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Co-Founder and Managing Director at Massive Capital Partners.
15 years on the…
15 years on the…
Articles by Ari
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Ari N. shared thisThe speed of innovation at Operant AI is incredible. Major new release in AI security. Congrats! What a team. 💪Ari N. shared thisToday we are proud to announce Operant's newest addition to our AI Runtime Defense Platform: Operant Semantic Firewall. Agentic AI has collapsed the time between decision and action. A security layer now has to decide in the same instant the agent acts — fast enough to sit in the live path without slowing it down, and decisive enough to stop a harmful action before it executes, not flag it after. The Operant Semantic Firewall detects the actual intent behind every prompt, tool call, command, and data movement in real-time and returns an allow, block, or redact decision as the agent acts — giving enterprises their first enforceable real-time control over the entire agent loop. While the term "AI Firewall" has been thrown around recently, Operant's Semantic Firewall is a fundamentally different and more powerful beast. It is the first product that understands an AI agent's intent in real-time and enforces it inline — stopping a malicious action, a jailbreak, or a data breach, while allowing the rest of the AI stack to continue functioning as intended. Operant Semantic Firewall isn't just marketing speak or "on the road map," it is available *now*. Book yourself a live demo to see the power in action for yourself here: https://lnkd.in/gwTm9KN6 Big thanks to our whole team and customers and partners who have participated in bringing this next level solution to life! #SecureYourAI #Cybersecurity #AISecurity #AIFirewall #SemanticFirewall
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Ari N. reposted thisAri N. reposted thisThis week on Massive Signals: Liz Dennett, PhD on building Endolith during mining's inflection point. Endolith uses microbes to pull more copper out of ore the industry has already mined. But one of the sharpest things Liz said had nothing to do with copper, it was about who she let onto her cap table. When she picked her Series A lead, half a dozen investors reached out to ask why. The firm was known for national security, not mining. She had one rule for choosing people: she wanted the ones who'd tell her hard truths without making it about their own ego. She went with the caliber of the people over the label on the fund. Within a year, it was clear she had picked the right partner to grow Endolith. At Massive, we have been big believers in what Liz is building at Endolith and hearing about Liz’s journey of learning what to say yes to and learning how to say no is something every founder should hear. Full episode linked below.
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Ari N. shared thisCongrats Kevin Noertker - super exciting next phase ahead. Time to fly 🛫Ari N. shared thisAmpaire has closed a $19 million Series B financing led by DiamondStream Partners, with strategic participation from Alaska Airlines and International Airlines Group (IAG). The financing brings Ampaire’s total funding to $68 million, including approximately $25 million in non-dilutive grants and contracts. More importantly, it gives us additional resources to turn flight-proven hybrid-electric technology into commercialized products and scaled operations. This capital will help Ampaire: - Expand commercial route operations under the FAA eIPP program - Produce additional Eco Caravan aircraft - Advance certification of the AMP-H570 and Eco Caravan - Grow our engineering and operational teams - Strengthen our supply chain, manufacturing and aftermarket capabilities Ampaire’s hybrid-electric fleet has now flown more than 38,000 hybrid-electric miles. In flight testing, the Eco Caravan has consistently demonstrated approximately 54-57% lower total fuel burn than the legacy turboprop configuration, including the fuel used to recharge its batteries. We’re grateful to DiamondStream Partners for leading the round; to Alaska Airlines Alaska Star Ventures and IAGi Ventures for their strategic validation; and to The Pay It Forward Company, Massive VC, Techstars Ventures, Autodesk Foundation Impact Fund, Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI) Impact Fund, Elemental Impact, Venn10 Capital, LP, Gaingels, Exitfund, Sand Hill Angels, Climate Capital and the other investors supporting our next phase. Hybrid-electric aviation is moving from demonstrated technology into commercialization and scaled operations. Let's Fly! Read the full announcement: [https://lnkd.in/gaKB_kcr] #HybridElectric #Aviation #AdvancedAirMobility
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Ari N. shared thisThis week on Massive Signals, we spoke with Leo Polovets, General Partner, Humba Ventures; Co-Founder & Partner Emeritus, Susa Ventures. Leo is an experienced investor with a strong track record who moved from deep engineering into venture. He thinks about startups the way a software architect thinks about systems: as bundles of risk to be de-risked methodically. That lens is why founders trust him and why his portfolio conversion rates are exceptional. David Mandell and I went deep on how he built a fund focused on physical, hard-tech problems many of today's investors avoid. Link in comments
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Ari N. shared thisThis is a super simple explainer for anyone curious about energy, solar, or what our portfolio company, Exowatt, is building to provide the power we need from the sun!Ari N. shared this“To power America with solar, we’d have to cover the entire country in panels.” It’s one of the most common myths in energy. In the first episode of Exowatt Explains, our CEO and Co-Founder Hannan H. walks through what the math actually says when it comes to land requirements. The constraint isn’t how much land we have. It’s where and how we build. #CleanEnergy #AIInfrastructure #FrontierLand
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Ari N. reposted this🎙️ What does "dual use" actually mean? It's one of the most overused—and misunderstood—terms in venture today. J2 Ventures Co-Founder and Managing Partner Jonathan Bronson joined David Mandell and the Massive Signals podcast to discuss what "dual use" really means, why government funding isn't the same as product-market fit, and how J2 invests at the intersection of deep tech and national security. Whether you're a founder, investor, or just fascinated by the future of frontier technology, this episode is packed with insights you won't want to miss. 🎧 Give it a listen: https://lnkd.in/dnAMzCKyAri N. reposted thisThis week on Massive Signals: Jonathan Bronson, co-founder of J2 Ventures, on investing at the intersection of deep tech and national security. Jon's read on founders is shaped by his own path: PhD chemist turned investor, paired with a former military intelligence officer, Alexander Harstrick, as a co-founder. That combination shows up in how he judges people, not just technology. One test case: a founder who called to say he was shelving a product doing $1M a year to rebuild it from the ground up. Jon's first instinct was to say no. The founder pushed back… And was right. We get into what changed his mind, and what it says about backing conviction over sunk progress... ...and more on the signals around key inflection points in market-leading deep tech companies. Full episode linked below.
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Ari N. reposted thisAri N. reposted thisThis week on Massive Signals: Jonathan Bronson, co-founder of J2 Ventures, on investing at the intersection of deep tech and national security. Jon's read on founders is shaped by his own path: PhD chemist turned investor, paired with a former military intelligence officer, Alexander Harstrick, as a co-founder. That combination shows up in how he judges people, not just technology. One test case: a founder who called to say he was shelving a product doing $1M a year to rebuild it from the ground up. Jon's first instinct was to say no. The founder pushed back… And was right. We get into what changed his mind, and what it says about backing conviction over sunk progress... ...and more on the signals around key inflection points in market-leading deep tech companies. Full episode linked below.
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Ari N. shared thisScott Davis is one of the best minds in #quantum today and this conversation was an absolute eye-opener on what is happening in the industry. Excited to be able to share this! Let us know what you think and if you have any unanswered Quantum questions after listening.Ari N. shared thisNew episode of Massive Signals out now. On this episode, Ari N. and I spoke with Scott Davis, CEO of Vescent, one of the leading suppliers of precision optical clocks, frequency combs, advanced laser systems, and control electronics that underpin quantum computing, timing, networking, and sensing. Scott has a very transparent discusses about how close we actually are to a “Q-Day” that could break modern encryption, and why GPS may be the more urgent vulnerability. We also get into what it actually took to move Vescent from a garage project into full-scale production, and why Colorado quietly became the country’s only place-based quantum tech hub. Take a listen. Link in comments.
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Ari N. shared thisIs this an example of AI going too far? Imagine what becomes of a company using AI agents for interviews. What does it say about the culture, the hiring manager, the work experience? Would you want to work there? Will your boss or colleagues even be human? Imagine a founder has to talk to an agent like this at a venture firm vs an investor? Would you care as long as the check came through? I wonder if this is a great new AI use case - or this is Fireflies backed into a corner and a product managers trying something new? 🤷♂️🤖Ari N. shared this🚨 BREAKING: Fireflies.ai just launched AI Voice Agents. This is the iPhone moment for Voice AI. Fireflies went from an AI note-taker in your meetings to AI that TAKES your meetings for you. Screening interviews. Discovery calls. Progress check-ins. All automated. All conversational. All scalable. Here's what this actually means for your business: You can now clone yourself for the repetitive conversations. →The first-round screening interviews that follow the same script. →The discovery calls asking the same qualifying questions. →The weekly check-ins with the same status updates. →The customer support calls answering the same FAQs. This isn't about replacing Zoom calls. It's about freeing your team from the 80% of calls that don't need a human. So I set up a Fireflies Interview Voice Agent this morning in under 5 minutes. Want the whole guide? 1️⃣ Connect with me 2️⃣ Comment "Fireflies" And I will send it over. Repost for priority.
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Ari N. liked thisBoulder, Colorado is innovating 💥 Endeavor Colorado J.P. Morgan Private BankAri N. liked thisLast month we had our annual Endeavor Colorado Summer BBQ! Every industry in the room, from quantum and space to AI, fintech, biotech, and energy. Companies at every stage, plus the board members, investors, and community behind them. That mix in one backyard is the real strength of Colorado's scale-up ecosystem! Some of the founders there have been in the Endeavor network for years. Others we only met this spring. A lot of them were meeting each other for the first time. Thank you to Dan Caruso and Cindy Caruso for the hospitality, and to everyone who made the drive. Endeavor Entrepreneurs in the room: JumpCloud, Quantum Metric, Maybell Quantum, Watchmaker Genomics, Lunar Outpost, BillGO, Peak Energy.
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Ari N. liked thisAri N. liked thisTwo decades. That's a long time and a lot of security acronyms. During our Fund I raise, several prospective investors told us "information security" was niche and would never be a large market. The niche part may have been right then: security usually meant a good password and a hardened perimeter with everything valuable inside the shell. But "never a large market?” Boy, was that wrong! Over the past two decades, data became corporate lifeblood, and employees are addicted to accessing it anytime, anywhere. In the mid 2010's, Cloud and SaaS dissolved the perimeter, and what remained was identity and data: who's asking and what they can touch. Most security innovation since then traces back to that one shift. That is about to change. Two things surprised me along the way. First: amidst rampant identity theft and breaches, why do people weaponize convenience against their own security? Seriously, turn on multi-factor authentication and stop clicking links in emails! The second, sadly related, is the chilling reality of the modern threat landscape: attackers stopped breaking in and started logging in. When we invested in Randori in 2018, the vision was to show companies how an adversary would compromise them: performing reconnaissance and launching an authentic attack that almost always resulted in a breach. It spawned segments and, yes, acronyms: EASM, BAS, and CART. Its red-teamers, part engineer and part artist, could break into anything. The industry noticed and Randori had a great exit when it was acquired by IBM in 2022. As a techno-geek myself, I expected to learn technique working with Randori, but my main takeaway was economics. Adversaries are maniacally focused on ROI. A zero-day gets you a foothold, but so does phishing a distracted employee for valid credentials, at a tiny fraction of the cost. Companies spend years defending expensive attacks while the cheap ones keep working. Enter Generative AI. What's changed isn't how attacks work. It's the price of running them. Costly attacks, once reserved for the hardest and juiciest of targets, are now close to free. AI does the phishing, hunts the unpatched service, finds the open port, writes the exploit. It won't stop at the public edge: internal segments, partner links, anything that answers a query gets discovered. Nobody gets to unplug. The next few years bring a new cyber arms race: Machine speed against machine speed. Near term, AI favors attackers; they have no procurement cycle, no compliance review, no regulators. Longer term I'd bet on defenders, because defense runs on context, and context accumulates. The biggest lever is discipline about what you connect at all, and what you refuse to leave reachable. As scary as this is, I’m excited to be in the fight and couldn’t imagine it without the scar tissue, pattern recognition and networks we’ve built over 20 years. At the very least, I’m grateful not to argue about whether cybersecurity is a niche market anymore! #406at20
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Ari N. liked thisAri N. liked thisToday we are proud to announce Operant's newest addition to our AI Runtime Defense Platform: Operant Semantic Firewall. Agentic AI has collapsed the time between decision and action. A security layer now has to decide in the same instant the agent acts — fast enough to sit in the live path without slowing it down, and decisive enough to stop a harmful action before it executes, not flag it after. The Operant Semantic Firewall detects the actual intent behind every prompt, tool call, command, and data movement in real-time and returns an allow, block, or redact decision as the agent acts — giving enterprises their first enforceable real-time control over the entire agent loop. While the term "AI Firewall" has been thrown around recently, Operant's Semantic Firewall is a fundamentally different and more powerful beast. It is the first product that understands an AI agent's intent in real-time and enforces it inline — stopping a malicious action, a jailbreak, or a data breach, while allowing the rest of the AI stack to continue functioning as intended. Operant Semantic Firewall isn't just marketing speak or "on the road map," it is available *now*. Book yourself a live demo to see the power in action for yourself here: https://lnkd.in/gwTm9KN6 Big thanks to our whole team and customers and partners who have participated in bringing this next level solution to life! #SecureYourAI #Cybersecurity #AISecurity #AIFirewall #SemanticFirewall
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Ari N. liked thisAri N. liked thisUrsa Major is going public at a $2.3 billion valuation, and the near-term capital goes into a Colorado production campus. Here is what the company actually makes: rocket motors. The thing that provides the thrust in missiles, interceptors and hypersonic vehicles. That sounds narrow until you look at who else makes them. The US went from six suppliers of solid rocket motors down to two between 2000 and 2015. Ursa Major is one of a small group trying to become another source. Eleven years in, it has run more than 5,500 ground tests, powered more than a dozen hypersonic missions, and grown to more than 360 people across six facilities. This money turns its Galeton site from a place where solid rocket motors get tested into a place where they get built at volume. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027. https://lnkd.in/gz8m_feM
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Ari N. liked thisAri N. liked this2022: Opened our first Boundless Life location 2026: 8 locations, 3 continents, 2,500+ families served, 200+ employees When we opened our first location in Sintra, we were in true startup mode. We had no streamlined system and no team that had done this before. Just had a small group of us, a tight deadline and families arriving whether we were ready or not. So we did whatever it took. We ran to the supermarket and bought out every bit of bedding they had. We stayed up late building the furniture by hand. We learned everything the hard way, in real time, with no room for mistakes. That first opening was a real mission. Fast forward to today, and it looks completely different: → A growing team of over 200 → 8 locations, having served 2,500+ families → A playbook that means every new opening runs smoother than the last → Purposefully designed education centres, so kids feel at home at every location That’s just the result of doing the hard, messy version enough times until we finally understood what actually mattered. On that drive to the supermarket, arms full of pillows, I had no idea we'd one day be serving over 2,500 families. If you'd told me that then, I wouldn't have believed you. It felt unfathomable. But at the same time, I envisioned it. I knew that what we were building would provide families with their dream lives. That’s essentially our mission in one line. Every founder has that vision. And every founder has moments where that vision gets questioned. By doubt or, in this case, exhaustion. But when you actually believe in what you're building, those hard times don't stop you. They just test how much you mean it. And if you mean it enough, you will push through them. That's the difference between an idea that stays an idea, and one that turns into something real. What's the vision you're holding onto right now, even when it feels hard to believe in? ----- 📣 Repost to share with others in your network Follow Mauro Repacci for more
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