Investing in Dust

Making work “work better” for smart teams

Pietro Bezza
2 min readJun 27, 2023

I am thrilled that Connect Ventures is once again backing the formidable duo Gabriel Hubert and Stanislas Polu in their new journey with Dust. We are participating in the today announced 5M€ seed round led by Sequoia, together with XYZ, GG1, AIGrant and others great microVCs and angels.

At Connect we believe the best products have an opinion. Being “opinionated” in product strategy means taking a stand, making choices, ruthlessly picking what to do and painfully what not to do. This “to choose is to renounce” principle, formulated elegantly by André Gide, is literally followed by the Dust co-founders. Yes, being opinionated around LLMs meet B2B software at the very early stage of this technology demands vision, native expertise, product magic and courage and the Dust founders have plenty.

Some of their product opinions:

🤖 Dust is human-augmenting (not replacing). R2D2, not Skynet.

💸 Focusing on the upside rather than cutting costs.

🔎 Purposefully designed around artificial intelligence

🛠️ Investing in craftsmanship over chatbots.

🌟 Solve hard problems at hand on user experience and product quality.

👩‍💻 Obsessing for user-centered products that need to be safe and usable

🚀 Focusing on the application/product layer

🔧 Designing for tinkerers, striving to be useful to everyone.

Gabriel and Stan are so opinionated and transparent with their opinions that they have created a first version of the Dust product constitution.

We are excited to be part of Dust’s mission to bring the power of LLMs into the enterprise in safe, usable ways with new software experiences that augment humans and let software do more and more of the boring parts. Let’s make work “work better” with Dust. DUST DO IT! 💪🏼

Gabriel and Stan original caricatures made in 2012. Smart engineers don’t age.

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Pietro Bezza
Pietro Bezza

Written by Pietro Bezza

Believe in the power of software products to improve people’s lives on a massive scale. Co-founder and Managing Partner at Connect: (www.connectventures.co)