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Fellows Fund Gathers Top Minds to Fund AI BreakthroughsMotivated to help AI researchers and engineers successfully launch category-defining companies, 10 leaders in the field have formed Fellows Fund. The platform expects to support a half dozen companies this year by, among other things, facilitating talent acquisitions, customer introductions, and spearheading investor outreach. Recent Significant Milestones:
Why did we build this? Some of the greatest commercial outcomes in tech began in a lab or an adjacent garage - most notably Google, Apple, HP, and Cisco (News - Alert). The Fellows are uniquely situated to recognize promising breakout technologies, foster the talent behind the inventions, and facilitate strategic industry connections to build great companies. However, timely identification and commercialization of AI breakthroughs has lagged behind the needs of today's business and deprived AI innovators of the entrepreneurial opportunities and networks they merit. As tenured professors and C-Level executives at the most distinguished universities and technology companies, the Fellows have noticed predictable failure modes and confidence gaps that prevent highly skilled technical talent from establishing companies and growing them. Fellows join us from C-Level and VP leadership positions at Microsoft (News - Alert), ServiceNow, Twitter, Instacart, Adobe, and Stanford Children's Health, each introduced below. Our investments are also supported by top talent recruiting firm TalentSeer.com, which has deployed for over 100 AI companies in the past 5 years and ha the expertise to grow and fortify engineering and sales organizations in the AI era. Initial Portfolio Company Exemplifies Fellows Fund Synergies InsightFinder.com, an AI Ops company which seeks to make data center outages something of the past, is our first investment. The company's founder and CEO, Dr. Helen Gu, is a professor of computer science at North Carolina State University who holds multiple patents on unsupervised learning approaches to identify root causes of potential failures in complex computing environments. InsightFinder has built a business around preventing these issues before they cause catastrophic and costly service failures. Based on InsightFinder's strong customer traction, defensible technology, and promising growth strategy, we led and closed a $2M investment in the company. This investment demonstrates the strong network advantages the Fund offers to entrepreneurs and investors alike. InsightFinder was sourced through our network of Fellows. Its groundbreaking approach was vetted by the experts in the field, and the Fellows' network and connections are poised to foster the company's success. We Proudly Introduce an AI Brain Trust of Founding Fellows and Managing Partners Distinguished Fellows:
Stefano Corazza:
Charles Elkan:
Xuedong Huang:
Gang Hua:
Vijay Narayanan:
Anshul Pande:
Haixun Wang:
Lei Yang:
Managing Partners
Alex Ren:
Andrew Grinalds:
"We witnessed the successes and failures of over 300 AI startups in the last 5 years. Looking forward, we believe AI entrepreneurs must be backed by a fresh approach to venture capital, one providing capital support as well as the relevant insight and critical expertise to guide entrepreneurs through technical and commercial development."
"I am excited to be among the first cohort of distinguished fellows at Fellows Fund. The Fellowship launches a new model and trend in venture capital, where investors provide support to portfolio companies that goes far beyond funding. I am certain the collective experience and insight from the Fellows council would be a great asset to any entrepreneur."
To learn more about Fellows Fund, please visit fellowsfundvc.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210712005536/en/ |