Radical Ventures Launches $4M Program to Nurture AI Startup Founders

Radical Ventures Aims to Entice AI Founders With Classes, GPUs

Venture capital firm Radical Ventures is seeking artificial intelligence researchers who might want to start their own company, offering more than a dozen "founder-curious" academics and tech workers about $250,000 in compute credits to try out new ideas. The program, which will give away about $4 million, is part of a larger effort by Radical Ventures to entice more academics and tech workers to try their hand at startups in the booming AI industry.

Radical Ventures Aims to Entice AI Founders With Classes, GPUs

(Bloomberg) -- Venture capital firm Radical Ventures is seeking artificial intelligence researchers who might want to start their own company, offering more than a dozen "founder-curious" academics and tech workers about $250,000 in compute credits to try out new ideas. The program, which will give away about $4 million, is part of a larger effort by Radical Ventures to entice more academics and tech workers to try their hand at startups in the booming AI industry. Launched in 2017, the Toronto-based firm has $1.8 billion under management and unusually close ties to AI luminaries -- with investors including AI pioneers Fei-Fei Li and Geoffrey Hinton. Li is also a scientific partner at the firm, which has made early bets on startups including Cohere Inc. and Covariant Inc. Radical Ventures aims to draw out more technical talent from universities and tech companies with the promise of computing power -- a scarce resource in the current AI boom. The program echoes those of other VC firms that offer computing resources to startups, including Index Ventures, but Radical will not require any equity in return. The firm will give the free credits to as many as 16 researchers and software engineers, who are also participating in its annual Radical AI Founders Masterclass series, designed to help turn AI research into companies. The problem: Academia has a wealth of coveted AI talent, but not every researcher at a university or industry lab has the resources or knowledge to launch a startup. "They are founder-curious in the sense that they've built out technologies, but maybe not commercialized them or they have nascent ones that they don't know how to build a business out of," said Radical Ventures Partner Aaron Brindle. "The idea is to create a bit of a fire and spark the curiosity around what's involved in building a business." Brindle said the firm aims to deepen relationships with AI researchers in a series of hybrid events this fall. Now in its fourth year, the classes teach practical business skills, like how to identify a market and build a team, and how to know whether to launch a startup. More than 1,700 researchers and engineers have taken the classes so far, including employees from the likes of OpenAI, Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc. as well as universities including Oxford, Stanford and the University of Toronto.