The Founders Writing Checks into Silicon Valley’s Top AI Startups
Here's our list of 13 notable founders investing in AI startups
If you look through the cap tables of the hottest AI startups, chances are you’ll see some individual names alongside the tier-one venture capital firms.
A cohort of top AI founders have emerged as prolific angel investors in companies ranging from search engine Perplexity to the video-tool creator HeyGen. They’re mostly backing early-stage companies with checks ranging from a few thousand dollars to the low six-figures, though some have gone much bigger and invested as late as Series C.
Founders investing on the side is not new—it’s been happening since the beginning of the tech boom in the 1980s, said Mitch Kapor. Back in the dot-com bubble days, when IPOs were easy, founders were often given the right to buy coveted pre-IPO shares in other startups. The rise of AngelList in the 2010s made it easy for founders to invest in startups via smaller syndicates.
What’s new in the AI era is founders investing earlier in their careers, before they’ve had a big win on their own, investors tell me.
There’s a clear logic to the trend; founders can get deal flow organically from their network of friends (or competitors). Most have the technical and business expertise to spot potential winners. Just as importantly, they have the connections to jump in quickly with a small check that could lead to outsize returns.
Guillermo Rauch, the founder of Vercel, said his company’s platform has been a great source for deals. “A lot of these companies and entrepreneurs are building on Vercel and they reach out because they want to learn about how I did it,” he said.
Rauch also isn’t afraid of cold outreach if he’s excited about something—that’s how he got connected to Scale AI during the company’s seed round and invested after the team went through Y Combinator.
A few high-profile AI angels–Elad Gil, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross—have raised funds and effectively operate as individual VCs. (We’re not including those heavy hitters in our list since they’ve essentially built their own venture capital firms.)
More recently, several AI founders, like those at Octane AI and Pilot, have raised their own first-time venture funds to back early stage AI companies.
But a newer class of AI founder-angels, who have full-time jobs building their companies, are making modest individual investments in the fashion of traditional angels.
Databricks’ VP of AI Naveen Rao, whose startup MosaicML was acquired in a $1 billion deal last year, does a lot of due diligence for his VC friends, and that often leads to angel checks of his own. He likes the opportunity to back strong founders in areas that he’s also personally passionate about, such as computing and healthcare.
Rao told me that his checks into startups can go smaller or larger but often are in the “hundreds of thousands of dollars” range.
Alloy founder Sara Du has been writing smaller pre-seed and seed checks. “A lot of the people I invest in I see socially or through investor events and would want to be friends with anyway, so it’s a vehicle for me to get close to folks and learn vicariously through them as well,” she said.
Among her hotter early deals is AI safety startup Haize Labs; General Catalyst reportedly led its latest round at a $100 million valuation.
We spoke with top AI investors and consulted databases like Crunchbase and PitchBook to put together a list of founder/angels who’ve invested in up-and-coming AI startups.