The latest Vermilion newsletter is out 🗞️

🌄 How the AI-native era is expanding the surface area for new companies
🔧 Why the MCP tool layer is becoming essential infrastructure
💰 Keycard raises $38M led by A16z, Boldstart & Acrew
📈 Osmosis announces a $6.3M Seed from CRV & Audacious

Link in 🧵

The AI-native era isn’t consolidation, it’s expanding. Infra is maturing. Behavior is shifting. Founders building the connective tissue between humans + AI are early in the best way.

🔗 Read the latest: New Stack, Same Game: Why the AI-native era feels different yet familiar linked in 🧵

At pre-seed/Series A, you don’t need 50 metrics. You need 5.

✅ New users
✅ Activation rate
✅ PQLs
✅ New vs. expansion ARR
✅ (and watch churn quietly)

Track something. Every day. The KPIs That Actually Matter at Pre-Seed into Series A 🧵

“One of the biggest surprises is that 12% of the stars on the repo are from organizations of 10,000+ person. That gave us confidence that there's a huge monetization opportunity, even with massive companies.”

🎥 Watch the full interview linked in thread Tori Seidenstein, CEO & Co-founder of Tadata

“The value to be unlocked over the next 10 years is at the connectivity layer. We immediately recognized MCP was going to be a 100x improvement over what had been out there before.”

@ToriSeidenstein, CEO & Co-founder on the Tadata origin story

Catch the full episode in the comment below 👇

“We talked to 75 people in the first 90 days. We didn’t want to build for the future, we wanted to solve real problems today”

Our first Vermilion Cliffs Notes is live with Ian Cairns CEO and Co-founder of Freeplay. Watch the full interview linked below.

Valuations are up. Round counts are down. The AI-enabled developer is real, and the best technical founders are building around them.

It's not a bubble - It's a major shift.

What we’re seeing in the devtools + infra market right now:

👉 open.substack.com/pub/vermilio...