Mythos Ventures, an early-stage enterprise capital firm began by Vishal Maini, closed $14 million in capital commitments for its first fund that can put money into transformative AI corporations.
Metaplanet, Delphi Ventures and The Operating Group are backers alongside a bunch of individual investors, including Phil Black, co-founder of True Ventures; Walter Kortschak, managing director of Summit Partners; Tom Shaughnessy, co-founder of Delphi Digital; and Anna Counselman, co-founder of Upstart.
The solo general partner firm, based in San Francisco, joins the likes of Connect Ventures, Fuse and Unconventional Ventures in announcing a latest fund this month.
Maini is joined by partners Jonathan Eng and Paul Gu, the latter he has known since young adolescence. They grew up together, even studying together at Yale. All three worked together at Gu’s startup Upstart, a fintech company focused on lending. Most recently, Maini was at DeepMind working on safety and artificial general intelligence deployment.
“It was pretty clear from being within the trenches that we were nearly to cross the chasm from research to product ready,” Maini told TechCrunch. “We’re not even in the complete swing of it yet. I began this now because I feel that in the subsequent decade, a wave of corporations shall be built that shall be genuinely history-defining by way of the varieties of transformation which can be achieved. It felt like the fitting time to bring a team together to deal with that.”
Nevertheless, before you sigh about yet one more VC firm targeting AI corporations, Maini does understand. Not only did he say it was “a foul time to start out a fund,” he doubled down and said it was “arguably a good worse time to start out an AI fund.” Why? Because everyone seems to be moving into the AI space, in fact.
Ultimately, though, Maini was capable of get the commitments in about six months and greater than double his initial goal of $6 million. Here’s how: leaning into its differentiation of “transformative AI.”
He explained that it’s a term utilized by Open Philanthropy, an early funder in OpenAI. The definition has two parts: One is impact-based by way of reaching a certain level of advanced AI systems. The second is around the potential of frontier systems and having AI that’s nearly as good as a human at cognitive tasks. The term continues to be catching on, he added.
“That may change in the subsequent few years because, in my opinion, it’s the proper term for use to explain the space somewhat than generative AI,” Maini said.
Maini intends to jot down check between $100,000 and $1 million for corporations raising on the pre-seed and seed levels.
Mythos goes after startups in areas Maini considers underhyped. For instance, corporations that don’t heavily depend on generative AI, but as an alternative use machine learning paradigms and artificial cognition to upend industries. One other is artificial general intelligence-proof corporations that shall be relevant five or 10 years from now when he said there won’t be a must call an organization an “AI company” anymore.
The firm has invested in 4 corporations from the brand new fund, including Elicit, which is constructing an AI research assistant to automate scientific review, and which announced its first funding round this week. Others are Monumental, constructing AI-enabled robotic stone-carving factories, and ValueBase, which is automating real estate valuations.
“We would like to be there from the concept stage, and we’re with the founders all through to the top,” Maini said. “I truthfully don’t think that there shall be many AI corporations in 10 years. It’ll be a weird thing to say. Everyone’s going to make use of AI in 10 years. We are going to put money into the businesses that can ride that tailwind as that transition plays out.”