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Joseph “Joe” Montana, co-founder of iMFL and retired National Football League (NFL) quarterback, speaks during an interview in San Francisco, California, U.S. on Tuesday, April 30, 2013.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Joe Montana won his first Super Bowl as an NFL quarterback in 1982. Almost four decades later, he’s about to get his first IPO as a venture capitalist.

Montana, who led the San Francisco 49ers to four Super Bowl victories and was inducted into the National Football League Hall of Fame in 2000, has spent the past six years investing in start-ups through his firm, Liquid 2 Ventures. He started with a $28 million fund, and is now closing his third fund that’s almost three times bigger.

One of Liquid 2’s first investments was announced in July 2015, when a code repository called GitLab raised a $1.5 million seed round after going through the Y Combinator incubator program. GitLab’s valuation at the time was around $12 million, and other participants in the financing included Khosla Ventures and Ashton Kutcher.

On Thursday, GitLab is set to debut on the Nasdaq with a market cap of almost $10 billion, based on a $69 share price, the high end of its range. Montana’s initial $100,000 investment, along with some follow-on funding, is worth about $42 million at that price.

“We’re all pretty pumped,” Montana, 65, said in an interview this week, while vacationing in Italy. “This is going to be a monster for us.”

Joe Montana #16 of the San Francisco 49ers celebrates after they scored against the Cincinnati Bengals during Super Bowl XVI on January 24, 1982 at the Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan. The Niners won the Super Bowl 26 -21.
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While famous athletes dabbling in start-ups has become a trend in Silicon Valley — from NBA stars Stephen Curry and Andre Iguodala to tennis legend Serena Williams — Montana jumped into the game much earlier. Prior to Liquid 2, Montana was involved with a firm called HRJ, which was founded by ex-49ers stars Harris Barton and Ronnie Lott.

HRJ, which invested in other funds rather than directly into companies, collapsed in 2009 and was sued for allegedly failing to meet its financial commitments.

But rather than return to the sport that brought him fame in an executive role or as a broadcaster, like so many fellow all-star quarterbacks, Montana stuck with investing. This time he took much a different route.

Convinced by Ron Conway

Ron Conway, the Silicon Valley super angel known for lucrative bets on Google, Facebook and Airbnb, started showing Montana around the world of early-stage investing, primarily through Y Combinator. Montana, along with a growing crop of seed investors and celebrities, would attended Y Combinator Demo Days, where entrepreneurs show slides of their companies with growth that’s always up and to the right.

“We were trying to see what their secret sauce was and who they looked at and what they were really looking for in early-stage companies,” Montana said referring to Conway and his team. “He started taking us there, and we started doing a handful of investments here and there, and then he talked me into starting a fund.”

In 2015, Conway was speaking to the latest group of founders in the Y Combinator program, and he invited Montana to attend the event. That’s where Montana met GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij, a Dutch entrepreneur who had turned an open-source project for helping developers collaborate on code into a company that was packaging the software and selling it to businesses.

“We got together, and said, ‘hey this is a special guy,'” Montana said. “We committed that night.”

GitLab had just come out of Y Combinator. In his presentation at Demo Day that March, Sijbrandij told the audience that his company had 10 employees along with 800 contributors working on the open-source project. GitLab was on pace for annual sales of $1 million, he said, and paying customers included Apple, Cisco, Disney and Microsoft.

GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij at company event in London
GitLab

GitLab now employs over 1,350 people in more than 65 countries, according to its prospectus. As it prepares to hit the public market on Thursday, GitLab’s annualized revenue is over $230 million. Sales in the second quarter jumped 69% to $58.1 million

However, because GitLab spends the equivalent of three-quarters of its revenue on sales and marketing, the company recorded a net loss of $40.2 million in the latest quarter. Much of the marketing budget is focused on expanding its DevOps (the combination of software development and IT operations) user base.

“To drive new customer growth, we intend to continue investing in sales and marketing, with a focus on replacing DIY DevOps within larger organizations,” the company said in the prospectus.

‘Still listening to pitches’

For Montana, GitLab marks his firm’s first IPO, though he said “we have 12 or 13 more unicorns in the portfolio,” referring to start-ups valued at $1 billion or more. They include Anduril, the defense technology company led by by Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey, and autonomous vehicle testing start-up Applied Intuition.

Montana has three other partners in the firm: Mike Miller, who co-founded Cloudant and sold it to IBM; Michael Ma, who sold a start-up to Google and became a product manager there; and Nate Montana, Joe’s son, who previously worked at Twitter.

Montana said he’s involved in the fund on a day-to-day basis and attends the partner meetings every Tuesday. He said his partners, who are more experienced in technology, handle much of the technical diligence and sourcing of deals, while he focuses on helping portfolios with connections in his network.

“Until the pandemic, I was still speaking around the country,” Montana said, adding that he didn’t start taking a salary until the third fund. “I was out speaking to companies like SAP, Amex, Visa and a lot of large corporations, like large insurance firms down to Burger King.”

Specific to GitLab, Montana said he connected Sijbrandij early on with a senior executive at Visa, when the company was looking to do a deal with the payment processor.

“I’m still listening to pitches, I go to pitches and do all that,” Montana said. “But my time is better spent now helping with connecting these companies as they mature.”

WATCH: GitLab co-founder and CEO on the future of work during and after the pandemic

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Beta stock jumps 9% on $1 billion motor deal with air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility

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Beta stock jumps 9% on  billion motor deal with air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility

Beta Technologies strikes $1B electric motor manufacturing deal with Eve Air Mobility

Beta Technologies shares surged more than 9% after air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility announced an up to $1 billion deal to buy motors from the Vermont-based company.

Eve, which was started by Brazilian airplane maker Embraer and is now under Eve Holding, said the manufacturing deal could equal as much as $1 billion over 10 years. The Florida-based company said it has a backlog of 2,800 vehicles.

Shares of Eve Holding gained 14%.

Eve CEO Johann Bordais called the deal a “pivotal milestone” in the advancement of the company’s electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, technology.

“Their electric motor technology will play a critical role in powering our aircraft during cruise, supporting the maturity of our propulsion architecture as we progress toward entry into service,” he said in a release.

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Amazon launches cloud AI tool to help engineers recover from outages faster

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Amazon launches cloud AI tool to help engineers recover from outages faster

Mateusz Slodkowski | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Amazon’s cloud unit on Tuesday announced AI-enabled software designed to help clients better understand and recover from outages.

DevOps Agent, as the artificial intelligence tool from Amazon Web Services is called, predicts the cause of technical hiccups using input from third-party tools such as Datadog and Dynatrace. AWS said customers can sign up to use the tool Tuesday in a preview, before Amazon starts charging for the service.

The AI outage tool from AWS is intended to help companies more quickly figure out what caused an outage and implement fixes, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of agentic AI at AWS, told CNBC. It’s what site reliability engineers, or SREs, do at many companies that provide online services.

SREs try to prevent downtime and jump into action during live incidents. Startups such as Resolve and Traversal have started marketing AI assistants for these experts. Microsoft’s Azure cloud group introduced an SRE Agent in May.

Rather than waiting for on-call staff members to figure out what happened, the AWS DevOps Agent automatically assigns work to agents that look into different hypotheses, Sivasubramanian said.

“By the time the on-call ops team member dials in, they have an incident report with preliminary investigation of what could be the likely outcome, and then suggest what could be the remediation as well,” Sivasubramanian told CNBC ahead of AWS’ Reinvent conference in Las Vegas this week.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia has tested the AWS DevOps Agent. In under 15 minutes, the software found the root cause of an issue that would have taken a veteran engineer hours, AWS said in a statement.

The tool relies on Amazon’s in-house AI models and those from other providers, a spokesperson said.

AWS has been selling software in addition to raw infrastructure for many years. Amazon was early to start renting out server space and storage to developers since the mid-2000s, and technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Oracle have followed.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, these cloud infrastructure providers have been trying to demonstrate how generative AI models, which are often training in large cloud computing data centers, can speed up work for software developers.

Over the summer, Amazon announced Kiro, a so-called vibe coding tool that produces and modifies source code based on user text prompts. In November, Google debuted similar software for individual software developers called Antigravity, and Microsoft sells subscriptions to GitHub Copilot.

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Amazon to let cloud clients customize AI models midway through training for $100,000 a year

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Amazon to let cloud clients customize AI models midway through training for 0,000 a year

Attendees pass an Amazon Web Services logo during AWS re:Invent 2024, a conference hosted by Amazon Web Services, at The Venetian hotel in Las Vegas on Dec. 3, 2024.

Noah Berger | Getty Images

Amazon has found a way to let cloud clients extensively customize generative AI models. The catch is that the system costs $100,000 per year.

The Nova Forge offering from Amazon Web Services gives organizations access to Amazon’s AI models in various stages of training so they can incorporate their own data earlier in the process.

Already, companies can fine-tune large language models after they’ve been trained. The results with Nova Forge will lean more heavily on the data that customers supply. Nova Forge customers will also have the option to refine open-weight models, but training data and computing infrastructure are not included.

Organizations that assemble their own models might end up spending hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, which means using Nova Forge is more affordable, Amazon said.

AWS released its own models under the Nova brand in 2024, but they aren’t the first choice for most software developers. A July survey from Menlo Ventures said that by the middle of this year, Amazon-backed Anthropic controlled 32% of the market for enterprise LLMs, followed by OpenAI with 25%, Google with 20% and Meta with 9% — Amazon Nova had a less than 5% share, a Menlo spokesperson said.

The Nova models are available through AWS’ Bedrock service for running models on Amazon cloud infrastructure, as are Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 models.

“We are a frontier lab that has focused on customers,” Rohit Prasad, Amazon head scientist for artificial general intelligence, told CNBC in an interview. “Our customers wanted it. We have invented on their behalf to make this happen.”

Nova Forge is also in use by internal Amazon customers, including teams that work on the company’s stores and the Alexa AI assistant, Prasad said.

Reddit needed an AI model for moderating content that would be sophisticated about the many subjects people discuss on the social network. Engineers found that a Nova model enhanced with Reddit data through Forge performed better than commercially available large-scale models, Prasad said. Booking.com, Nimbus Therapeutics, the Nomura Research Institute and Sony are also building models with Forge, Amazon said.

Organizations can request that Amazon engineers help them build their Forge models, but that assistance is not included in the new service’s $100,000 annual fee.

AWS is also introducing new models for developers at its Reinvent conference in Las Vegas this week.

Nova 2 Pro is a reasoning model whose tests show it performs at least as well as Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5, OpenAI’s GPT-5 and GPT-5.1, and Google’s Gemini 3.0 Pro Preview, Amazon said. Reasoning involves running a series of computations that might take extra time in response to requests to produce better answers. Nova 2 Pro will be available in early access to AWS customers with Forge subscriptions, Prasad said. That means Forge customers and Amazon engineers will be able to try Nova 2 Pro at the same time.

Nova 2 Omni is another reasoning model that can process incoming images, speech, text and videos, and it generates images and text. It’s the first reasoning model with that range of capability, Amazon said. Amazon hopes that, by delivering a multifaceted model, it can lower the cost and complexity of incorporating AI models into applications.

Tens of thousands of organizations are using Nova models each week, Prasad said. AWS has said it has millions of customers. Nova is the second-most popular family of models in Bedrock, Prasad said. The top group of models are from Anthropic.

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