re building your team. https://lnkd.in/gbC7xBpM

Welcome back @antirez Salvatore Sanfilippo! I'm very excited to have you back working on Redis and helping lead the future of Redis @Redisinc https://lnkd.in/g3UCmmGd

🚀Day 3 of Shipmas, and OpenAI's Sora has landed with a bang— quite literally, as their servers struggle to keep up with demand. Sora’s text-to-video capabilities are undeniably impressive: Pro users can churn out 500 videos up to 20s long, at 1080p, watermark-free, armed with tools like storyboards, photo-to-video transformations, remixes, and blending. The hype is real, but this isn’t just about Sora. This is about the tsunami that’s coming. 🌊 OpenAI may hold the spotlight right now, but this is a global arms race. Runway, Luma AI, Kuaishou Technology's Kling, MiniMax's Hailuo AI, Tencent's Hunyuan Video are all pushing the boundaries of what's possible. Many people are passionate about one model over another. I think this leaderboard will be constantly shifting and the only thing that's certain is that the Visual AI genie is out of the bottle. 🧞♀️ Here’s how I see the transformation unfolding: 1️⃣ Experimental: We’re in Phase 1 now. Creators animating memes, TikTok experiments, and Instagram reels—playground stuff. 2️⃣ Cost Rationalization: Soon, enterprises will start slashing production costs. I talked to a VFX studio who shared that their team for a major motion picture project recently shrank from 200 to just 6. AI will lower the need for editors, stunt doubles, sound designers, physical set staff (camera, lighting), costume designers etc. 3️⃣ Democratization: Hollywood-grade capabilities in the hands of anyone with a laptop and a dream. The barrier between ideation and execution will disappear. 4️⃣ Real-Time Customization: Hyper-personalized video UX—ads, experiences, and content tailored to individuals in real time. Video and voice becomes the predominant interface. We’re not inching toward transformation; we’re sprinting. The implications for the $250B film and TV industry and $190B gaming industry are profound. Entire value chains will be rewritten. Entire industries will be reshaped. The world is going to look remarkably different in a decade. 🌎

"No one is immune." Enrique Salem of Bain Capital Ventures says he sees an opportunity for AI to be better utilized in defense against ransomware and cyber attacks https://trib.al/GORimjC

2025 will be a breakout year for enterprise AI. Models advance; agents get widely deployed; experiments move to production; customers feel a wow-factor from what companies can do with software. All that -- and M&A will get a lot more interesting!  #BigIdeas2025

🔮 Looking ahead into 2025, it's crucial for #CISOs and security teams to acknowledge we're entering an era of solution consolidation and fresh thinking at the C-Suite level, not patch-working & feature-chasing. ℹ️ BCV's Enrique Salem, Saanya Ojha & Rak Garg provide a high-level overview of the expanding #cybersecurity threat landscape & highlight a few of our portcos actively working to defend it from humans and machines. 📰 https://lnkd.in/e95J6f_s