Trajectory opens its platform and confirms a $45M Sequoia-led Series A at $300M
What's the deal? Trajectory, the San Francisco continual-learning startup founded by Ronak Malde, Arjun Karanam and Michael Elabd, has opened its post-training platform to the public and confirmed a Sequoia-led $45 million Series A at a $300 million valuation, TechCrunch reported on 2 November 2026. Nvidia, Bessemer Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures participated. That public figure follows an August Information scoop that Sequoia had led a $40 million round at the same $300 million post-money valuation, two months after a $15 million seed at $115 million.
Who else is in: On 5 November Creandum partner Ghazwa Khalatbari published an X essay, "The Art of Paying Attention", on why Creandum is backing the founders alongside Sequoia, Conviction, Nvidia and Bain Capital Ventures. Creandum GP Fredrik Cassel amplified the piece. PitchBook also lists Creandum among Trajectory investors. The company says total Series A plus seed capital is about $60 million.
What it does: Trajectory sells a "research lab in a box" for post-training: companies bring a benchmark, production environment or examples of what good looks like, then train, inspect traces, compare models and deploy. It markets Continual Grading and related research so domain experts, not only lab researchers, can steer model behaviour from production feedback. Named early users include Harvey, Rogo, Decagon, Mercor and Nvidia. In one result cited by Creandum and Trajectory, the team post-trained a Nemotron Lightning model from 0% to an 8.3% all-pass rate on Harvey's LAB benchmark, matching a reported Opus 5.5 score at far lower cost and higher speed; those are company-reported figures, not an independent audit.
Who's building it: Malde (CEO) was among the Windsurf researchers Google DeepMind acqui-hired; Elabd also worked at DeepMind; Karanam worked on generative foundation models at Apple. The three met as Stanford classmates. TechCrunch puts the team at about 18 people, with recent hires from OpenAI, Stripe and Netflix.
Read more: TechCrunch, Trajectory (platform launch), The Information, Ghazwa Khalatbari / Creandum (X), Fredrik Cassel (X)
Image: Creandum X essay cover for Trajectory (Creandum / X)
