OUR FOCUS lhe Rise of the Cognitive Plumbing Layer 氀栀e Plumbing Layer Rises Again. May昀椀eld's conviction in infrastructure investmenting began 25+ years ago. We've been a believer in the power of plumbing to help consumers and businesses realize the bene昀椀ts of technology waves. During the Web era, Navin joined a long line of tech industry school dropouts to co-found his 昀椀rst company in 1996 with his PhD advisor at Stanford University. VXtreme made it possible to stream vídeo over the Internet, and after its acquisition by Microsoft, endures as Windows Media. While at Microsoft, Navin invested in Akamai, which delivered infrastructure to scale the Web. ln 2014, as the cloud era got into full swing, May昀椀eld partnered with Armon Dadgar and Mitchell Hashimoto, the open source superstar founders of HashiCorp, whose mission was to elevate the devops professional with a simple and comprehensive multi-cloud infrastructure platform. HashiCorp's public offering in December 2021 valued the company at $15 billion, and it continues to power major cloud-based businesses today. Over the last de­ cade, we have partnered with many bold enterprise founders including those at CloudSimple, CloudGenix, Elastica, Gigya, Portworx, NUVIA, Ranch­ er, StorSimple, and Volterra who successfully realized their mission to cloudify the world. As AI shifts from early adoption to widespread enterprise use, the importance of the "plumbing layer" is resurgent. The transformative potential lies in four layers of the tech stack: models/middleware/tools, data, infrastructure, and semiconductors/systems. The breakthrough of GenAI is in elevat­ ing humans by providing a natural language interface and performing cognitive tasks - an era we think of as Al+Humans = Human Squared. ln this context, cognitive plumbing unlocks the easy creation of agents, applications, and services that can be built on this foundational technology. ln the future, we're looking forward to partnering with many more cognitive plumbers of the AI age.