ai

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.

Shorooq Partners

Check: No personal check range is disclosed. Shorooq's equity platform covers the full journey from pre-seed to late-stage growth; Tina's current Venture Partner/adviser listing does not establish independent check authority, so founders should confirm the relevant vehicle and decision process.

Tina looks for high-caliber founders applying differentiated technology to consequential emerging-market problems. Her attributable investment material emphasizes technically credible climate and industrial solutions, strong founder quality, proprietary assets, blue-chip customer validation, and the ability to turn a regional advantage into a scalable category. Her background across banking, private equity, law and insurtech adds a cross-disciplinary diligence lens.

Decasonic

Check: No Abdul-specific check range is public. Decasonic's current team page calls him Venture Investor and says founder Paul Hsu is the firm's sole general partner, so this profile does not imply unilateral allocation authority. Confirm current vehicle, instrument, lead appetite and check size directly.

Abdul invests at the application and interface layers where Web3 provides programmable trust, ownership or economic coordination for AI systems. His current work emphasizes physical AI and robotics data, machine identity and payments, consumer AI applications, prediction markets and AI-native financial infrastructure. Decasonic's underwriting frame combines narrative, product-market fit and execution, with adoption and durable network effects as primary evidence.

Check: No public check range is stated. AINative says it invests at Seed and Series A in AI-native companies and is active; UNLMTD describes larger Seed–Series A checks but remains in formation. Confirm legal vehicle, close status, available capital, allocation and decision process before relying on either.

Alexander's current thesis is that hypergrowth can be assessed through a conjunction of visible structural factors: aligned macro/meso/micro trends, founder cognitive complexity, plan velocity, coherent co-founder dynamics and a supportive capital climate. AINative narrows this to companies substantially built and operated by AI agents. The methodology is unusually explicit but its performance statistics are self-reported and should be independently verified.

1kx

Check: No Wei-specific check range is published. 1kx raised a $75M fund in 2024 and says it writes first checks across cycles, but neither fact establishes an individual ticket; founders should use the firm's pitch channel for current sizing.

Wei invests in the financial and security infrastructure that lets blockchains and autonomous software reduce the cost of trust without sacrificing safety. His work joins deep cryptography with venture underwriting: trust-minimized horizontal scaling, programmable cryptography and purpose-built hardware, threat-resistant privacy, and external enforcement, provenance and governance for agentic AI.

Lux Capital

Check: Not applicable to Nat's events role. Lux invests across stages, but no personal allocation authority or check size belongs to this profile. Founder financing pitches should go to Lux's investment team.

Nat designs the convening layer around Lux's frontier-science and technology network. Her work brings together founders, researchers, executives, investors, journalists and creative leaders in focused formats such as AI, AI-biology and health-intelligence summits. The operating thesis is that carefully curated, content-rich gatherings create trust, knowledge exchange and useful founder connections. It is a platform thesis, not a personal investment thesis.

Khosla Ventures

Menlo Park, CA

AUM: $18B

Benchmark

San Francisco, CA

AUM: $50B+

Blockwall

Frankfurt, Germany / Paris, France

Borderless Capital

Miami

Cadenza

New York / San Francisco, United States

Caladan Ventures

Singapore

LongHash Ventures

Singapore

Agesa Emeklilik Teknoloji VCIF

Istanbul

AUM: ₺303M