SAIFVC

Exactly two years ago, I launched @HalcyonFutures. So far we’ve seeded and launched 16 new orgs and companies, and helped them raise nearly a quarter billion dollars in funding. Flash back to 2022: After eight years in VC, I stepped back to explore questions about exponential technology and the future of humanity. Then ChatGPT launched – we’d entered the exponential AI era. The upside of AI is huge – but so are the risks: misalignment, loss of control, cyber and bio-threats, fraud, adversarial misuse, and more. For humanity to thrive in this era, we’ll need to build a resilient and secure world. And we’ll need an ecosystem of both nonprofit and for-profit solutions led by ambitious, thoughtful leaders from business, policy, academia and media. I found myself asking: 1. How do we get the world’s most talented people working on these civilization-scale challenges? 2. What funding model would allow us to support many different types of projects? With those questions in mind, I launched Halcyon. We’re building something a bit unusual: - @HalcyonFutures, a nonprofit and grant fund that helps leaders and entrepreneurs pivot to ambitious, high-impact work. - @HalcyonVC, a VC firm backing for-profit founders tackling the hardest problems in AI security and global resilience. So far we’ve raised $25m in funding for Halcyon’s nonprofit and VC fund. We’ve incubated or provided zero-to-one capital to 16 nonprofits and companies, and helped them go on to raise more than $200m — from @GoodfireAI's interpretability work to @aiunderwriting's AI risk standards and insurance, @TransluceAI's model behavior research, and @SeismicOrg's public opinion research and media. We're a small team of three (me, Shelby Summerfield and @rossmatican) surrounded by a community of advisors and allies that includes leaders from frontier labs, governments, cybersecurity, philanthropy, startups and VC. Over the coming weeks we’ll share more about Halcyon and what we’re building next. If you're working on something we might be excited about, say hi. Visit our website below in comments ⬇️

📢Introducing the Alignment Project: A new fund for research on urgent challenges in AI alignment and control, backed by over £15 million. ▶️ Up to £1 million per project ▶️ Compute access, venture capital investment, and expert support Learn more and apply ⬇️