Introducing AIX Ventures
In March of 2013, during my doctoral work at Stanford, I received a summer internship application from a high school student, Tanay Tandon. Although Tanay had little experience, his curiosity was off the charts. That summer he built a neural net to count red and white blood cells, dramatically reducing the cost of what was an expensive test at the time. This was the beginning of his company, Athelas, of which I am an early investor and which recently announced its unicorn financing.
My journey from Stanford to Metamind CEO to Salesforce Chief Scientist to now founding you.com has included many amazing entrepreneurs along the way. And I have been humbled to be an early investor in many AI-focused companies such as Weights & Biases, HuggingFace, and Ping, to name a few. I have also enjoyed co-investing with some of my favorite AI counterparts.
Last January I was reflecting on the importance of AI — part of the fourth industrial revolution — and how we are just getting started. It is clear that machines are still just beginning to learn and the next few decades are going to be an exciting time for AI and humanity. There is going to be generation after generation of AI entrepreneurs who fundamentally rethink our approach and enable step changes in the technology. These entrepreneurs are going to need a strong AI community to help them achieve the best outcomes.
That’s why today we are launching AIX Ventures, a new AI-focused venture firm made up of some of the world’s top AI practitioners. Our $50M Fund I is focused on PreSeed and Seed startups. Fund I Investing Partners include Pieter Abbeel, Anthony Goldbloom, Chris Manning, and myself. At AIX we believe top AI practitioners need to be practicing AI, so we have an amazing full-time team led by my co-founder Shaun Johnson, previously VP of Engineering, Product, and Design at Lilt. The AIX team also includes General Partner Fang Yuan, formerly of Baidu Ventures where she led BV’s investment in Covariant. We are honored to be backed by Bain Capital Ventures, Foundation Capital, Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, Village Global, Vintage IP, and many amazing AI practitioners and investors. Thank you everyone for your trust.
Best Wishes,
Richard