MENLO PARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mayfield, a top-tier early-stage venture capital firm, announced today AI Garage, a $100 million initiative aimed at ideation-stage founders building AI teammates as digital companions. The firm has identified teammates as a $6 trillion* opportunity that ushers in the era of Collaborative Intelligence, where humans partner with AI to revolutionize the way we work and live.
AI Garage is a unique early-stage effort that draws on the firm’s 40 year track record of working with entrepreneurs-in-residence (EIRs) to nurture founders at the ideation stage. Entry to AI Garage is free (with no equity for Mayfield at induction) and selective, providing individual guidance to founders and supporting them from ideation to incorporation.
The firm distinguishes AI Teammates from copilots (simple assistants that offer suggestions like Amazon's Rufus) and agents (task oriented autonomous systems like Lyft's refund handler). Teammates collaborate with humans on complex tasks to achieve a shared goal, such as Evenup aiding lawyers to expedite the processing of personal injury claims, or Neubird Hawkeye enabling site reliability engineers to respond quicker to site slowdowns.
“AI is evolving from Assisted and Autonomous to Collaborative Intelligence that works alongside humans to elevate them to superhumans,” said Navin Chaddha, Managing Partner of Mayfield. “As we gathered a family of founders building teammates, they told us there was value in a thought partner even before they had a specific idea, to support them to grow it into a fundable company. So we are returning to our EIR roots with AI Garage, an initiative designed for deep collaboration with a few founders.”
The entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR) model is one where founders spend time with dedicated partners at a venture capital firm hatching an idea. Mayfield has a long track record of successful partnerships, with one legendary example being that of current Alphabet chairman and former Stanford University President Dr. John Hennessey, who used his sabbatical year in 1984 at Mayfield to found RISC semiconductor MIPS Technologies. A more recent example is Rehan Jalil, founder of current Mayfield portfolio company Securiti.ai, who served as a Mayfield EIR twice, while ideating on Elastica (acquired by Blue Coat Systems in 2015) and also on Securiti.ai. As the venture industry evolved, the EIR model grew beyond the physical presence of founders at the firm, but retained the spirit of ideation stage collaborations. Successful examples of this include Poshmark/IPO followed by Naver acquisition, NUVIA/Qualcomm, CloudGenix/Palo Alto Networks, Portworx/Pure Storage, Volterra/F5 Networks, and Mammoth Biosciences.
The firm’s current Teammate investments include Balbix’s BIX (Security teams), DevRev (Support Rep), Docket (Sales Engineer), Neubird’s Hawkeye (Site Reliability Engineer), Outreach’s Cleo (Sales Development Rep), Qventus (Healthcare professional), Revefi (Data Engineer), Sema4 (Finance Manager), and two stealth startups (Chip Engineer and Security Analyst).
How AI Garage Works
Founders who would like to be considered for AI Garage can be first-time or seasoned; need to be located in the Bay Area; with the bandwidth to dedicate themselves to exploring a new idea. Five initial personas being targeted at launch include teammates in financial services, IT services, healthcare & life sciences, marketing, and finance & accounting.
Key benefits include:
- Zero equity at induction into the AI Garage;
- A 6 month stipend during the idea exploration stage;
- Up to $5 million in capital per founding team;
- Pairing with a dedicated investor;
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Access to the whole founder amplification team that provides help with:
- Strategy and business plan creation
- Market opportunity sizing
- Customer validation from Mayfield’s CXO network
- Talent matching
- Brand and narrative creation
AI Garage applications are open at mayfield.ai now and will close by October 15, 2024. The selected applicants will hear back from Mayfield no later than December 1, 2024.
*Source: Mayfield analysis, US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Salary.com, Press search, and others
About Mayfield
Mayfield is a cognition-focused ideation-stage venture capital firm with a founder-first philosophy and $3 billion under management. Mayfield invests primarily in early-stage Cognition-as-a-Service technology companies that are leading us into the new era of Collaborative Intelligence. Since its founding in 1969, the firm has invested in over 500 companies, resulting in 120 IPOs and over 225 acquisitions. Some notable investments in recent years include Lyft, Poshmark/Naver, HashiCorp, Marketo/Adobe, and SolarCity/Tesla. For more information, go to https://www.mayfield.com or visit us on Linkedin.
