Mayfield Returns to EIR Roots with $100M AI Garage Builder Initiative
September 04 2024 - 12:00PM
Business Wire
- AI Garage targets founders building AI Teammates, the first
example of Collaborative Intelligence, and a $6 trillion dollar
opportunity
- Drawing upon the entrepreneur-in-residence model, the program
will provide selected ideation stage founders with personalized
guidance and access to firm resources, nurturing them from idea to
incorporation
- Selected founders will receive a stipend during the ideation
phase, and up to $5M in capital
Mayfield, a top-tier early-stage venture capital firm, announced
today AI Garage, a $100 million initiative aimed at ideation-stage
founders building AI teammates as digital companions. The firm has
identified teammates as a $6 trillion* opportunity that ushers in
the era of Collaborative Intelligence, where humans partner
with AI to revolutionize the way we work and live.
AI Garage is a unique early-stage effort that draws on the
firm’s 40 year track record of working with
entrepreneurs-in-residence (EIRs) to nurture founders at the
ideation stage. Entry to AI Garage is free (with no equity for
Mayfield at induction) and selective, providing individual guidance
to founders and supporting them from ideation to incorporation.
The firm distinguishes AI Teammates from copilots (simple
assistants that offer suggestions like Amazon's Rufus) and agents
(task oriented autonomous systems like Lyft's refund handler).
Teammates collaborate with humans on complex tasks to achieve a
shared goal, such as Evenup aiding lawyers to expedite the
processing of personal injury claims, or Neubird Hawkeye enabling
site reliability engineers to respond quicker to site
slowdowns.
“AI is evolving from Assisted and Autonomous to Collaborative
Intelligence that works alongside humans to elevate them to
superhumans,” said Navin Chaddha, Managing Partner of Mayfield. “As
we gathered a family of founders building teammates, they told us
there was value in a thought partner even before they had a
specific idea, to support them to grow it into a fundable company.
So we are returning to our EIR roots with AI Garage, an initiative
designed for deep collaboration with a few founders.”
The entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR) model is one where founders
spend time with dedicated partners at a venture capital firm
hatching an idea. Mayfield has a long track record of successful
partnerships, with one legendary example being that of current
Alphabet chairman and former Stanford University President Dr. John
Hennessey, who used his sabbatical year in 1984 at Mayfield to
found RISC semiconductor MIPS Technologies. A more recent example
is Rehan Jalil, founder of current Mayfield portfolio company
Securiti.ai, who served as a Mayfield EIR twice, while ideating on
Elastica (acquired by Blue Coat Systems in 2015) and also on
Securiti.ai. As the venture industry evolved, the EIR model grew
beyond the physical presence of founders at the firm, but retained
the spirit of ideation stage collaborations. Successful examples of
this include Poshmark/IPO followed by Naver acquisition,
NUVIA/Qualcomm, CloudGenix/Palo Alto Networks, Portworx/Pure
Storage, Volterra/F5 Networks, and Mammoth Biosciences.
The firm’s current Teammate investments include Balbix’s BIX
(Security teams), DevRev (Support Rep), Docket (Sales Engineer),
Neubird’s Hawkeye (Site Reliability Engineer), Outreach’s Cleo
(Sales Development Rep), Qventus (Healthcare professional), Revefi
(Data Engineer), Sema4 (Finance Manager), and two stealth startups
(Chip Engineer and Security Analyst).
How AI Garage Works
Founders who would like to be considered for AI Garage can be
first-time or seasoned; need to be located in the Bay Area; with
the bandwidth to dedicate themselves to exploring a new idea. Five
initial personas being targeted at launch include teammates in
financial services, IT services, healthcare & life sciences,
marketing, and finance & accounting.
Key benefits include:
- Zero equity at induction into the AI Garage;
- A 6 month stipend during the idea exploration stage;
- Up to $5 million in capital per founding team;
- Pairing with a dedicated investor;
- Access to the whole founder amplification team that provides
help with:
- Strategy and business plan creation
- Market opportunity sizing
- Customer validation from Mayfield’s CXO network
- Talent matching
- Brand and narrative creation
AI Garage applications are open at mayfield.ai now and
will close by October 15, 2024. The selected applicants will hear
back from Mayfield no later than December 1, 2024.
*Source: Mayfield analysis, US Bureau of Labor Statistics,
Salary.com, Press search, and others
About Mayfield
Mayfield is a cognition-focused ideation-stage venture capital
firm with a founder-first philosophy and $3 billion under
management. Mayfield invests primarily in early-stage
Cognition-as-a-Service technology companies that are leading us
into the new era of Collaborative Intelligence. Since its founding
in 1969, the firm has invested in over 500 companies, resulting in
120 IPOs and over 225 acquisitions. Some notable investments in
recent years include Lyft, Poshmark/Naver, HashiCorp,
Marketo/Adobe, and SolarCity/Tesla. For more information, go to
https://www.mayfield.com or visit us on Linkedin.
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