Who We Are:
AI is the new electricity: Just as electricity transformed numerous industries starting 100 years ago, AI is now poised to do the same. AI Fund is an early stage venture firm founded by Dr. Andrew Ng in 2017. Our portfolio companies utilize AI technology and applications to improve processes and efficiency. The AI Fund team combines their experiences as AI pioneers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, investors, and operators. We are backed by a $176 million-dollar fund from top-tier VC firms. Together, let’s build great companies that will move humanity forward.
Why Partner With AI Fund:
We’ve been there. We’ve founded and scaled successful companies ourselves, and we know that creating meaningful startups is really hard. Many entrepreneurs toil with ideas for years. Many spend time building something without the foresight of limiting factors that could have been easily dismissed upfront. Accomplished execs often teeter between a desire to start a company and creating something great versus taking a job that is less fulfilling. If only someone could help with taking the risk out of turning an idea into reality and accelerate the company building process, more people would be inspired to start a company.
Coming up with great ideas, sussing them out, assembling great teams, and helping raise capital is what we do. We shorten a process that can take years down to months. We make sure you are going after the right market, are fully validated, and are surrounded by great teammates. Lastly, we make sure you see the world through the lens of a data scientist and machine learning expert, which is the perspective any meaningful company in the future must have.
But we also know that the process is not about us. It’s about great Founders and empowering them to do great things.
What We Seek:
We are looking for passionate entrepreneurs with first-hand knowledge of the problem they have encountered or entrepreneurs that might match to a problem or idea we already have. It’s not a mandate, but ideally, we want people with experience solving business problems and have a keen eye for anticipating business risks. You may have been a product manager running a product or product line before. You may have been an engineer who has been on the front lines of helping shape a company. You may have been a management consultant who has experience in a particular vertical. Or perhaps you are a proven entrepreneur who recognizes that the difference between success and failure is razor-thin, and you want every advantage you can get.
Lastly, we want people who are leaders. We desire people who can hire great people, get others excited about their vision, raise capital, and make it all happen.
About Portfolio Company:
AI Fund is developing autonomous navigation software for unmanned aerial vehicles. Leveraging an efficient and accurate computer vision-based system, this solution enables precise and resilient navigation, even when GPS signal is unreliable or unavailable. Its cost-effective, scalable approach supports large-scale deployments and will disrupt the landscape of autonomous hardware.
What You Will Be Doing:
- Strategic Direction: Lead our strategic planning and execution, adapting our business strategies as market and technology landscapes evolve.
- Product Development Oversight: Guide our product from concept validation to prototyping, ensuring it meets market needs and integrates seamlessly between software and hardware components.
- Partnership Development: Strengthen and expand our partnerships to boost market penetration and enhance our product offerings.
- Team Leadership: Build and lead a diverse team, nurturing a culture that values innovation, flexibility, and execution excellence.
What You Must Bring:
- Entrepreneurial Experience: Proven leadership in start-up, unstructured, or ambiguous work environments, particularly in roles that demand strategic decision-making and business model innovation.
- Proficient technical understanding of Sensing/Perception/Localization of drone or mobile robotics systems: Proficient technical understanding of embedded systems, including proficiency in software development and hardware integration. Must have a solid grasp of machine vision approaches and the ability to oversee complex product development collaboration between software functionality and hardware performance.
- Stakeholder Management: Robust negotiation and relationship-building skills, capable of engaging effectively with a broad range of stakeholders from technical partners to investors.
- Strong GTM Experience: Extensive experience in developing and executing GTM strategies.
- Leadership and Team Building: Demonstrated ability to assemble and direct teams through the formative stages of a start-up, emphasizing rapid development cycles and agile methodologies.
- Communication Skills: Exceptional ability to communicate and build relationships with internal and external parties across the globe.
Nice to Haves Include:
- Technical and Market Insight: Solid knowledge of the drone technology landscape, including various technical approaches, key competitors, and Go-To-Market strategies.
- Industry Connections: Well-established network within the drone, technology, or related industries (i.e. public sector) across Taiwan, the US, and globally.
- Entrepreneurial Success: A track record of founding or co-founding successful startups, particularly in technology-driven sectors.
- Innovative Mindset: A strong passion for innovation and technology with a proven ability to tackle complex challenges creatively.
- Multilingual: Fluency in Mandarin and English, essential for effective communication with both local teams and international partners.
Characteristics We Value:
- Accountability: an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions while doing so with the highest regard for integrity.
- Leadership: able to influence others to follow you and lead the team to a brighter future.
- Grit. able to stick with projects and work hard through good and bad times. High pain tolerance and can perform well under stress or pressure.
- Scrappy: Takes initiative and proactively gets things done with low resources, but doing creative things, begging, borrowing, and whatever is needed in an ambiguous environment or situation.
- Ownership orientation: Demonstrated orientation of extreme ownership over all aspects of the company and extremely results-driven in nature.
At AI Fund, we are committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy (including childbirth, lactation and related medical conditions), national origin, age, physical and mental disability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information (including characteristics and testing), military and veteran status, and any other characteristic protected by applicable law. AI Fund believes that diversity and inclusion among our employees is critical to our success as a company, and we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool. Selection for employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.
Top Skills
What We Do
Who is AI Fund?
We are a team of AI pioneers, proven entrepreneurs, seasoned operators, and venture capitalists that collaborates with leading entrepreneurs to solve big challenges using artificial intelligence.
Founded in 2017 by Dr. Andrew Ng, AI Fund is backed with $176 million in capital by some of the leading VC firms and investors, including NEA, Sequoia, and Greylock.
How Are We Different?
We work with entrepreneurs during their startup’s most critical and risky phase, from 0 to 1. At the earliest stages, your company strategy is still being formed, and you’re still on the path to demonstrating your idea’s full potential – this is a reality we understand. This is the period when decisions on product strategy, market fit, and team are most critical, moving fast and fixing parts of your business when you have limited resources is a challenge.
We believe the best way to help entrepreneurs is by providing our time, expertise, and resources to help flesh out these key strategic decisions. Making the right decisions at the right time can often make the difference. We are here to improve these dynamics, at a time when the help matters the most.
Why Work With AI Fund?
Getting a startup from idea to Series A funding is not easy. We’ve been there and understand the challenges you must overcome. Whether you desire limited help and just want access to our unique ecosystems of AI experts and entrepreneurs or you would like our full support, we are interested in the opportunity to help in your success.
We are flexible in how we work with companies, but ultimately, we are here to maximize your chance of success and accelerate getting your company to market. We provide the capital, expertise, and resources to accelerate the work required to minimize risks in your startup, help you rise above the noise, and make your company more attractive to new investors.
