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.
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.
Saturday 7/18 Beta X AMD AI Agent Hackathon
The AI Agent Builder Challenge is a five-week intensive program that guides founders from ideation to production-ready AI companies, featuring technical mentorship from industry leaders like Alibaba Cloud and AMD. The sprint culminates in an August 15 Demo Day for the top 20 teams to pitch venture firms, with at least one startup guaranteed a $2 million investment from Beta Fund alongside comprehensive go-to-market support.
Friday 7/25 YC Startup School Founder & Investor Mixer
An intimate rooftop mixer the night YC Startup School kicks off — bringing together the founders arriving in San Francisco with the investors actively backing what comes next, hosted by Beta Fund and Llama Venture.
No panels. No slides. No pitches. Just a curated room of the people building — and funding — the AI-native ecosystem, over drinks above the fog.
Friday 8/7 Snowflake X Beta Fund Agent & Token Economy Hackathon
Saturday we ran the AI for Education Hackathon at Stanford, partnered with TAL, Nebius, Evermind and Butterbase, 43 teams demoed. 3 took the podium. And 4 operators on the morning panel told us where AI in classrooms still breaks.
THE WINNERS
🥇 TempleBot
🥈 MentorAI
🥉 Cortex — blackboard.ai
The morning panel with Dr. Joy Chen (30 years EdTech, ex-founder acquired by TAL, now Senior Advisor at Stanford GSB Ventures), Heidi Perry (2 EdTech exits, HMH), Daniel Rezak (Head of Educator Engagement at Epic, ex-Tynker, ex-Chicago public school science teacher), and George Wang (Head of Revenue at ClassDojo, ex-Instagram), moderated by Shane (Epic for Kids) — surfaced three signals that landed all afternoon.
First, the pedagogy-vs-AI fight is already happening inside the largest EdTech companies and with state assessments, school budgets, and the UC system potentially reinstating SBAC locking everyone in, Joy Chen called the realistic horizon for meaningful change 3 to 5 years — so build inside the constraint or don’t build for schools at all;
Second, the sharpest reframe of the day was that the winning EdTech business model is back-office AI, not classroom AI — ClassDojo’s AI isn’t a student-facing tool but an internal system that cuts teacher curriculum prep time, which raises teacher earnings per hour, which drives teacher retention, which drives student retention.
Third, Daniel Rezak’s framing “can you make someone an architect without teaching them to hold a hammer?” — cognitive scaffolding vs. cognitive surrender — was so clean that every winning build by afternoon was on the scaffold side and nobody in the room built a grading assistant or a code-gen tutor — the room heard the panel and moved.
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
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