Lightspeed Venture Partners

Nikita Bier resigns as X head of product

Nikita Bier has stepped down as head of product at X after a little more than a year in the role, saying he will continue to advise the company. Bier — a serial entrepreneur and Lightspeed venture partner — took the product lead role in July 2025 and said he oversaw the launch of 30 new products while protecting the platform's "town square." His tenure included high-profile controversies involving the xAI chatbot Grok, which generated offensive content and nonconsensual imagery that prompted legal scrutiny of the platform.

Fireworks valued at $17.5B after $1.5B raise

Fireworks, a cloud startup that hosts open-source AI models for developers, raised $1.5 billion in a funding round that values the company at $17.5 billion. Backed by Nvidia, the San Mateo-based startup said it has exceeded $1 billion in annualized revenue — five times its revenue a year earlier — and now handles roughly 40 trillion AI tokens per day. Fireworks operates in the inference cloud market, competes with major cloud providers to host models, and has formed partnerships (including with Microsoft) while diversifying its customer base beyond early heavy users like Cursor. The round was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV, with participation from Nvidia, Evantic and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Fireworks plans to expand headcount and buy more GPUs to support growing demand for cheaper, specialized AI model deployments.

Reflection Signs $1B Compute Deal with Nebius

Reflection AI, a U.S. startup building open AI models, has agreed a $1 billion compute deal with European AI infrastructure company Nebius. Nebius — formerly the international arm of Yandex — will give Reflection access to Nvidia’s latest chips. The deal follows a recent agreement giving Reflection access to SpaceX compute and comes as firms race to secure large-scale compute for training and deploying advanced models. Reflection, founded in 2024 by two former Google DeepMind researchers, is valued at $8 billion and has raised about $2.6 billion from investors including Nvidia, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed. Nebius recently received a $2 billion investment from Nvidia and has signed multi-year infrastructure agreements with Meta and Microsoft worth tens of billions.