It is not often that a product launch quickly proves to be a truly revolutionary event –Apple’s iPhone and Tesla’s Model S come to mind. When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, it was immediately recognised as a catalysing milestone. AI has been a topic of huge interest for a long time, but now we got to see that generative AI was real, it worked and could be applied anywhere. It represented not a shift in an industry, but a shift in the way the world operates.
Earlier this year, it was reported that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, no longer controlled the corporate VC fund associated with his company, the OpenAI Startup Fund, and control was handed over to Ian Hathaway, who had been helping manage the fund since it was launched in 2021.
AI has been a topic of huge interest for a long time, but now we got to see that generative AI was real, it worked and could be applied anywhere.
The fund is seeking to invest $175m –which includes commitments from Microsoft– in early-stage startups that can leverage AI to have a transformative effect on a wide range of sectors including energy, healthcare, law, infrastructure, sciences and education.
Some of its more recent rounds include a series B that it co-led for AI-powered healthcare assistant Ambience Healthcare. It also participated in funding rounds for AI teaching assistant Class Companion, coding platform Anysphere and an $80m series B round for Harvey, an AI assistant for the legal profession.
Hathaway has also overseen OpenAI’s accelerator programme, Converge, which initially launched in December 2022. A year later, applications opened for its second cohort of between 10 and 15 companies, Converge 2,open to anyone building something with AI.
Before joining OpenAI, Hathaway was an investor at Haystack, a San Francisco-based seed-stage VC firm, which made early investments in companies such as delivery apps Instacart and Doordash, as well as cloud infrastructure company Hasicorp, petcare service provider Wag and equity management platform Carta.
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