Future Ventures’ Transformative Innovation Playbook

Viewing the AI revolution through the lens of the investment world can show us quite a lot about what this technology means for the future and how the business world integrates these cutting-edge advances.

One example is a brand-new fund set up by Future Ventures that has some interesting strategies, interests, and partnerships in a space so new that there’s still a lot for investors to figure out. Like their previous funds, Future Ventures Fund IV just closed another oversubscribed $200M fund.

Steve Jurvetson has experience on the boards of SpaceX and Tesla and a keen interest in space and AI. Maryanna Saenko has worked on technologies like novel antennae, robots, and driverless cars, with experience at Khosla Ventures, Airbus Ventures, and DFJ. Nico Enriquez, the team’s newest member, focuses on sustainable tech and joins the fund after his entrepreneurship journey and experience at the U.S. Department of Energy.

The three are managing $1.3 billion in an investment world that’s radically changing. One thing that has led them is the search for the right investor partnerships among their LPs.

“From the very beginning,” Saenko said in a recent round table discussion, “we focused on investors who we lovingly refer to as ‘real people,’ who actually care about the future. We’ve built this community that enables us to support companies that will fundamentally make a difference in our world.”

The Investment Landscape

Speaking to these VC movers, a few days ago, I got some insight on how they make choices and what guides their investment decisions.

Jurvetson talked about their investor base: tech CEOs, other venture capital funds, PE investors, and bankers. Institutional LPs, he said, tend to take a long time to make decisions. He mentioned a “loyal LP base” that has driven the fund’s success. And he cited a novelty-seeking approach to their investing strategy:

“We’re trying to invest in things unlike anything we’ve seen before, but adjacent to where we’ve been,” he said.

As for tech focus, Jurvetson mentioned several segments – small neural networks for the edge, AI infrastructure, and reinvention of every major industry such as construction, manufacturing, energy, and food production. He talked about inherent diversification from their approach that will help balance the fund investments.

He also talked about the value of staying away from overblown sectors and avoiding following the herd to where the hype is.

“There’s a bunch of buzzwords,” he said, ”but we are not trying to fill a quota. We don’t go out and say, Ah, we need another one of those neurotech deals, because that bar chart looks a little low over there, right? We just inherently, with this novelty-seeking algorithm, diversify. And then we look at what we have done retrospectively and group the investments along clusters and sectors.”

To The Stars

Some would call Jurvetson the “Indiana Jones of space.” His office is decorated with rockets and gear, and all kinds of interesting extraterrestrial artifacts.

And he does have that experience at SpaceX, as well as other involvement in various deep technologies.

So, it makes sense that the fund would be partial to space companies. But in fact, they’ve only made one space investment each decade. In the long list of their current investment sectors, space investments rank on par with AI, Tech-Bio, Food and Agriculture, Energy, Climate, and Longevity by dollars invested to date. This further underscores the firm’s strategy of inherent diversification by always seeking the most novel and groundbreaking opportunities.

Big Moves

The goal, Saenko said, is to be a magnet next to the right haystack – to change the world, rather than just making small iterative adjustments or simple systems integration, since, as she noted, “pipe-bending is not revolutionary.”

“We don’t think of it as self-congratulatory to say that we’re looking for these wildly optimistic and empowered entrepreneurs like there have never been before,” Jurvetson said. “The ability for an individual to change the world, for a small company to change the world, is more powerful now than ever. You see, it is not just in traditional industries. It’s everything. It’s cars that you drive, the Internet access that you have, the food that we eat – if you look forward 10 years, there’s going to be more and more of the economy that has been improved dramatically, and made much more efficient because of the entrepreneurs we’re trying to invest in now.”

Mentioning things like edge-deployed inference and exploring different “flavors of AI models,” the group described the principle of ensuring that their investments are significant and relevant to the issues at hand.

More About Companies

So, what are some of the main focal points here?

While investing, Saenko said, she is looking for projects whose transformative technologies have the potential to redefine industries and improve the human condition. There are alternative meat companies, geothermal firms, and grid optimization projects in the fund’s orbit. But one way to showcase what the fund is into is to look at individual companies of note that are included in the portfolio.

Here are a few of them.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems— With over $2 billion raised, CFS is building ARC, the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant. It is expected to generate 400 megawatts of renewable electricity by the early 2030s, fundamentally reshaping the global energy landscape.

Gameto focuses on women’s health. Its IVF innovations help with fertility treatment by reducing the need for hormone injections and making treatment cycles shorter.

Copernic Catalyst is developing novel ammonia catalysts and revolutionizing the chemical world. Lace Lithography innovates by using atoms instead of light to scale Moore’s Law to the nanoscale. Then there’s space, where Xona is putting a powerful GPS constellation in orbit.

Two other standouts are Neurobionics, which is working on minimally invasive deep brain stimulation, and Greenlight, a company poised to eliminate the harmful glyphosate that’s sprayed on so many crops worldwide.

Also, look for biotech firms Decibel and Moonwalk Bio.

This shows some of the motivation behind the building of this fund and is a good example of what we’re seeing in the investment world as people apply all of our new technology to real-life use cases and implementations.

In a way, it’s a bellwether for trends and takeoffs, in an enterprise world that will never be the same after we harness the power of neural networks.