Future Ventures is one of the most exciting early-stage investment firms in Silicon Valley today. Cofounders Steve Jurvetson and Maryanna Saenko have a combined wealth of experience and knowledge when it comes to early-stage investments. Steve’s career spans over 14 years on Tesla’s board and 14+ years on the board at SpaceX, along with investments in Elon Musk’s Boring Company and Neuralink, while Maryanna has a degree from Carnegie Mellon in robotics, and she has plowed money into companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems, 64x Bio, and Gameto.
The team recently closed their third fund, bringing their total assets under management to an impressive $925 million. Compared to others in the field, Future Ventures remains focused on small early-stage investment, with initial checks reaching between $3 and $6 million. Such investments have included The Better Meat Co., leveraging digital signal processing techniques to locate radio devices in 3D with what it says is meter-level accuracy, and Your Choice Therapeutics, a birth-control health technology for men.
When asked about their opinion on the exponential advancements in AI, both Steve and Maryanna had a more cautious take. Steve highlighted the foundation models that Mosaic ML has developed, which can make creating AI projects much more cost effective. Maryanna highlighted the safety measure that makes sure AI technologies stay within controlled boundaries
Unsurprisingly, the conversation moved onto Siri and why it is still so lacking. Steve noted that it was a “hairball of code” which was marketed as a breakthrough but was not very “scalable”, while Maryanna offered the interesting take that Apple’s products are kept so polished to make sure they don’t start “yelling at you or putting random events on your calendar or sending emails on your behalf”.
Future Ventures’ VC portfolio is impressive, and with their new fund, the company is likely to continue to make successful and valuable bets in the AI and technology space.
