M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund

In PitchBook's latest report on the growth of quantum computing funding, M12 Managing Partner Michael Stewart shares his perspective on this new frontier of investing. Full report linked in the comments.

Today during AI Engineer World's Fair, we hosted a lunch for the founders and investors building the agentic SDLC. The room was full of people influencing how software gets written, and this conversation will continue tomorrow at Future Code: Rewriting the Developer Frontier, a summit bringing together engineers, open source maintainers, and founders rethinking the next generation of code. CVP and Global Head of M12, Michelle Gonzalez, will moderate a panel on agentic and AI coding infrastructure alongside Cam Immesoete, Benny Yufei Chen, and Alex Zenla. There's still time to sign up at the link in comments. Thank you to Kevin Crosby and GitHub for co-hosting today's lunch, and to Cheryl Cheng, Michelle Gonzalez, Peter Lenke, CFA, and everyone else who joined us. 

Founders raising today want more from their investor partners than capital. They want access to customers, enterprise distribution, and compute. It's a shift M12 Corporate Vice President and Global Head Michelle Gonzalez saw early, and Global Corporate Venturing just named her to their annual Powerlist for the fifth year in a row. We're glad to see Michelle recognized again, and proud of the part she's played in building M12. Under her leadership, M12 has built a model around people, access, and partnership, opening real doors for the founders we back.

The AI bottleneck was never content creation. It's everything that happens after. Typeface's new Signal Report — The AI Speed Paradox — surveyed 200+ enterprise marketing leaders and found that 93% say AI increased pressure to move faster, yet campaign timelines have gotten longer. Only 16% say their organization is fully prepared to operate at AI speed. As Abhay Parasnis, Founder and CEO of Typeface, an M12 portfolio company, puts it: "The next phase of transformation is about orchestration." Read more here: bit.ly/4uT3Vjs

The way software gets built is changing fast. Coding agents are taking on more of the work, reshaping the tools and infrastructure they run on. On June 30, during AI Engineer World's Fair, CVP and Head of M12 Michelle Gonzalez will moderate a panel on agentic and AI coding infrastructure, hosted at GitHub HQ. She'll be joined by Thomas Dohmke of Entire, Alex Zenla of Edera, Benny Yufei Chen of Fireworks, and Cam Immesoete of Microsoft AI. If you're building the next generation of developer tools, or following where they're headed, we hope to see you there. Register here: https://lnkd.in/gVs4S5Kr

Most enterprise data isn't in a database. It's in PDFs, emails, presentations, and documents that AI systems can't process. Unstructured's platform parses, chunks, and prepares complex content and turns it into AI-ready data for RAG pipelines, LLMs, and agentic workflows. Unstructured is collaborating with Microsoft to help enterprises accelerate AI adoption on Azure. In heavily regulated industries, data complexity and compliance requirements have long stood in the way of successful AI deployment. For these organizations, unlocking enterprise connectivity is what turns an AI pilot into production-ready workflows. Congrats to M12 Managing Partner James Wu, Unstructured Founder and CEO Brian S. Raymond, and the entire Unstructured team on this milestone. https://lnkd.in/gdDX6MCG

AI's influence runs deeper than models and markets. It's forcing questions that extend past technology problems: how we educate the next generation, what we lose when we optimize for efficiency, and what we owe the people who are wary of it. At Fortune #BrainstormTech in Aspen, M12 Managing Partner Cheryl Cheng joined leaders from across consumer technology, culture, and enterprise software for a conversation on how to prepare, individually and as a society, for the wave of AI that's already here. The range of perspectives made for exactly the kind of discussion these questions call for. Special thanks to Fortune's Andrew Nusca for moderating.

M12 is hiring an Associate to join our investment team in San Francisco. We invest across AI, B2B SaaS, cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, and developer tools and have helped build over 100 great companies since launching a decade ago. Associates on our team work the full investment process alongside a team investing up and down the AI stack. If you're energized by early-stage technology and the founders building it, we'd love to meet you. Apply here: https://lnkd.in/g9Q2i82T

We're not in an AI bubble. We're in a box. That was M12 Managing Partner Michael Stewart's take at the MadHats AI Rabbit Hole "AI Bubble Tea with VCs" panel, alongside Ann Bordetsky, Anubhav Maheshwari and Serik Kaldykulov. The box is compute. Getting compute faster is what enterprise AI decisions are being made around right now. Michael's view on what unlocks the next 10x: rethinking hardware from first principles — semiconductors, photonics, all of it. Unit economics are back on the table too, with Anubhav Maheshwari noting margins at the app layer are dominating investor conversations.