Today, we are thrilled to announce our inaugural $14M fund for Mythos Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm investing in early-stage transformative AI companies.
We are proud to be backed by Metaplanet, Delphi Ventures, and The Operating Group alongside a group of AI founders, technologists, investors, and operators who share our vision of building a radically better future with artificial intelligence.
Our team has spent the past decade in the trenches as AI practitioners: leading AGI deployment strategy research at DeepMind, building AI-powered lending platform Upstart (Nasdaq: $UPST), and incubating scientific moonshots at Convergent Research.
As generalists across the transformative AI ecosystem, we invest in hardware, infrastructure, developer tools, foundation models, and vertical and horizontal applications that disrupt existing industries or serve entirely new markets in the emerging AI economy. We support founding teams at critical junctures in their startup journey: from fundraising and growth strategy, to product development and technical roadmapping, to long-term safety and governance.
Our investment strategy focuses on three core drivers that we believe will be especially important in the coming decade:
‘AGI-proof’ companies: Startups whose business models will not be made predictably obsolete by the radically more advanced and general AI systems we expect to see in the coming years. Absent regulatory limits, we expect capabilities of future systems to exceed human performance on virtually all cognitive tasks. Startups must therefore prepare for fundamental defensibility in a world of AGI-equipped teams building competing products.
Non-incremental advancements: Technology, business, or process improvements designed from first principles that provide order(s)-of-magnitude advantages over ‘old economy’ incumbents and AI-native entrants. We aim to work with founders going against the grain to build history-defining companies, not just following a crowded trend.
Prosocial technologies: Solutions that deliver outsize returns for the benefit of humankind, whether by unlocking positive externalities from tackling root node societal challenges, or by enhancing civilizational resilience against global catastrophic risks. Like nuclear weapons and bioweapons, advanced AI and its derivative technologies can cause large-scale loss of life if weaponized or deployed unsafely. Our firm is committed to reducing baseline AI risk, with measures including risk analysis during due diligence and enabling the development and adoption of safety protocols across the industry.
Beyond betting on any particular view of the future, early-stage investing is fundamentally about people. We partner with founders who embody the type of ambition, integrity, energy, resourcefulness, and first-principles thinking that we believe is a recipe for transformative impact.
We have invested in four incredible teams to date:
Elicit: Building an AI research assistant to automate and scale open-ended reasoning.
Monumental: AI-enabled robotic stone carving factories to create cities of splendor.
ValueBase: Automated real estate valuations with unparalleled accuracy to enable a Georgist land value tax.
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Mythos means 'story.' Starting a company is embarking on a hero’s journey, one that comes with the highest highs and lowest lows. We're committed to helping founders develop their story and joining them on the adventure of a lifetime, offering support, camaraderie, and community along the way.
We are just getting started. If you are building something that makes the future much better, we would love to hear from you.
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