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“AI"Godmother" Fei-Fei Li also became an LP.

This is the first news about her investment. The organization she invested in is called Radical Ventures, which recently raised nearly $800 million in funds to create the largestAIFund. The current asset management scale of the institution will expand to US$1.8 billion (about RMB 12.9 billion).

Radical Ventures was founded in 2017 and its investment areas include start-ups with disruptive technologies such as AI, robotics, and quantum computing. It is headquartered in Canada and has a high reputation and influence in the industry.

The investors in Radical Ventures this time include two giants in the field of AI. In addition to the "AI Godmother" Fei-Fei Li, the leader of deep learning research, known as the "Godfather of Artificial Intelligence",GoogleFormer Brain executive Geoffrey Hinton also came to take charge.

The two historical figures in the AI ​​field also had a classic dialogue on the same stage at the end of 2023, which was widely circulated.

In addition, this round of LPs also includes the family office of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Canadian pension fund CPP Investments, etc. CPP Investments stated in a public document this week that it has committed $75 million to the new fund, bringing its total investment in Radical Venture to $204 million.

Why Radical Ventures?

In fact, Radical Ventures has a deep connection with Fei-Fei Li. In February 2023, Fei-Fei Li joined the investment institution as a scientific partner. In February of this year, when Fei-Fei Li plunged into the AI ​​wave and started her first business, establishing the spatial intelligence company World Labs, Radical Ventures invested in World Labs. This allowed World Labs to quickly grow into a unicorn in just three months after its establishment.

Now that Fei-Fei Li has become an LP of Radical Ventures, the relationship between the two is undoubtedly closer. Their mutual choice also represents their consistency in their understanding of the industry and their judgment of value.

As a leader in the field of AI, Fei-Fei Li has a strong influence in both academia and industry. Her joining and entrepreneurship not only brought more technological resources and industry insights to Radical Ventures, but also further promotedAI TechnologyIn turn, Radical Ventures will also provide strong support for Fei-Fei Li's AI entrepreneurial journey.

As a scientific partner, investee, and LP, why did Fei-Fei Li choose Radical Ventures among so many VCs?

Radical Ventures was founded at a time when artificial intelligence technology was rapidly emerging and showing great potential. Both founders, Jordan Jacobs and Tomi Poutanen, have successful entrepreneurial experience in the field of AI.

The two founded an artificial intelligence company, Layer 6 AI, in 2016.Machine LearningThe company has been acquired by Toronto-Dominion Bank.

In addition, the two are also the founders of Vector Institute, one of the three major artificial intelligence research centers in Canada. The organization plays an important role in the field of artificial intelligence. At that time, the leadership team and chief scientific advisor of Vector Institute was the leading figure Geoffrey Hinton.

At its inception, Vector Institute received a $150 million donation from Google. In addition, the Ontario government also pledged to invest $50 million, and the Canadian government supported it as part of its 2017 $125 million artificial intelligence strategic budget. At the same time, 30 companies and institutions have pledged to invest a total of $80 million in Vector Institute over the next 10 years. These companies include Google,Nvidia, Thomson Reuters, KPMG, etc.

The above deeds fully demonstrate the appeal and influence of the two. The original intention of the two to establish Radical Ventures was to support the growth of deep learning companies as angel investors. This vision was influenced by a landmark artificial intelligence research paper titled "Attention Is All You Need".

"After that paper came out, we believed that AI would trigger a software upgrade cycle with an economic impact similar to the Industrial Revolution, and it would also unleash science that would be similar to the Second Industrial Revolution," said Jordan Jacobs, who said no Western investors paid attention to it at the time.

Vision, passion, knowledge and deep industry background resources are perhaps what impressed Fei-Fei Li about Radical Ventures, and are also its unique competitive advantage. With this advantage, although the scale of its first fund (Radical Fund I) after its establishment is only 13 million Canadian dollars, it has successfully invested in a number of potential artificial intelligence startups.

In 2019, Radical Ventures raised Radical Fund II, which grew rapidly to $350 million. In January 2023, Radical Ventures announced the completion of the fundraising of approximately $550 million for the third fund. The completion of this round of financing marks that Radical Ventures has become one of the most influential venture capital firms in the field of artificial intelligence. Its investment portfolio covers many high-quality artificial intelligence startups, including Cohere Inc. and Covariant Inc., as well as artificial intelligencechipdevelopment startup Untether AI and drug discovery company Genesis Therapeutics Inc.

Fei-Fei Li joined Radical Ventures as a scientific partner in February 2023. This will undoubtedly inject a strong force into Radical Ventures and further enhance its industry influence. Fei-Fei Li will use her expertise and experience in the field of AI to provide important reference and guidance for Radical Ventures' investment decisions.

Now, Fei-Fei Li has become more closely tied to Radical Ventures as an LP. In addition to the LPs mentioned at the beginning, Radical Ventures' LP lineup also includes Toronto-Dominion Bank, John Megrue, former co-chairman of Bridgewater, and Aaron Rosenberg, former head of strategy and operations at DeepMind.

Radical Ventures has made frequent moves this year.

In July, Radical Ventures invested $100 million in the angel round of Li Feifei's World Labs. In June, Radical Ventures participated in Waabi's B round of financing with an investment of $200 million. Waabi is a company that willunmannedIn the same month, Radical Ventures also invested $50 million in the Series A of Twelve Labs, a video search SaaS platform. In May, Radical Ventures also invested in two companies, including Nabla Bio, an antibody therapy service provider, with a $26 million Series A investment, and DatologyAI, an AI large model training service provider, with a $46 million Series A investment.

The "AI Godmother" created a unicorn in 3 months

Who is Fei-Fei Li? It is hard to explain her here. There are probably not many scientists in the world who deserve the title of "godmother". The founder of the current AI boom is none other than Fei-Fei Li. It can be said that without Fei-Fei Li's persistence in her scientific dream, the current AI boom would not have happened in this direction and at this speed.

Her achievements are not limited to: She was awarded the title of tenured associate professor at Stanford at the age of 33, becoming the firstStanford UniversityThe female director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is a member of three American academies and the creator of the ImageNet database, a key catalyst for modern artificial intelligence. She is also a former Google vice president, chief scientist of Google Intelligent Cloud and artificial intelligence and machine learning...

Fei-Fei Li's series of groundbreaking achievements are undoubtedly a shining example in the AI ​​field, which has always been dominated by men. People are amazed at her many contributions to the field of AI, and are deeply moved by her inspirational story of counterattack, because her life is legendary.

Although Fei-Fei Li won the "genetic" lottery, her life during her teenage years was relatively difficult and tight. She moved to the United States with her parents at the age of 15. Her family had no savings, she could not speak English, and she relied on heavy manual labor to make a living. She worked in a Chinese restaurant and did housework for others during high school. After being admitted to Princeton University with a full scholarship, she would often help out in the dry cleaning shop that her family opened with borrowed money.

Trapped by financial pressure, Fei-Fei Li hesitated between continuing her studies and working when she graduated from college. Fortunately, her parents still supported her in not compromising with reality and heading straight for the stars and sea in her heart during the difficult times.

To some extent, it was her intellectual parents who cultivated Fei-Fei Li's qualities. Her father is an engineer with a naive and casual personality, a love of natural sciences, and a strong curiosity about the world. Her mother, on the contrary, loves literature and would take her to read Lu Xun's works and Western classics such as Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. Both parents have one thing in common: they love truth more and are not very interested in fame and fortune.

Everyone knows what happened next. She overcame many difficulties along the way and achieved many achievements and honors. Her persistence in taking the sidelines has earned her a reputation in the global scientific community. The public has also given her an inspirational label: from a "laundry girl" to an "AI godmother."

In 2024, 48-year-old Fei-Fei Li has taken on the role of an entrepreneur. She founded World Labs on the basis of her role as a scientific partner at Radical Ventures. The company is committed to enabling robots or AI systems to understand and reason about information in 3D space like humans, and to promoting the application and development of AI technology in the real world.

World Labs also completed two rounds of financing in just over three months, turning from 0 to a unicorn with a valuation of more than $1 billion. Investors include Silicon Valley venture capital a16z and Radical Ventures and other top technology investors. In this round of AI investment boom, a16z is an important participant and is increasing its investment. In April 2024, the investment institution completed a fundraising of $7.2 billion, of which a considerable proportion of the funds will be invested in the field of artificial intelligence.

The current AI boom is fanned by Fei-Fei Li, but no one can predict where the subsequent storm will go.ChatGPTIn the nearly two years since its launch, billions of dollars have flowed into artificial intelligence start-ups, making it a special case in the current "capital shortage and difficulty in financing", but at the same time many investors have begun to question the existence of many bubbles in this industry.

But Jordan Jacobs thinks the tide will continue to surge. "There is definitely a hype cycle in certain areas of venture capital and artificial intelligence. But I think there will continue to be a lot of money pouring in," he said. "There are some really big future companies that are transitioning from early stage to growth stage that we think we have the expertise and relationships to invest in."

AI investments drove a 47% increase in U.S. venture capital funding to $55.6 billion in the three months through June, the highest quarterly total in two years, according to PitchBook data.