10/23/2023

Enterprise

Generative Europe Comes To Our New Berlin Home

We’ll be joined by Ting Wang, Director of ML & AI at Wayfair, and Marc Klingen, Co-Founder of Langfuse.

We are thrilled to bring Generative Europe to Berlin on November 7th: apply to attend here. The discussion will focus on embedding LLMs in your application. While we have seen the first successful demos and standalone products, the playbook for how to embed LLMs in your SaaS is still to be written.

During Generative Berlin, we will outline a first draft of the playbook:

  • How do you choose the best model?
  • How do you optimize the triangle of cost, quality, and latency?
  • And how do you measure customer impact?

We are very fortunate to be joined by Ting Wang, Director of ML & AI at Wayfair, and Marc Klingen, Co-Founder of Langfuse.

Ting Wang is the Director of ML and AI at Wayfair, leading a global team based in Europe and US. Her mission is to turn ML/AI into the biggest advantage to improve efficiency across Wayfair’s supply chain and service operations. Currently, her team is actively building Convo AI applications for their service use cases.

Marc Klingen, is the co-founder and CEO of Langfuse. Being part of YCombinator and iterating on applications to build with Generative AI, Marc and his team quickly realized that a bridge between LLM infrastructure and applications is missing, leading them to launch Langfuse, which rocketed to Product #1 on Product Hunt. Marc brings a background in Computer Science & Innovation from Technical University Munich.

You can apply for a seat at the Berlin meet up here (and get a sneak peek at our exciting new Berlin home too!) Our Paris event was overscribed, so be quick to get your spot! If you missed it, you can read more about the discussion that took place in Paris.

Our new home in Berlin

We believe category-defining companies are built all across Europe — and ultimately require a pan-European approach to succeed. Hence we decided to set up where our founders are, and go hyper-local. So, we have added to Lightspeed’s Europe presence with a permanent home in Berlin Mitte. Come by!

We aren’t new to Berlin either. Alex Schmitt was born and raised in Germany. We have made many investments in Europe, and we count ourselves lucky to work with more than 30 companies based here, many of which are rooted in Germany, but with global operations. These include Personio, Plan A, Lemon Markets, Candis, Polar Signals, Mayd, Soba, Xentral, and more.

Some of our investment themes are geographically informed; for example, Germany is Europe’s engine for SMBs. That is reflected in the strong suite of vertical SaaS companies for SMBs in Germany. Hanno Renner, founder of Personio – the leading HR solution for SMBs, says ”Lightspeed — one of the few global funds — has been instrumental for how we shape our global presence at Personio. Having a local team on the ground helps us even more in our journey from a European to an international champion.”We always strive to build global champions, but along the way, there are local nuances and operational hurdles to overcome. Max Linden, Founder and CEO of lemon.markets adds, “We wanted to work with Lightspeed given the team’s expertise and their longstanding commitment to Europe. By combining a global platform with local roots, our partnership with Lightspeed allows us to simultaneously spar on a topic like leveling from someone that built Pinterest while receiving a deep reference on a candidate we are hiring in Berlin.”

“To build a category-leading solution, we need a strong local presence in all of our markets,” says Lubomila Jordanova, CEO of Plan A. “Lightspeed goes the extra mile with boots on the ground that can open doors in the most important markets for us — in Berlin, London, and Paris.”

As pictured above, there are several more Germans in the Lightspeed family: Moritz, who leads our gaming practice, and Sebastian, who is a partner in our growth team, grew up in Hannover. And Julie lived the first 10 years of her life in Munich! Alex is on the right.

To apply to attend Generative Europe in Berlin on November 7th sign up here.

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