AI

Founders Fund

Check: $1M-$100M+ (multi-stage, also invests personally and through Thiel Capital)

The original contrarian VC. 'We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.' Seeks companies that can become category-defining monopolies in markets others ignore. First principles thinking is non-negotiable. The key question: 'What important truth do few people agree with you on?' Backs revolutionary technology, not incremental improvements. The Venn diagram of 'right' and 'different' is where he invests. Thiel's intellectual framework is deeply philosophical — draws from René Girard's mimetic theory (competition is imitation, and imitation destroys value), Leo Strauss, and libertarian economics. Founders Fund's motto: 'We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters' — a critique of Silicon Valley's focus on trivial consumer apps instead of transformative technology. Thiel distinguishes between 'definite optimism' (having a concrete plan to build a better future) and 'indefinite optimism' (vaguely hoping things get better). He champions the former. Created the Thiel Fellowship ($100K grants for young people to drop out of college and build companies) — alumni include Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum), Austin Russell (Luminar Technologies), and others.

BoxGroup

Check: $500K-$5M (recently raised a $550M fund in Oct 2025, significantly larger than previous funds)

One of the most active and respected seed investors in NYC. Co-founded TechStars NYC (now Techstars NYC), deeply embedded in the New York startup ecosystem since its earliest days. Known for being highly accessible, fast to decide, and genuinely helpful post-investment. Just raised a $550M fund (Oct 2025) — a massive step up from previous funds, signaling BoxGroup's evolution from small seed fund to significant early-stage player. Not thesis-driven — David reacts to founders and ideas he finds compelling rather than fitting investments into a predefined framework. This flexibility has served him well — his portfolio spans fintech (Plaid), healthcare (Oscar, Ro), consumer (Harry's, Away), and more. The common thread isn't sector but founder quality and early product-market fit signals. David is deeply connected to the NYC startup ecosystem and has helped shape it over the past 15+ years. He's often one of the first calls founders make when starting a company in New York.

First Round Capital

Check: $500K-$3M (seed only)

The seed-stage specialist. Invests earliest and deepest at seed — First Round was one of the firms that pioneered institutional seed investing. Built First Round into a platform that punches well above its check size — extensive founder community (~1000 active founders), expert network (First Round Network), and operational support. First Round Review (their media arm) produces some of the best tactical startup content anywhere — deeply researched guides on hiring, product, management, and go-to-market. Believes the best seed investors win by helping, not just funding. Josh's personal background as a serial entrepreneur (Half.com, Infonautics) gives him deep empathy for founders. He's lived the founding journey and knows what early-stage companies actually need. First Round's community model is a key competitive advantage — founders help each other, creating a network effect that makes the fund more valuable with every new investment. Known for being one of the most founder-friendly VCs — fast to respond, honest about passing, and genuinely helpful when invested.

General Catalyst

Check: $1M-$100M+ (multi-stage, GC manages $25B+)

'Responsible innovation' thesis: technology should solve real problems for real people, not create consumer distractions. Strong health and enterprise focus. Author of 'Unscaled' — argues that technology is unscaling the economy, allowing small, nimble companies to compete with large incumbents by renting scale (cloud, AI, platforms) rather than building it. Recently evolved GC into a 'global transformation company' — not just investing but also building internal ventures, acquiring companies, and providing 'transformation services' to portfolio companies and external partners. This is a controversial evolution — GC is now part VC, part PE, part consulting firm. Hemant believes the traditional VC model is outdated and that the next great investment firm needs to do more than write checks. Backs companies that endure and compound over decades. Deep conviction that AI will transform healthcare, reducing costs 10x while improving outcomes. Views technology as a tool for social good, not just wealth creation.

Benchmark

Check: $5M-$15M

Sarah's investing worldview is built on a few interlocking beliefs: (1) The best consumer companies create compounding engagement loops where users do MORE over time, not less. She formalized this into the Hierarchy of Engagement framework: first get users to a 'core action,' then create 'accruing benefits' and 'mounting loss' to retain them, then achieve self-perpetuation through network effects. (2) For marketplaces, aggregate GMV is a vanity metric and a red herring. What matters is 'Happy GMV' — the portion of transactions where both buyer and seller had an experience good enough to drive retention. Happiness, not scale, is your moat. No matter how large an incumbent, they are vulnerable to a new entrant that makes buyers and sellers happier. (3) She prefers founders who start in a 'thimble' of a market — a small, constrained market adjacent to very large ones — and expand outward, rather than going after a big market from day one. (4) In AI, she believes the next wave of consumer AI will be social, not solo. AI avatars, chatbots, and social AI products will win over single-player tools. (5) For B2B AI, she coined 'sell work, not software' — rather than selling a 15% productivity improvement via software, AI startups should sell the completed work itself, delivering a 95% improvement. Incumbents are stuck selling software; startups can leapfrog them. (6) She believes markets have their own physics — 'you can't change those physics, regardless of how great the founder is.'

Khosla Ventures

Check: $500K-$50M+ (across seed fund and main fund)

Explicitly optimizes for ~70% failure rates to back 'black swan' outcomes. Actively seeks opportunities that appear 'crazy' to most of the market. Capital-intensive, science-heavy bets. Believes fusion and superhot geothermal will be primary energy sources by mid-2030s. Bets on the future being radically different from the present. Co-founded Sun Microsystems. Famous for saying 'expertise is the enemy of imagination' — believes experts are often the worst at predicting disruption in their own fields because they're anchored to existing paradigms. Has been one of the most aggressive climate tech investors, putting billions into energy transition companies. Views AI as the most transformative technology in history, predicting it will replace 80% of jobs in 80% of occupations within decades. Runs both a seed fund (for earlier, riskier bets) and a main fund (for larger investments). Willing to lose money on most investments if the winners are transformational.

Bessemer Venture Partners

Check: $1M-$100M+ (multi-stage, BVP has $3.6B+ under management)

The cloud computing investor. His annual 'State of the Cloud' report is the definitive industry reference for cloud/SaaS metrics. Bessemer's 'Cloud Atlas' benchmarking tool is used by thousands of SaaS companies. The firm publicly lists its 'Anti-Portfolio' — companies they passed on (including Apple, Google, Facebook, Intel) — as a reminder of humility. Data-driven, metrics-obsessed approach to SaaS investing. Has been investing in cloud for over two decades, since before 'cloud' was even a common term. Believes AI will fundamentally transform labor-intensive enterprise processes and that the next generation of cloud companies will be 'AI-native' rather than AI-augmented. BVP created the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index (EMCLOUD) tracking public cloud companies — a widely referenced industry benchmark. Byron sees vertical SaaS (purpose-built cloud for specific industries) as one of the largest remaining opportunities.

Big Pi Ventures

Investing in deep tech and blockchain convergence at Big Pi Ventures, focused on the Greek and European tech ecosystem.

Gil Capital (Solo GP)

Check: $500K-$10M+ (flexible, has written checks as large as $50M+ in later-stage co-investments)

One of the largest and most successful solo GP funds ever ($1B+). Unusually dense hit rate across breakout companies — has invested in more unicorns than most institutional funds. Invests based on pattern recognition from decades of operating and investing. Moves fast, decides fast — known for making investment decisions in a single meeting. Written 'The High Growth Handbook,' the definitive guide on scaling from Series B to IPO. Being on your cap table is a strong signal to other investors — 'Elad Gil is on the cap table' has become a credibility marker in Silicon Valley. Currently most excited about AI as a platform shift comparable to mobile and cloud. Has shifted from primarily angel investing to writing larger checks ($5-50M+) as his fund has grown. Views the current AI wave as the most important technology shift since the internet.

Kleiner Perkins

Check: $1M-$50M+

Leads Kleiner Perkins' enterprise practice. Previously at Social Capital where he led the Slack and Figma investments — two of the most product-obsessed enterprise companies ever built. Strong product-first culture: believes the best enterprise companies feel like consumer products. The enterprise should be delightful, not just functional. Mamoon's core insight: enterprise software was historically sold top-down (CIO buys for the company), but the best modern enterprise companies grow bottom-up (individual users love the product, it spreads through the organization, and eventually the company buys an enterprise license). This 'product-led growth' (PLG) pattern defined Slack, Figma, Notion, and many of the best enterprise companies of the last decade. Now at Kleiner Perkins, Mamoon applies this same lens to AI-native enterprise products — looking for AI tools that are so delightful and useful that they spread organically within organizations.

Lux Capital

Check: $1M-$50M+

'Atoms, not bits.' The biggest opportunities are in companies that manipulate the physical world, not just software. Willing to fund multi-year R&D timelines. Just raised the firm's largest fund ever ($1.5B, Jan 2026, oversubscribed). Invests at the intersection of science and engineering where structural technical advantages create durable moats. Core belief: the 'directional arrow of progress' in science is inevitable — you can bet on where science is going because it only moves forward. Lux looks for 'narrative violations' — moments when consensus is wrong and reality is about to prove it. Josh believes the best founders have 'a secret' — proprietary technical insight that others can't see or don't believe. Has been vocal that the defense tech renaissance is just beginning, not a trend.

Sequoia Capital

Check: $500K-$50M+ (stage dependent)

The defining voice of Sequoia's AI thesis and arguably the most influential AI investor-thinker in Silicon Valley. Co-authors a series of landmark essays with Pat Grady that have become the canonical frameworks for understanding generative AI's evolution. Core conviction: the application layer — not foundation models — is where enduring value accrues. Foundation models are commoditizing rapidly (only five scaled players remain: Microsoft/OpenAI, Amazon/Anthropic, Google, Meta, xAI), so the real opportunity is in vertical AI applications that solve end-to-end human problems. Believes we have entered the 'Age of Abundance' where AI makes once-scarce labor available everywhere at near-zero cost, transforming the addressable market from software ($1T) to services ($10T+). In this world, 'taste' — the human judgment to decide what to build and how — becomes the scarcest resource. Her January 2026 essay declares AGI is functionally here in the form of long-horizon agents that can sustain multi-step work, correct errors, and persist toward goals autonomously. Sequoia has deployed roughly $150M into foundation models but over $1.5B into application-layer companies, reflecting a 10:1 bet on applications over infrastructure.

Craft Ventures

Check: $1M-$50M

Pioneered 'Bottom-Up SaaS' — the strategy of applying consumer growth tactics to B2B products. At PayPal he learned viral distribution; at Yammer he proved it could work in the enterprise, growing from zero to $56M ARR in under four years before selling to Microsoft for $1.2B. The core filter is predictable, compounding recurring revenue with strong unit economics. Invented the 'Burn Multiple' metric (net burn / net new ARR) that has become an industry-standard efficiency benchmark. Believes the best SaaS companies combine the growth potential of B2C with the enterprise budgets of B2B. Invested in 20+ unicorns. Operator-investor who thinks in SaaS metrics and has published detailed frameworks (Burn Multiple, Difficulty Ratio, The Cadence, Pipeline Metrics) that founders can reverse-engineer. Recently transitioned from General Partner to Venture Partner at Craft as the firm moved away from seed-stage investing.

Maximum Frequency Ventures

Operator-led crypto fund backing builders from idea to scale. Believes the hardest part of building in crypto isn't raising money — it's execution, and partners with founders as embedded co-builders rather than passive check-writers.

1752 VC

Check: $100K

1752 VC positions itself as an early-stage platform for founders and investors rather than a traditional sector-only fund. Publicly, its leadership emphasizes backing companies at the intersection of AI enablement and go-to-market execution, with focus areas including B2B SaaS, energy, and the future of work, especially around AI middleware and application layers.

Bessemer Venture Partners

Khosla Ventures

Menlo Park, CA

AUM: $18B

Craft Ventures

San Francisco, CA

AUM: $3B

Sequoia Capital

Menlo Park, CA

AUM: $85B+

General Catalyst

New York, NY

AUM: $25B

Lux Capital

New York, NY

AUM: $5B

First Round Capital

New York, NY

AUM: $1B+

BoxGroup

New York, NY

AUM: $500M

Kleiner Perkins

Menlo Park, CA

AUM: $10B+

Founders Fund

San Francisco, CA

AUM: $12B

Gil Capital (Solo GP)

Benchmark

San Francisco, CA

AUM: $50B+

Maximum Frequency Ventures

United States

AUM: $50M

a16z Speedrun

San Francisco / Los Angeles, USA

AUM: $200M+ deployed across 250+ startups since 2023