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 Fund III, Air Street will lead early-stage rounds for AI-first companies in North America and Europe with checks of $500k to $15M. We will also make a small number of growth-stage investments with checks of up to $25M. Many of the teams will be well known to us, having built relationships over many years, through our network and events, and even prior investments in them.
Our focus remains on AI-first software, developer tools and infrastructure, techbio and science, and defense and security - the areas where AI is not simply improving the status quo but enabling entirely new kinds of products and companies to be built.
Building the AI community
From the beginning, Air Street has been about more than the companies we invest in.
The State of AI Report has grown into the most widely read and trusted annual analysis of progress in the field, now in ninth edition. RAAIS, our Research and Applied AI Summit, has brought together leading researchers and builders since 2017 - from the founders of DeepMind and the co-author of “Attention is All You Need” to the next generation of AI-first founders from Wayve, ElevenLabs, and Isomorphic Labs. The Air Street AI Network now connects nearly 3,000 vetted researchers, engineers, product leaders, and founders around the world from our global meetups in London, New York, San Francisco, Paris, Munich, and Zurich.
We will also remain committed to speaking out when the ecosystem needs it. Whether that is our work on spinout.fyi - where key Air Street reforms to the university spinout playbook were accepted by the UK Government - or our Air Street Press essays and policy memos, we believe that if something is worth saying, it’s worth saying publicly.
Our third epoch begins today
Fund III launches into what I believe is the most transformational period in technology of our generation. Capabilities that seemed like magic a decade ago are now real, usable, and creating enormous value. Air Street is built for exactly this moment, and I couldn’t be more energised to find and back the defining companies of this era.
I am deeply grateful for the trust and partnership of an extraordinary group of long-term partners including US university endowments, foundations, hospitals, and institutional investment platforms. Many of our existing investors significantly increased their commitments, and several are investing in a solo GP venture firm for the first time.
Air Street could not have made this progress without the hard work and ambition of our founders. It is a privilege to partner with you.
To the steadfast AI founder: come join our third epoch. We begin today.
tl;dr Air Street Capital, founded by Nathan Benaich, has raised $232M for Fund III - making it the largest solo GP venture fund in Europe. The fund invests in AI-first companies in North America and Europe across software, science, the physical world, and defense, with portfolio companies including Synthesia, Black Forest Labs, Sereact, Profluent, Delian Alliance Industries, and Poolside. Read more at www.airstreet.com and press.airstreet.com
Congratulations and for Europe. The UK continues to lag in AI startups but will be watching to see if this trend can change.
AI first companies ? Who are these ? Any parameters ?