AI2 Incubator hatches a $10M fund for AI startups with support from big-name VCs

Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence is kicking things up more than a notch for AI startups with a $10 million pre-seed fund for its incubator program.

The AI2 Incubator’s fund is backed by some of the nation’s top venture capital institutions, such as Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group, Silicon Valley’s Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, and New York’s Two Sigma Ventures.

Exclusive: Apple acquires Xnor.ai, edge AI spin-out from Paul Allen’s AI2, for price in $200M range

But wait … there’s more: The fund also draws upon high-profile investors and mentors including Tableau Software CEO Adam Selipsky, Drive.ai co-founder Carol Reiley and Amazon Worldwide Consumer CEO Jeff Wilke.

The new fund announcement comes just a day after GeekWire first reported Apple’s acquisition of Xnor.ai, a Seattle startup incubated inside of AI2.

Oren Etzioni, AI2’s CEO and one of the godfathers of the fund, said he expects it to set new precedents for startups on the frontiers of deep learning, computer vision and natural language processing.

“This isn’t a venture capital fund,” he told GeekWire in advance of today’s unveiling. “This is rocket fuel for the AI2 Incubator.”

With the aid of investors, AI2 has already been able to hatch a brood of successful AI-centric spin-outs, starting with Kitt.ai (acquired by Baidu in 2017) and continuing with the likes of Xnor.ai, Lexion, Blue Canoe and WellSaid Labs. When you round up the seed investments that have been made in the AI2 Incubator’s ventures over just the past few years, the total comes to around $30 million.

“Investors are a crucial piece to building companies that scale quickly,” Etzioni explained in a news release, “and we are excited to create a more formal relationship through this fund.”

The new fund draws upon the AI2 Incubator’s existing system for fostering new ventures through its Entrepreneur-in-Residence program and its Future CEO / Technical Co-founder program. Pre-seed funding will be paid out according to a checkpoint system that could result in as much as $800,000 in support for a promising startup, said Bryan Hale, one of the incubator’s managing directors.

“We’ve allocated 12 companies to spin out based on this fund, and that’ll come in the next three years, perhaps a little bit less,” he said.