Hi friends! Welcome back to another installment of our newsletter, we have a lot to fill you in on.

The AI infrastructure landscape is experiencing a defining moment: agents are everywhere. What was once experimental is now becoming the default architecture for both enterprises and startups alike. Companies like Airtable are building sophisticated in-house agent systems, while entire startups like Serval are being built around agent-first architectures.

This shift has ignited an infrastructure arms race. We're seeing explosive growth across the entire agent stack, from execution environments (Modal, E2B, Daytona) to orchestration frameworks (Restate, Mastra, AG2) to coding-specific infrastructure (Warp, Morph, Cline). This category has raced past the nascent stages and is now foundational.

The catalyst was Openclaw's viral demonstration of agents running autonomously on Mac minis, which showed the world what's possible when AI systems can truly act, not just respond. This "Openclaw moment" has sparked two critical developments:

The infrastructure layer for the agent era is being built in real-time, and the companies laying these foundations are positioning themselves at the center of how AI gets deployed in production.

Cleanlab was recently acquired by Handshake! Huge congrats to Curtis, Jonas, Anish, and the rest of the team. Read more here.

Good Start Labs shared their findings on how tight feedback loops from games help AI models become better customer support agents, Read more here.

Keycard acquired Anchor.dev to extend its platform to govern coding agents. Anchor.dev was a stealth startup focused on making certificate issuance and validation automatic. Congrats to both teams, read more here.

Synthesis Company released the largest validation study of AI for systematic reviews. In conjunction with other researchers, they examined over 30,000 data points and showed that AI augmentation can enable more timely and comprehensive evidence synthesis and facilitate living systematic reviews. Read more here.

Warp just released Oz, a cloud-based sandbox for developers to collaborate with AI coding agents. Read more here, or try it out!

Formae just went multi-cloud, with the explicit goal of expanding core cloud support and making it extensible by builders. Read more here, or try it out!

Here’s our most recent podcast episodes from The Infra Pod with Tejas from Morph and the Open Source Startups Podcast with Catherine from Kernel:

Flux has recently gone viral after Lenny Rachitsky posted their near-vertical growth:

Like Lenny mentioned, Flux is currently hiring across engineering, operations, growth, support, and more. See more details here.

Many of our other portfolio companies are hiring across similar roles, explore more here!

Modal is cohosting an evening panel with Snowflake on Feb 18th in Menlo Park, featuring Forward Deployed Engineers and ML leaders discussing real-world AI deployment. They'll cover how they work deeply with companies to train models at scale, run performant inference in production, deploy RL pipelines, and more. We'd love to see you there.

MotherDuck is cohosting a data meetup with Estuary on Feb 17th in NYC. They'll walk through turning Slack conversations into a queryable knowledge base using real-time data pipelines, plus demo metadata enrichment techniques that improve text-to-SQL accuracy for LLM workflows. Check out more details here.

We’ll also be in SF next month supporting our companies for GDC and RSA 🎉

Thanks for reading! We'll be back next month with more updates.

— The Essence Team