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A Catalyst for AI-Native Startups

Conviction is a new venture firm purpose-built to serve AI-Native, "Software 3.0" companies, and to help them achieve their potential as the most important companies of tomorrow. If "Software 1.0" was about human-written code, and "Software 2.0" is about dataset labeling, "Software 3.0" will be about manipulating foundation models. We are extremely early in the translation of powerful AI models to powerful end-user products that transform industries.

Frontiers like this are exciting, weird and lonely places, and they are best tackled within small but strong communities. To support these companies on the AI frontier, we launched Embed, a highly selective program for extraordinary early founding teams. Embed harnesses a powerful network and tribal knowledge on company-building, while creating an AI-native community for shared learning and advantage. We've hosted three cohorts so far, and have been lucky to work with amazing companies like Chai, Cognition, Listen Labs, Physical Intelligence, Pika Labs, Reflection, Somite, and Yutori. We're excited to add to that list.

Applications are due by July 31st. We will host a mandatory in-person retreat in San Francisco in early September and an angel & VC investor demo day in late October

Details $150K investment, uncapped, no-discount MFN SAFE, or as part of a round you're raising now $350K in Azure credits, $500K+ of other compute/inference/hosting credits: OpenAI, Anthropic, Baseten, Pinecone, Vercel, and Weights & Biases Early access to Mistral models Rolling admissions over the month Class size of 10-12 companies, highly selective (<1% selection in first batches) Advisors and visiting partners Ivan Zhao, CEO Notion Henrique Duburugas, CEO Brex Anu Bharadwaj, COO Atlassian Claire Hughes Johnson, COO Stripe Amjad Masad, CEO Replit Kaz Nejatian, COO Shopify Harrison Chase, CEO Langchain David Hsu, CEO Retool Guillermo Rauch, CEO Vercel Dylan Field, CEO Figma Noam Brown (Meta, OpenAI) Arthur Mensch (Deepmind, Mistral) Kelvin Guu (Google Brain) Lulu Cheng Meservy (Rostra) Andrej Karpathy (Tesla, OpenAI)