Poetiq Raises $45.8M Seed
Our portfolio company Poetiq has raised a $45.8 million seed round, co-led by FYRFLY Venture Partners and Surface Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, 468 Capital, Operator Collective, NeuronVC, and HICO.
Founded by former DeepMind researchers Shumeet Baluja and Ian Fischer, Poetiq builds recursive self-improvement systems that turn existing language models into expert agents. Their approach has already produced headline-making results: on the ARC-AGI private test set, Poetiq's system scored 54%, 9-10 percentage points better than Gemini 3 Deep Think while costing half as much. On Humanity's Last Exam, they hit 55%, beating Claude Opus 4.6, with optimization costs under $100K.
Rather than fine-tuning models, Poetiq automates the generation of "harnesses" (code, prompts, and data stacks) that lift the performance of any underlying model. As new frontier models are released, Poetiq's harnesses automatically benefit without requiring retraining.
We backed the Poetiq team at the earliest stage because we believed recursive self-improvement could be a path to AGI that sidesteps the capital requirements of training bigger models. With six people (seven as of January) beating the best frontier labs on key benchmarks, that thesis is playing out.
Read the full announcement on Poetiq's blog.