Kleiner Perkins $10B+ AUM & The Rise of AI
Windsurf, Scale AI, ARR BS Detector | Leigh Marie Braswell, Partner at KP
Today we have Leigh Marie Braswell, Partner at Kleiner Perkins, to talk about the rise of AI, its impact, and the shifting dynamics in venture capital. We discuss Kleiner Perkins's $2B+ Rise of AI thesis across their 21st venture fund, KP21, an $825M fund to back early stage companies, and their third select fund, KP Select III, a $1.2 billion fund to back high inflection investments. We also go deeper into key AI infrastructure trends, machine learning applications, and their investments in AI companies like Windsurf, Glean, and Ambience.
Over the course of its 50+ years, Kleiner Perkins has made legendary investments into companies such as: Sun Microsystems, AOL, Intuit, Amazon, Google, Zynga, Looker, Slack, X, Spotify, Square, Brex, Plaid, Robinhood, Rippling, Glean, Figma, & many more.
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Leigh Marie focuses on investing in infrastructure and machine learning (ML) application startups. She joined the firm in 2023 after serving as a Principal at Founders Fund. Previously, she was an early engineer and the first product manager at Scale AI, leading development for 3D annotation products used in autonomous vehicles, robotics, and AR/VR.
Fun fact: Leigh Marie is originally from Alabama, she graduated from MIT with a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science. Braswell is known for her technical expertise, having been recognized as a top competitive female mathematician in high school. Outside work, she enjoys poker, where she hosts weekly events gathering the top tech folks in silicon valley to play a hand.
Highlights:
00:00 Introduction
00:25 $10B+ AUM: Kleiner's Legendary Generational Transformation
08:08 Windsurf: Angel Investment to Potential $3B Acquisition
18:21 Hyper-Competitive AI Landscape
25:43 ARR, Fraud, & Scams
31:52 Code-Gen Competition: Cursor, Devin, Copilot, Windsurf
35:48 Key Trends in AI Infra & ML Applications
40:13 Leigh Marie's Scale AI Journey
46:17 Talent Vortexes & Investing
52:34 Seed-Strapped Companies & Growth
58:37 “$10M Buy-In” Poker Nights & Networking
01:03:05 Looking Forward: AI and Founders
Leigh Marie’s Portfolio
OpenAI in talks to buy Windsurf for about $3 billion [Reuters]
Persona raises $200M Series D at a $2B Valuation
AI Is Making The Internet’s Bot Problem Worse. This $2 Billion Startup Is On The Front Lines [Forbes]
Chronosphere raises $120M Series C at a $1.6B valuation [Chronosphere]
Nooks raises $43M Series B from Kleiner Perkins and launches AI Sales Assistant Platform [Kleiner Perkins]
Serverless database startup Neon nabs $25M in fresh funding [SiliconAngle]
Windsurf: Angel Investment to Potential $3B Acquisition
Windsurf (formerly Codeium) has emerged as a significant player in the AI coding tools market, currently in advanced acquisition talks with OpenAI for approximately $3 billion. This potential acquisition would mark OpenAI's largest to date and represents a strategic move to enhance its capabilities in the AI developer tools market. The deal aligns with broader industry trends where AI capabilities are driving significant mergers and acquisitions, and would allow OpenAI to own more of the full-stack coding experience.
Leigh Marie first met Windsurf’s founders Varun & Douglas many years ago, bonding over competitive math at MIT, and quickly got involved with an angel check. While their initial PMF and growth wasn’t straight up and to the right, the company’s recent pivot and growth has been remarkable, acquiring over 1 million users in 4 months. Leigh Marie highlights the team’s ability to attract top engineering talent, build a best-in-class product, and achieve viral adoption. "There’s no limit to their ambition. They don’t just want to make 10x developers better—they want to make everyone a developer."
The code-gen space is currently a “war zone,” according to Leigh Marie. With competitors like Copilot, Devin, and Cursor, differentiation is challenging. Windsurf stands out via speed, infrastructure expertise, and a dual PLG + enterprise strategy. “The moat for all of these companies is just like how fast they can move,” she says. Personalization, network effects, and enterprise stickiness may create longer-term defensibility, but for now, “speed is kind of the only moat.”
Kleiner's Generational Shift & 50 Years of Investing
Kleiner Perkins has undergone a remarkable transformation since its 1972 founding by Eugene Kleiner and Tom Perkins. The firm's journey spans multiple technological revolutions, from semiconductors to the internet boom, and now AI. Under Mamoon Hamid's leadership, the firm maintains a lean team of nine full-time investors, eschewing the trend toward investment bank-scale operations. This strategic refocus has proven successful, with notable investments in companies like Figma, Rippling, and Loom demonstrating the firm's ability to identify and nurture transformative technologies.
The Rise of AI
AI is the dominant theme shaping Kleiner’s $2B+ in new funds across early and growth, and Leigh Marie’s personal focus. As she remarked, "Everything these days is AI." Luckily, with a background in Scale AI, Leigh Marie has developed a solid "bullsh*t detector" for AI companies, a critical skill in an environment where almost every startup claims to leverage AI.
"What’s been most shocking in the last year is how well this technology already works for non-technical users." From automating tedious back-office tasks to transforming workflows in industries like finance, supply chain, and legal, Leigh Marie sees AI as an unstoppable force with endless applications.
ARR, Fraud, & Scams
The AI hype cycle has brought fuzziness around metrics like ARR. Leigh Marie notes, “ARR— can mean just wildly, wildly different things.” She critiques misleading claims in high-growth environments, referencing companies calling volatile or non-recurring revenue “ARR.” “You can’t just take revenue at face value,” she warns, especially when AI usage costs are high. Some firms “are losing money the more that users use them.”
Leigh Marie’s Background & Time at Scale AI: The Foundation of Her Investment Edge
Before joining Kleiner Perkins, Leigh Marie Braswell spent four pivotal years at Scale AI, an experience she credits with giving her both tactical product skills and the strategic edge she now brings to venture investing. Her entrance into Scale wasn’t through a typical recruiting pipeline—it was through competitive math and poker. As she recalls, “Alex [Wang] and I got very close on the MIT poker club before he dropped out, I think his sophomore year, to found Scale.”
She joined the company when it was only three people as an intern, later becoming a full-time early engineer and eventually moving into product management. “Back then, Scale was the API for human labor,” she said, explaining how scrappy the early product was. “I called it the Alex API because we didn’t yet have a task force… if you put in a task, Alex would be on the back end doing it.” This hands-on, chaotic environment taught her to thrive in ambiguity and work under extreme pressure—skills that later translated into her investing style.
As Scale narrowed its focus to serving self-driving car companies, she helped reposition the product to tackle labeled image data and eventually lidar, where she led key product efforts. “I had always wanted to be a PM at Scale… and eventually that became, you know, okay, where are we taking this product and how do we integrate ML to reduce our cost?”
One of the major inflection points she witnessed was Scale’s early entry into defense—a move considered “not cool” at the time. “There’s this recent thing where it’s cool to work with the government… but back then it was hard to sell into and was seen as evil,” she reflected. Scale pushed through the cultural resistance, a decision that would later define a big part of its business model and aligned with Leigh Marie’s own long-term view on durability and impact.
Another eye-opening experience was Scale’s involvement in early GPT model labeling for OpenAI. “We actually helped OpenAI with GPT-2… I remember thinking, what even is this? I don’t know if this will ever be useful.” This moment seeded her early conviction in AI's future potential and helped build what she calls her “bullsh*t detector for AI”—a core competency in her venture investing work today.
She also learned firsthand how important talent is to success. Scale had a relentless bar for hiring. “We were all just totally overworked… and then we would interview these smart candidates, and Alex would say, ‘No, they don’t meet the bar.’” While frustrating at the time, Leigh Marie credits this culture of excellence with building what she now calls a “talent vortex”—a company that becomes a magnet for the best people because of its internal standards and reputation. She uses this pattern as a signal in her investment decisions today.
In sum, Scale AI was more than her first job—it was a crucible that shaped how she thinks about founders, chaos, technical moats, and the types of companies that break out. “If you’re not feeling like everything is on fire all the time, there’s probably not product-market fit,” she quips, summarizing a core lesson. That startup battlefield experience has become one of her sharpest tools in evaluating founders and navigating the frenzy of early-stage AI investing.
The Rise of “Seed-Strapped” Startups: Capital Efficiency in the AI Era
In today’s AI-fueled startup landscape, Leigh Marie Braswell has observed a new archetype of early-stage company: the “seed-strapped” startup. This isn’t the classic bootstrapped founder grinding without outside capital, nor the typical Silicon Valley venture rocket ship raising every 12–18 months. Instead, seed-strapped companies raise a small seed—“a few million dollars to get out the gate”—and then generate so much early traction that they effectively bypass traditional fundraising timelines.
“These companies are so wildly successful with their tiny team and their crazy 10x revenue growth,” she explains. “They’re just hand over fist in money. They don’t need to raise a Series A. Maybe they don’t even need to raise a Series B.”
Unlike in prior cycles, where fast scaling was closely tied to large capital infusions, these startups are leveraging the efficiencies of modern AI tools—automated workflows, lean engineering teams, rapid GTM experiments—to hit escape velocity with minimal headcount and infrastructure. In Leigh Marie’s view, these companies represent a fundamental reshaping of early-stage economics.
She doesn’t expect them to avoid raising forever—“if they want to build a huge business and hire a sales team... they’ll probably have to raise again”—but the timeline and trajectory are inverted. “You may see companies go from a seed to a Series C. It’s just gonna be weird,” she notes, signaling that traditional stage definitions are becoming less relevant.
This trend has implications for VCs:
The bar for Series A has shifted dramatically, making it harder to win allocation without a pre-existing relationship.
Founders now have more leverage, especially those with high-margin, fast-growing AI-native businesses.
Venture timelines are compressing, but not always in predictable ways—capital-efficient startups may choose to stay private longer, raise later, or not at all.
The seed-strapped movement also echoes Leigh Marie’s broader thesis on the “new efficiency frontier” in company building. Founders today can go further with fewer people and less burn, especially in categories like developer tools, productivity software, and infrastructure. For VCs, this means catching winners earlier—often pre-traction—and rethinking how to add value when capital is less scarce than it used to be.
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Resources
The Remaking of Kleiner Perkins: After 50 years of dealmaking, the historic firm is back at venture’s top table. Sharp bets and renewed focus suggest Mamoon Hamid and Ilya Fushman’s KP may be heading for another golden generation
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