For a company whose bets are largely unpredictable, the early-stage venture firm future companies he has become very predictable in his fundraising.
Now entering its fifth year, the company has just closed a $200 million fund, the third in a row. In fact, it would have exactly $600 million under management right now if it weren’t for the special-purpose vehicles (emerging funds, essentially) that it has raised to pump more money into some of its most capital-intensive and company-running companies. . assets under management to $925 million.
As we highlighted when the group closed its second background in 2021, the team could rake in a lot more if it wanted to. Co-founder Steve Jurvetson is a veteran VC who has been close to Elon Musk for a long time, spending more than 14 years on the Tesla board before retiring in the fall of 2020, holding a SpaceX board seat for the last 14 years or more. , and investing in Musk’s tunneling venture, Boring Company.
With Future Ventures co-founder Maryanna Saenko, the couple also wrote the first check for Musk’s neurotech startup Neuralink, while Saenko, a robotics expert with degrees from Carnegie Mellon, has fueled investments in a host of companies. equally ambitious, including Commonwealth Fusion Systems. , which aims to build a compact fusion power plant; 64x Bio, a gene therapy manufacturing company that raised $55 million last year; and Gameto, a reproductive health company that wants to make egg freezing as routine as a dental cleaning, and almost as affordable.
Given their track record (Jurvetson was also an early investor in now-public satellite data company Planet Labs), the obvious question is why they continue to raise the same conservative amount for each fund, and the answer, Saenko suggests, boils down to the strategy.
For one thing, Future Ventures has focused and continues to focus exclusively on start-up and early-stage companies, writing initial checks for between $3 million and $6 million, she says. In other words, you don’t need a lot of money considering what you’re putting to work.
It also helps that the company, at its own expense, dives into startups where there isn’t a lot of competition from rival teams early on, either because it’s a bit “out there” or because the time-to-engagement is longer than most. of venture capitalists. tolerate.
One of those bets is the best meat with. In a call today with Saenko and Jurvetson, they raved about the five-year-old company, which has raised just $10 million to date, according to Crunchbase data, but has enormous potential, in their opinion. “This is an alternative protein company from the future of meat. [centered on a] type of fungus that grows faster than any other life form that can be considered meat,” Jurvetson explained. “You go from zero to harvest in 18 hours.”
The Better Meat product, which has a meat-like texture and flavor profile, is sold as a meat-like product to other companies at a cheaper cost than chicken or beef, Jurvetson says. But even better, he says, the “actual organism that they have patented for this production process has been a part of the human diet for thousands of years in other products.” so it enters a category of being”generally considered safe” by the FDA, which means it can, and has, gone directly to market. (Many other plant-based alternatives to meat and seafood face a more complicated regulatory path.)
Another signature bet is ZaiNar, which harnesses digital signal processing techniques to locate radio devices in 3D with what it says is meter-level accuracy. Think indoor phones and dense cities; vehicles without line of sight; and assets using IoT devices in industrial settings.
Future Ventures has even bet on birth control for men, funding Therapeutics of your choice last summer.
Naturally, we wonder what Saenko and Jurvetson think about the most futuristic trend of all right now: the dramatic advances in AI that have the world so captivated. Were you as surprised as the rest of the world by what ChatGPT released into the wild?
In particular, when we asked both of them over the phone today, they both sounded a bit doubtful.
“I think what has surprised me has been the public sentiment,” Saenko offered. “The pace of AI innovation and its ability to solve increasingly interesting problems in compelling ways – we’ve been marching at that pace for quite some time. And so it’s interesting to me that [ChatGPT’s release] in the broader social sphere it was such a compelling turning point that all of a sudden all these people who frankly didn’t give a damn about space now can’t stop talking about it.”
Jurvetson added: “It’s fun. My next meeting is with [our portfolio] company called Mosaic ML; navigate [Rao] was previously a founder in Nervana [a deep learning startup that sold to Intel for more than $400 million in 2016]. Now it offers these foundational models to everyone else. It’s like democratizing access. So imagine you can build ChatGPT for less than $500,000, which is still a lot, but it’s not $10 billion or $1 billion dollars, depending on which numbers you believe. It’s a much more interesting and scalable business proposition. [because] They basically figured out a way to make this work more cheaply.”
It’s not bearish, quite the opposite, he said, but he also noted that people adjust to the future quite quickly. “We should expect more and more examples like this, where it feels like magic, you give it a couple of years and then it fits into the fabric of society.”
With one flagrant exception. Given that Jurvetson cut his teeth at Apple decades ago in a marketing position, we couldn’t help but wonder why Siri is still so terribly bad at so many things, even with the phenomenal advances happening around her in the world of AI.
Jurvetson said that “it was a hairball of code that was marketed as a breakthrough but it wasn’t really a very scalable architecture. AND [Apple has] I’m stuck with that.”
Saenko took a more generous view of why Siri still can’t get some of the simpler things right. “Siri crashes in very familiar ways,” Saenko said. “He’s not going to randomly start yelling at you or put random events on your calendar or send emails on your behalf that you didn’t mean to.
“One could argue that the [large language model] The systems, as they currently exist, have too much capacity to go crazy if given too much power. Maybe that’s what Apple has indexed, because if you think about it, the products they put out into the world are really fully baked.”
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