GFT Ventures Fund I - Announcing Final Close
We are delighted to share that we have officially closed our inaugural Fund I with a fund size of $140M, well over our original target of $100M (link to press release). We attribute the continued interest in GFT Ventures, from both new and existing investors, to our shared and unwavering “conviction” that modern AI and Data Science techniques will continue to transform virtually every business, and every industry, over the coming decades. We consider it a great honor and privilege to manage the Fund on your behalf, and are excited to continue sharing with you our passion to support the world’s best and brightest AI, data science, and frontier technology entrepreneurs that are solving the world’s hardest problems for the largest markets.
GFT Ventures continues to see exponential growth opportunities ahead of us in our core focus areas. In fact, developments in the field of AI this past year have been nothing short of amazing. The incredibly rapid and widespread adoption of large language models such as ChatGPT have ushered in what we are internally referring to as “the second big bang” of AI, which (as eloquently stated by Jensen Huang of NVIDIA) is now truly beginning to experience its “iPhone moment.” Our belief is that the “mainstream” excitement, and associated infrastructure buildout, around these transformer models will lead to more (and more frequent) cycles of AI framework and application development spanning areas well beyond images, video and voice. And just further confirms our strong and early conviction that the technology wave we are now surfing is truly at the “beginning” of what we believe will be a multi-decade cycle. Capitalizing on this opportunity, GFT Ventures has staked out a very early AI thought leadership position, helping to drive the largest technology disruptions we will likely see in our lifetimes, and ultimately producing some of the most valuable technology franchises the world has ever seen.
At this time, we’re also excited to announce that the Fund has recently invested in two new AI-centric companies, Qortex and Artisight, each sourced through our proprietary deal flow pipeline. More details on each of them can be found below.
As always, we very much appreciate the strong support we’ve received from our investors, partners, colleagues and friends as we continue to expand the GFT Ventures franchise. We are ecosystem builders and supporters at heart, and we couldn’t be more excited by the industry reception we’ve received. We love what we do, and we do it with passion.
With Gratitude,
Jeff Herbst and Jay Eum
Founding Managing Partners, GFT Ventures
Read the rest of the newsletter here.