Why this, why now?
The pace of innovation in infrastructure is accelerating, but the signal-to-noise ratio keeps getting harder to navigate. We’re starting this newsletter to cut through the noise and highlight the developments that actually matter, whether that’s a technical breakthrough, an emerging architectural pattern, or a shift in how developers are building.
We’ve always believed the best investment insights come from staying close to the builders. This newsletter is an extension of that philosophy; a place to share what we’re learning, spotlight the founders we’re backing, and explore the trends shaping the future of infrastructure.
What should we expect?
You’ll hear from us about:
New investments and why we’re excited about them
New podcast episodes where we sit down with founders and operators building the next generation of infrastructure
Thoughts on what we’re seeing in the market
DevTool products worth trying
Infra related events to meet with builders and VCs in the space
Jobs from our portfolio companies that are actively hiring
We’re keeping this newsletter to a monthly focus to start, and only the insights we think are worth your time.
Market observations:
Kernel generation is having a moment. Stanford’s Scaling Intelligence Lab published two interesting pieces: Tokasaurus, an LLM inference engine for high-throughput workloads, and their work on surprisingly fast AI-generated kernels. Meanwhile, Luminal is taking a search-based compilation approach to deep learning optimization. Engineers at xAI are skeptical any of this will beat hand-tuned kernels - but the real unlock might be democratizing optimization for teams that can’t hire kernel engineers.
Lakehouse stack deep dive. Prashanth Rao’s blog post breaks down the modern lakehouse architecture and LanceDB’s approach to interoperability with the broader ecosystem.
SQLite as agentic filesystem. Glauber Costa makes the case that SQLite is the ideal filesystem abstraction for agents - Turso built agentfs, an entire filesystem backed by a single SQLite file you can move anywhere.
Cline Bench for code agents. New benchmarking environment helping push code agents forward with RL and complex coding scenarios.
Portfolio highlight: Congrats to the Keycard team - Ian, Peter, and Matt - on their MCP launch.
The podcasts
We also host two podcasts:
The Infra Pod, which brings you insightful and thought-provoking discussions on the world of infrastructure software. Join Tim Chen and Ian Livingston in their reflections on favorite moments, hottest takes and what's next!
The Open Source Startup Pod, which is the leading podcast on how to build a successful open source company. Check out our latest exclusive with Jon Morehouse on his decision to open source Nuon (startup empowering BYOC for all).
Events
We are hosting a virtual workshop on Hiring & Scaling High-Performance Engineering Teams on Jan 14th, RSVP here.
Our friends over at Flowglad are hosting the Plug & Play Hackathon alongside Lovable and Hathora on Jan 15th in NYC. Hackathon is a hands-on workshop and build session focused on one core idea: using SDKs and APIs to move faster when building products. Check out more here.
Also our friends at Nuon are hosting a BYOC Barbecue in SF on the 31st of January. You’re invited if you have a strong opinion on deployments, if you hear the word “data sovereignty” more than you care to, or if you’re just interested in what’s new in developer tools. Check out more here.
Highlighted jobs
Mesa.dev is looking for a Founding Product Engineer:
Fixing the development lifecycle is the highest leverage problem in the world. As the demands of software grow, the Software Crisis worsens every year. If you care about developer experience, there’s no better product to work on.
If you’re not a fit for Mesa’s current openings but are passionate about joining innovative AI and software infra startups, check out other exciting opportunities within Essence’s Portfolio!
Stay connected
If you haven’t already, follow Tim Chen and Essence on Linkedin and Twitter/X for more frequent updates.
Thanks for being part of our community, and we’re looking forward to sharing what we’re building!
— The Essence Team
Asim Moinuddin, Tim Chen, Naomi Walker-Garrett