M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund reposted this
Congratulations to Jason Lopatecki and Aparna Dhinakaran on the Arize AI exit to Dynatrace. And thank you for letting me be part of the journey. Onward!
M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund
Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
San Francisco, California 51,419 followers
We accelerate the future of technology through investments, insights, and meaningful partnership with Microsoft.
About us
M12 is Microsoft’s corporate venture capital fund. We invest across key focus areas in the most promising early-stage companies that are disrupting markets in the business of today and tomorrow.
- Website
-
http://m12.vc
External link for M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund
- Industry
- Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
- Company size
- 11-50 employees
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, California
- Type
- Public Company
- Founded
- 2016
- Specialties
- venture capital, VC, investing, technology, corporate venture capital, cloud infrastructure, AI, ML, Business SaaS, communication, productivity, big data, analytics, and security
Locations
-
Primary
Get directions
1355 Market St
San Francisco, California, US
Employees at M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund
Updates
-
Falling inference prices do not automatically generate better margins. M12 Managing Partner Todd Graham sees the durable margins where checking an agent's output costs a fraction of creating it.
Every agentic pitch deck shows 80% gross margins. I've stopped believing that slide. Agents are Jevons machines — cheaper tokens just buy longer loops. The real margin engine isn't inference, it's verification. Here's where durable pricing power actually settles in the agentic stack. #AgenticAI #AIInfrastructure #VentureCapital #AIAgents #EnterpriseAI
-
Compute is the defining bet in AI right now, and every layer of the stack is competing for investment. On August 18 at ModCon, CVP and Head of M12 Michelle Gonzalez joins a panel on funding the AI stack, exploring where investors would put their first dollar in AI infrastructure. She'll be joined by Dave Munichiello, Sam Fort, Liz Stein, and Quentin Clark.
-
-
Different AI workloads require different hardware, and as those distinctions become clearer, so does the opportunity for startups with specialized infrastructure solutions. M12 Managing Partner Michael Stewart joined DatacenterDynamics to talk through where he sees that opportunity opening up.
-
Enterprise AI used to be measured by adoption. Now, CFOs are focused on returns. Managing Partner Cheryl Cheng joined Romaine Bostick, CFA and Emily Graffeo on Bloomberg Television's The Close to talk through how everyone is "sharpening the pencil" — being more intentional about token use — though the appetite for AI hasn't lessened. She also expects value to spread across the stack rather than concentrate in one layer, since enterprises want a say in the chips, infrastructure, models, and applications they run.
-
-
What agents can do has outpaced what enterprises can safely hand them. The gap is in enforcement. M12 Managing Partner Todd Graham breaks down where that gap comes from and what closes it, including: • What separates a stated constraint from an enforced one • The range of enforcement, from prompt instructions to sandboxes and formal methods • Why the strongest practical safeguard is removing an ability rather than asking an agent not to use it The open issue is guaranteeing that an agent's output is actually correct, and that's where Todd sees room to build. Read the full piece: https://lnkd.in/guzw94tg
-
We traded the usual happy hour for a movie night, and the room was buzzing well before showtime. Thank you to Wells Fargo for co-hosting our Odyssey screening.
Last night, we partnered with Wells Fargo to bring together founders, investors, and operators for a screening of The Odyssey. Thanks to everyone who joined us - we loved seeing new connections made before the lights dimmed! Looking forward to the next one! Manpreet Bagga M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund Cheryl Cheng Alan Du
-
-
Open-source software is the shared foundation that generations of American engineers built on. Open weight models are that kind of foundation for AI, according to Microsoft's new letter. Six of our portfolio companies signed the letter. We're proud to back founders who support an open ecosystem: Arcee AI, Armada, Cinder, DatologyAI, Fastino Labs, and Unsloth AI.
-
-
AI is no longer confined to hyperscale data centers. It's moving to regional facilities, and to the edge — phones, sensors, machines. Latency isn't just a service metric anymore. Alongside cost, throughput, and token consumption, it now dictates how compute gets allocated and where it gets built. M12 Managing Partner Michael Stewart joined Chris Heinrich and Emma Strutton on DatacenterDynamics to talk through what that shift means for how edge infrastructure gets designed and paid for. Watch the full episode: https://lnkd.in/gPvd_vRv
-
-
M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund reposted this
Mercury 2 is now available on Azure Foundry. The world's fastest reasoning language model, built to make production AI feel instant. Mercury 2 doesn't decode sequentially. It generates responses through parallel refinement, producing multiple tokens simultaneously and converging over a small number of steps. Mercury 2 runs over 1,000 tokens per second on widely-deployed NVIDIA GPUs, at less than half the cost, with comparable quality to Claude Haiku 4.5 and GPT-5 Mini. It delivers real-time speed that used to require specialized hardware, with no custom chips and no lock-in. Full announcement: https://lnkd.in/g4BZGmuJ
