partner @contrary | prev 2x founder turned early-stage investor
Joined February 2009
- Tweets 552
- Following 555
- Followers 3,621
- Likes 2,433
8 Photos and videos
Jason Chen retweeted
Jun 16
In the age of AI, human ingenuity becomes even more valuable. The likes of @elonmusk @spacex, @nvidia, @anthropic, @OpenAI were founded in the U.S. for a reason.
Over the years, I've met thousands of talented founders, engineers, and technologists, and many left everything familiar for the chance to build something new.
So we sat down to hear their stories.
First Landing 👇
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Jun 12
Congrats to @markiewagner and the @PoeticHQ team!
Has been a blast spending some time with them these past few months. True n of 1 company and team.
Jun 10
Introducing @PoeticHQ: a new AI system that executes complex multi-hour tasks with 99% accuracy and 10x fewer tokens than agents.
We raised $50M at $500M from Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, First Harmonic, and Genius Ventures to build AI that does complex work inside Fortune 500 companies without hallucination.
While code is too brittle, agents are too unpredictable. The work that runs the global economy - anti-money laundering, fraud investigations, underwriting - needs extreme accuracy.
So we built a new kind of software that pairs the flexibility of AI with the predictability of code.
When the world stays the same, Poetic runs fixed code: fast, cheap, identical every time. When the world changes, Poetic uses AI to regenerate its approach and find its way back to the objective.
In one year, we went from zero to an eight-figure run rate as a team of four.
Since then, we’ve scaled the team and executed the highest-stakes processes at AIG, SoFi, and Chime. At SoFi, a large US bank, Poetic reached 99% quality on fraud investigations in five weeks.
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Jason Chen retweeted
May 21
hiring a growth engineer at @nomic_ai
the job: build agentic systems that get us in front of every built environment company in the U.S. (~20k companies). orchestrate agents to automate non-spammy outbound, ad campaigns, linkedin touchpoints, events, seo — all wired together.
i've personally been building our internal gtm system myself from scratch the last 6 months with very impressive results - time to scale!
this isn't a marketing role. it's engineering role where your measured output is qualified customer calls and sign ups.
if you like low latency feedback loops between prompt and customer demand surges this might be the role for you.
link: nomic.ai/careers
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Jason Chen retweeted
Apr 10
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Today, we're launching AEC-Bench — the first open, multimodal agent benchmark for construction.
196 tasks across real construction documents. Full agent harness. Automated evaluation. Apache 2.0.
We benchmarked Claude Code, Codex, and our own agent. Here's what we found 🧵
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Jason Chen retweeted
10 Dec 2025
Thank you to our investors for supporting Valinor in our mission to use AI to transform clinical trials, which are the core bottleneck to drug development.
The work ahead is clear: partner with drug developers to bring better medicines to market faster by making every clinical trial smarter, more targeted, and more likely to succeed for patients.
Now back to work!
10 Dec 2025
Valinor is building momentum with a $13 million funding round to increase clinical trial success through our ML platform.
Thank you to our investors @CRV, @HarpoonVentures, @AminoCollective, and @Pelion_VP for backing our vision to help shape the future of faster, more efficient drug development.
This investment will fuel the expansion of our proprietary patient-derived datasets and grow our San Francisco-based team.
Our multimodal ML models are trained on matched multi-omic and clinical outcome datasets to better predict patient response — helping drug developers identify responders earlier, design smarter trials, and uncover new insights from real-world biology.
If you are working on clinical drug programs and want to learn more about Valinor's predictive ML models for patient response please reach out!
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3 Sep 2025
Real innovation in agriculture (AI or otherwise) requires bridging a massive data gap. Orchard does this, and so much more.
Today, they've built the trusted OS for modern farms all over the country.
Congrats @charliewu and @orchard_robots on this deserved milestone!
3 Sep 2025
I'm excited to announce our $22M Series A here at Orchard!🍎
Here @Orchard_Robots, we’re securing America’s food supply by building the AI farmer that automates our nation’s farms.
Our mission is to make farming profitable, efficient, and sustainable again.
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25 Aug 2025
Contrary’s VP program continues to be the very best place to accelerate your path in startups and tech.
If you’re a builder looking for others who share your ambition and drive, the VP program is for you.
Apply today!
Contrary Venture Partner applications are now open!
If you're a builder on campus, interested in investing in exceptional startups, and want to be part of one of the most selective communities in tech, apply now.
Contrary invests and works directly alongside exceptional founders to build enduring companies, from seed to scale. With this approach, we’ve been fortunate to back iconic companies like Ramp, Anduril, Zepto, and many others.
Our Venture Partners are great builders and future founders who become the go-to resource for others on campus. As a VP, you’ll learn first-hand what it takes to build and invest in exceptional companies, from taking part in investment decisions to sitting in on fireside chats with seasoned founders and investors.
Best of all, you’ll be joining and learning from the best community in tech. Most VPs go on to become venture-backed founders, early engineers/operators, or investors, and enjoy the support of Contrary’s network for life.
Read more here: contrary.com/blog/venture-pa…
Apply here by Sept 14th: contrary.com/vp-apply
If you're looking for more information or want an opportunity to ask questions, we're hosting our National Info Session on the evening of Wednesday, Sept 3rd. See you there!
RSVP here: lu.ma/VPInfoSession2025
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Jason Chen retweeted
22 Jul 2025
I’m excited to announce Ash by Slingshot AI, the first AI designed for therapy backed by $93M in funding from the world’s top mission-driven investors.
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Jason Chen retweeted
22 Jul 2025
They said it couldn't be done.
They said it *shouldn't* be done.
We tried anyways.
Today we're launching Ash, the first AI designed for therapy, and announcing $93M in funding from @radicalventures @ForerunnerVC @a16z @felicis @trailmixvc @joinsequel and many more.
We've had 50k people using it, with pretty transformative results. Here's my co-founder @danielreidcahn telling our story. Link to Ash below.
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Jason Chen retweeted
9 Jul 2025
First tweet ever. Hopefully the Series C won’t be the second.
@_MomentHQ has raised a $36M Series B led by @indexventures to automate the $150T fixed income market.
We're also announcing our partnership with LPL Financial, the largest broker-dealer in the U.S.
Our team automated bond trading at Citadel and Jane Street - now we’ve assembled a world-class team to power every mission-critical workflow in fixed income.
Thanks @PaigeSmithNews for the write-up in @business, and to @a16z, @lightspeedvp, @Venrock, @neo & @contrary for the continued support.
And welcome, @janatindex to the board.
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15 May 2025
A fantastic read from @CoryBAnderson and the @Contrary_Res team on the past, present, and future of America's electrical grid.
Coauthored with @alexstratmoen and @AryanAfrouzi, who are working hard to fix it!
15 May 2025
1/ America’s electric grid was once the marvel of the industrial age.
Now it’s aging, brittle, and cracking under the pressure of EVs, extreme weather, and two-way power flows.
This is the story of how we got here—and why we need to build an “energy internet” 🧵
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14 May 2025
I’m thrilled to announce we’ve led @voltraenergy's pre-seed.
Breakthroughs in energy technology across batteries, nuclear, solar, wind, and more speak to the potential for resource abundance and meaningful progress in energy production.
Energy demand, spurred on by rapid innovations in AI and the push to increase domestic industrial production, is expected to grow faster than ever before.
But against this backdrop is aging infrastructure and an electrical grid that is ill-prepared to handle the increased load.
The average current age of US transmission lines is 40 years old. Many of the country’s power transformers are at or beyond their expected lifespan. Put simply, the grid is old and vulnerable.
To fix this, we obviously need to build new infrastructure. But that is costly, time-intensive, and mired in political and regulatory complexity. To supplement this, and to ensure that we can prepare for tomorrow’s energy demands today, we also need better software that is not built for Windows Vista.
Enter Voltra. Their lofty goal is to build the operating system for the electrical grid - a unified platform that allows any energy-related asset to seamlessly connect and work together. Most solutions today are asset- or company-specific, and very few speak or work together. Voltra aims to change that.
They are launching today with their first product, Charge.
Built for electric vehicle charging, it has intelligent load management, real-time grid coordination, and a unified API across multi-vendor hardware and systems. More important, it provides access to the thousands of physical assets and vendors that will serve as the foundation to a more intelligent grid.
Congratulations to @alexstratmoen and @AryanAfrouzi and the whole Voltra team!
Also - no joke - I got a power outage while drafting this last night. We need to fix this!
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Jason Chen retweeted
23 Apr 2025
The diamond drill rig for mineral exploration was first tested in Minnesota in 1890 and hasn't seen a fundamental innovation since 1953.
We @durinmining built a remotely operable drill rig in 4 months. Our next version will be autonomous.
Testing begins in Nevada next week.
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Jason Chen retweeted
17 Apr 2025
Just closed our first million dollar deal 🥳
With a customer that grew ~50x in 6 months of using our tech 💪
Never been more bullish on Orchard 🍎
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17 Apr 2025
This is what tech media is missing - a digestible, daily show that examines the most important tech stories of the day from the perspective of those in the arena.
Excited!!
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We're excited to share DOSS.COM with the world, and congratulate them on an $18M Series A!
The 21st Century is finally dawning for ERP systems. @wileycwj and Arnav are doing their part to bring systems of record to the cutting edge.
contrary.com/blog/investing-…
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Jason Chen retweeted
25 Feb 2025
First Tech Talk of the year! Name a better lineup: @baseten @codeiumdev @DecagonAI @usepatch @mercor_ai & Doss
Register here to join us: lu.ma/SF-TechTalk
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