Welcome to this week’s Beta Update 👋
*Note: You’re receiving this update because you previously registered for a Beta University–hosted or co-hosted event via our Luma calendar and opted in to receive communications from the hosts.
Llama Beta Fellowship
The fund for the agent-native era.
The Llama Beta Fellowship is our commitment to this generation. Twenty founders. Up to $2M per company. $40M committed to this batch alone. The Fellowship isn’t just capital — it’s a curated room where the operators, engineers, and category leaders shaping the agent-native era gather to help these twenty ship. From Fellowship, teams graduate into our early-stage portfolio; through late-stage SPVs, they gain exposure to the category leaders they’re building alongside.
Investing where conviction begins.
📅 Coming up
Saturday 8/29 Qoder X Beta Fund Agent Factory Hackathon
Panel from TinyFish Co-Founder, Character.ai and Qoder
4 tracks build on top of Qoder with more than $1500 Cash Prize
Friday 10/23 AWS Builders Loft X Beta Fund Multi-Model Hackathon
Snowflake X Beta Fund X Evermind Agent & Token Economy Hackathon
600+ registration, 60+ teams in one day at SnowFlake. Judging ran fully async through a Master Submission Slides deck and Google Form rubric, scored by 8 industry judges on continuity, innovation, and pitch impact. Three clusters dominated the field: cost-of-reasoning infra (5 teams), consumer memory and attention capture (6 teams), and personal finance interpreted as token economy (5+ teams).
Top 3 winning team:
Innerthink: Harvey Yuan, Kevin Elkin, Zhenghan Yang. Trained a Qwen3-8B model with CODI (Continuous Self-Distillation) and a LoRA adapter (r=128) so reasoning happens inside the network’s hidden layers, using cross-entropy loss across layers on GSM8k-Aug-NL and CommonsenseQA. The pitch: reasoning still happens, but never leaves the network as billable tokens. Trained on H100s.
TokenOS (Team ABC): Srikanth Samy, Krishiv Jaini, Aarush Parekh. Agent-native token accounting infrastructure that tracks and routes token spend across model calls, so agents can reason about their own inference cost the way a modern OS reasons about CPU cycles.
AfterScroll (DreamTeam): Isha Singh, Samvrith Bandi, Rikin Shah. Turns posts you save on X, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn into calendar events and actionable tasks via Google Calendar sync and voice or text chat. Consumer play at the intersection of information overload and agent execution.
Beta Fund Builders Club
Join the Builders Club, the official Discord hub for future Beta Fund Hackathons.
We are centralizing a high-signal community of founders and engineers. This isn’t just another chat server—it is the direct pipeline to our investment team and ecosystem partners.
What’s on the line:
Direct Investment: On-the-spot investment checks for exceptional projects.
Hardware & Capital: High-tier prizes including Cash, Mac Minis, and more.
GTM Support: Direct access to Beta Fund’s resources to help you scale and move from hack to startup.
If you are building at the edge, join us to connect with mentors, find co-founders, and secure the backing your project needs.
Cheers,
Beta University Team
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.