Eren Bali has made a career of spotting what comes next. The serial founder who built Udemy into an online learning giant and later launched Carbon Health now has another thesis: that text-based chatbots represent the infancy of consumer AI, not its final form.
His latest venture, Monogram, emerged from stealth with $40 million in seed funding—a sum that would have turned heads in any era, but especially now, when even hot AI startups are finding the fundraising window narrower than it was a year ago. DST Global and Lux Capital co-led the round, joined by Conviction, SOMA Capital, Gradient Ventures, e2vc, and Maxitech. The investor roster reads like a who's who of the AI establishment: Arthur Mensch from Mistral AI, Lyft co-founder Logan Green, Y Combinator's Garry Tan, and a constellation of others who've built products at scale.
The pitch? Monogram isn't a chatbot. At least, that's what Bali and his co-founders—Edouard Tabet and Murat Akbal—insist. Instead of spitting out paragraphs of text, the iOS app generates what the team calls a "visual, interactive user interface" tailored to each prompt. Ask it to compare electric vehicles, and you get an interface designed for comparison. Search for a restaurant, and the app builds something closer to a bespoke discovery tool than a list of links.
It's an ambitious reimagining of how people might interact with AI. Monogram draws explicit parallels to Doug Engelbart's legendary 1968 demonstration—the "Mother of All Demos"—and other watershed moments like the browser and multi-touch on the iPhone. Whether that comparison holds up remains to be seen. The app launched on the App Store the same day the funding was announced, with version 1.0 arriving on June 30, followed by updates on approximately July 2, July 3, and July 6—a pace that suggests the team is iterating rapidly.
The Unusual Marriage of Investors
The funding round itself is notable for its composition. DST Global, best known for writing nine-figure checks into late-stage companies, has been dipping earlier into AI deals—a shift that mirrors the broader venture landscape's obsession with the category. Lux Capital, meanwhile, closed a $1.5 billion Fund IX earlier this year with a stated focus on deep tech and artificial intelligence. The firm has long cultivated a reputation for backing technical founders tackling hard problems, and Monogram fits that mold.
Then there's Conviction, the firm led by Sarah Guo, a former Greylock partner who has become something of a bellwether for AI interface innovation. Her involvement, alongside Gradient Ventures—Google's AI-focused seed fund—suggests Monogram has captured the attention of investors who spend their days tracking every shift in how people interact with machine learning models.
The angel list, too, is telling. Ramp CFO Karim Atiyeh, Oscar Health co-founder Mario Schlosser, Color co-founder Othman Laraki, NFX co-founder Pete Flint, and product advisor Lenny Rachitsky all wrote checks. These are operators who've seen consumer products scale—or stumble—and presumably believe Bali and his team have identified something real.
What Happens Next
Monogram declined to disclose its valuation, a common move in an environment where revealing the number can invite unwanted scrutiny—or set expectations the company may struggle to meet. The company's LinkedIn page lists 11–50 employees, with 16 profiles visible as of July 8. Interestingly, the hiring page on Monogram's website showed no open roles at the time of the funding announcement. That could signal a team focused on refining the product before scaling headcount, or perhaps just caution about growing too fast in an uncertain market.
The app itself remains in beta. It requires Google Sign-In and offers optional calendar integration, suggesting Monogram is already thinking about how AI might weave into daily workflows. The terms of service note that third-party AI providers may process user content to generate responses—a standard disclosure in this era—but the company pledges that any use of data for training requires explicit user consent. A small gesture, maybe, but one that nods to the growing unease around how AI companies handle personal information.
For now, Monogram is an iPhone-only app requiring iOS 26.0 or later, limiting its reach to those on Apple's latest software. Whether the company can translate rapid early iteration into sustained traction—and whether its interface paradigm resonates beyond the early adopters who download every new AI tool—will determine if that $40 million seed becomes a footnote or a foundation.
Bali has built companies before. This time, he's betting that the future of AI isn't about talking to machines—it's about them building interfaces we didn't know we needed. It's a big idea. And in this market, big ideas either become breakthroughs or cautionary tales. Sometimes both.
