# Particle launches on token efficiency as frontier models get pricier per task and AI security budgets grow

*By VC Tech Radar • October 29, 2026*

Suhail's Particle launched with a model that cuts token use on top of DeepSeek, new benchmarks show long-horizon coding agents still struggle, and a16z's CISO survey shows where AI-security budgets are going. Also covered: new rounds in robotics, vertical agents and defense.

## Particle bets on cheaper intelligence per task

Suhail launched a new company, Particle. Its first model, particle-1, is the start of a developer-focused series. The company says it matches performance while using about 45% fewer tokens [^1]. It is post-trained on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017. The stated long-term goal is "continuous post-training," meaning model improvements that ship as fast as software [^2]. OpenRouter relays Particle's claim of 28–52% fewer output tokens than the DeepSeek base across four coding benchmarks [^3]. Garry Tan says Particle will be at the frontier for the lowest dollar per unit of intelligence [^4].

The underlying problem is cost per task, not price per token. Two Minute Papers says the new DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017 builds much better working software and costs just over $1 per million output tokens. In the host's own tests, though, it took two to three times as many tokens as Claude Opus to finish the same task [^5]. Particle's pitch targets exactly that gap: open weights with better token efficiency.

Other model signals from the period:
- **Gemini 4 Carbon.** Demis Hassabis calls it "SOTA across key benchmarks" but published no figures [^6].
- **ViBench 2.0.** Replit's new benchmark has agents build a whole product from an empty project, one feature at a time. Even GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Astra and Opus 5.5 passed every check in only 49–65% of builds [^7]. Long-horizon autonomous building still has a lot of room to improve.
- **OpenAI and Google TPUs.** Reuters, citing The Information, reports that OpenAI plans to buy Google TPUs. No terms were disclosed and neither company commented [^8].
- **Cartesia H-Nets.** Albert Gu reports that a new version of these byte-level models shows up to 3–5x efficiency gains in controlled scaling-law experiments. At larger scale it matches an open-source model trained on 11T tokens using about 10x less data and compute [^9].

## AI security: budgets are rising, but incumbents get the first call

a16z surveyed 100 CISOs at companies with 1,000+ employees. 87% expect security spending to rise, driven mainly by AI-enabled threats and by their own AI deployments [^10]. All seven of the most-selected 2027 initiatives involve AI [^10]. Production use is still low: 18% run AI SOC tools in production, and 13% run AI offensive security or AI vulnerability remediation. Within 12 months, 45% plan to buy or upgrade internal AI-agent security, 42% offensive security, and 38% AI governance [^10].

The go-to-market picture is less favorable for startups:
- 44% would first look for AI security features from their existing platform; 21% would start with an AI-native vendor. 47% say a capability gap their incumbent can't fill would lead them to pick a startup [^10].
- Some categories have as many as 43 vendors [^10].
- a16z discloses that it led Armadin's Series B. Armadin uses autonomous agents to find exploitable paths through enterprise systems [^10].

Attack capability is the reason for the urgency. In a simulated 32-step network attack, GPT-4o stalled at step 2. Today's top models got about three-quarters of the way through on average, and the best runs completed all 32 steps [^11]. Wiz's CTO said the company's Atlas harness, which combines DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic models, made its PHP remote-code-execution finding possible. He described the flaw as affecting 12 years of PHP deployments in default configurations [^12]. He said most monitored workloads were still unpatched [^12]. He told startups to plan for critical vulnerabilities arriving monthly or even weekly, and to build automated patching and infrastructure-as-code while they are still small [^12].

## Rounds and launches

- **Foundry Robotics** raised a $100M Series A led by Marlinspike, with Khosla continuing. It is building a 130,000 sq ft factory in Emeryville and says it already ships to paying customers in energy, telecom, autonomous vehicles and defense [^13].
- **Broccoli (YC W22)** raised $52M across its Series A and B for AI phone agents that serve plumbing, HVAC and electrical contractors. It has 1,500+ businesses on the platform and has booked 2.5M appointments. The founders knocked on 140 contractor doors, and the plumbing owner who first gave them time is now COO [^14].
- **Fragment** launched with $56M: a Series A led by 8VC, plus a seed co-led by General Catalyst and A* [^15]. It resolves supply-chain exceptions, starting with direct procurement [^16].
- **Formation Bio** launched a $600M fund to acquire drugs and move them through the clinic, pairing the capital with its AI platform [^17].
- **Diode**, a PCB design-and-manufacturing company whose Series A a16z led, hired an a16z investor as president [^18].
- **Bunkerhill**, which builds agents for health systems, says it has grown 12x annualized since January and closed eight figures of ARR in one week [^19].
- **FluxCap (YC P26)**, founded by former DOJ antitrust chiefs, came out of stealth building "Deep Legal Tech" [^20].

## Operating data from scaled vertical and defense companies

**Hippocratic AI** has about 300 employees, has raised about $450M, and launched its product only about 21 months ago. It reports 290M patient interactions and counts five of the top seven payers among its customers [^21]. The CEO says it charges about $9–10/hour. Running the same 31-model stack on closed models would cost about $105/hour in compute alone, which is why it uses open weights [^21]. Most of its traction comes from "infinite pilot" work, meaning care nobody offered before. In one example, calls to 1,700 patients lost to follow-up led 180 to complete CT scans, which found three cancers [^21].

**Stark**, a European defense company backed by Sequoia, won billions in contracts within 18 months [^22]. It grew from zero to 700 people in two years [^22] and plans to invest about €600M in R&D and production capacity over 12–36 months [^22]. The founders say European procurement has gone from years to months, and they expect that change to last [^22].

## Pressure on incumbent software

SaaStr, citing the WSJ, says about $300B in risky PE-backed loans come due in 2028–29, and roughly a third of that is software [^23]. Software loans fell from about 95 to about 85 cents on the dollar after new Anthropic and OpenAI models came out, while other loans held near 96 [^23]. Elizabeth Yin argues customers will no longer pay $25,000 for a CRM they can rebuild themselves [^24]. She says Hustle Fund runs about 90% of its operations on agents [^25]. In her view the lasting value moves to support: maintenance, security and uptime [^26].

## Orbital compute

Cowboy Space, led by Robinhood cofounder Baiju Bhatt and backed by Index, unveiled a rocket built to carry five racks of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs into orbit. Its stated aim is space compute that costs the same as compute on the ground [^27]. Starcloud, a competitor backed by Benchmark, is valued at $2.3B [^27].

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### Sources

[^1]: [𝕏 post by @Suhail](https://x.com/Suhail/status/2115497949421883648)
[^2]: [𝕏 post by @Suhail](https://x.com/Suhail/status/2115497953544864048)
[^3]: [𝕏 post by @OpenRouter](https://x.com/OpenRouter/status/2115564621717512295)
[^4]: [𝕏 post by @garrytan](https://x.com/garrytan/status/2115517748860375286)
[^5]: [Deepseek's New AI Has A Secret](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pryCaGv8wuo)
[^6]: [𝕏 post by @demishassabis](https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2115489550256746502)
[^7]: [𝕏 post by @Replit](https://x.com/Replit/status/2115553116942975013)
[^8]: [r/artificial post by u/winer666](https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1xhzycw/)
[^9]: [𝕏 post by @_albertgu](https://x.com/_albertgu/status/2115502110578290900)
[^10]: [𝕏 article by @steph_zhang](https://x.com/i/article/2115253341337034752)
[^11]: [𝕏 post by @a16z](https://x.com/a16z/status/2115498840006815757)
[^12]: [Wiz’s CTO on PHP2Shell and the coming 'vulnpocalypse' | Equity Podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh1bHCl1R4k)
[^13]: [𝕏 post by @adarshkulkarni](https://x.com/adarshkulkarni/status/2115479547479273658)
[^14]: [𝕏 post by @ycombinator](https://x.com/ycombinator/status/2115550323607740769)
[^15]: [𝕏 post by @pranavmulgund](https://x.com/pranavmulgund/status/2115465594313298302)
[^16]: [𝕏 post by @roelofbotha](https://x.com/roelofbotha/status/2115601838317707465)
[^17]: [𝕏 post by @a16z](https://x.com/a16z/status/2115447517639061899)
[^18]: [𝕏 article by @zabie_e](https://x.com/i/article/2115550957815881728)
[^19]: [𝕏 post by @nish_khandwala](https://x.com/nish_khandwala/status/2115072182699090253)
[^20]: [𝕏 post by @ycombinator](https://x.com/ycombinator/status/2115457251922325907)
[^21]: [Why vertical AI apps will win | Munjal Shah, Co-founder and CEO, Hippocratic AI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI9rT1rkXgU)
[^22]: [European Defense Sovereignty Starts in the Factory: Stark’s Uwe Horstmann and Johannes Schaback](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhIabMKHJlA)
[^23]: [The $300 Billion Software Debt Wall: The Big B2B Defaults Unfortunately Haven’t Even Started Yet](https://www.saastr.com/the-300-billion-software-debt-wall-the-big-b2b-defaults-unfortunately-havent-even-started-yet)
[^24]: [𝕏 post by @dunkhippo33](https://x.com/dunkhippo33/status/2115489839613088119)
[^25]: [𝕏 post by @dunkhippo33](https://x.com/dunkhippo33/status/2115489841571823715)
[^26]: [𝕏 post by @dunkhippo33](https://x.com/dunkhippo33/status/2115489844205859309)
[^27]: [The New Space Race: Startups Press Ahead on ‘Orbital Infrastructure,’ Test Feasibility of Data Centers](https://www.newcomer.co/p/the-new-space-race-startups-press)