Air Street Capital announces $232M Fund III to back AI-first companies

Air Street Capital announces $232M Fund III to back AI-first companies Entering our third epoch. Today, I’m thrilled to share that Air Street Capital has raised a third fund of $232,323,232 to back AI-first companies from the earliest stages in North America and Europe. Air Street will lead early stage rounds with checks of $500k to $15M and make select growth investments up to $25M. When I started investing in 2013, deep learning was largely confined to research labs. Yet I was convinced back then that the most important technology companies of our generation will be built AI-first. This is because AI is a force multiplier for technological progress, and everything around us is ultimately a product of intelligence. So in 2019, I founded Air Street to build a venture firm dedicated to this conviction. Today, AI-first companies are emerging across every industry. We’re seeing the birth of highly capable long-horizon coding agents, AI-first vertical software products that produce human-grade work, design novel biological systems that outperform nature, control a wide range of embodied physical systems, and reshape - and test - our national security. The AI frontier has become the center of gravity of the technology industry, and by extension, every industry. With Fund III, Air Street is now the largest solo GP venture firm in Europe. This structure enables high-conviction investing with a single decision-maker and significant capital to support the most ambitious teams building AI-first companies. What our founders are building Over the past decade, through my earliest angel investments and across Air Street’s funds, I’ve backed teams building across software, the physical world, science, and defense. In software, Synthesia’s AI video platform now generates >$150M in annual recurring revenue with customers across more than 90% of the Fortune 100. Black Forest Labs‘ FLUX models have become the most widely used open visual intelligence models among developers and enterprises alike. Poolside has built a frontier AI lab operating in high-stakes enterprise and government environments. In science, Profluent has created the first AI-designed CRISPR system (published in Nature) and demonstrated that scaling laws enable the design of ever more capable genome editors. Meanwhile, Enveda Biosciences is unlocking the chemistry of nature with AI to discover new medicines from natural products. In the physical world, Wayve‘s AI driver operates zero-shot in over 500 cities around the world. Sereact deploys embodied AI robotics inside warehouses for leading industrial brands including BMW Group and Daimler Truck. And Lambda and Crusoe are powering the largest computing infrastructure buildout in modern history to train and deploy frontier AI. And in defense and national security, Delian Alliance Industries is deploying autonomous defense systems to protect Europe and its allies at a time of critical need. We have also seen several exits across Air Street funds, including Valence Discovery to Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Graphcore to SoftBank, Adept to Amazon, Allcyte to Exscientia (pre-IPO, subsequently Nasdaq-listed and merged with Recursion), Fern Labs to Poolside, and ClipDrop to Stability AI and later Jasper. What Fund III enables With…