Geoff Ralston, well -known in the starting community for his years in Y Combinator, has returned to the official investment ring, announced on Thursday.
His new fund is called the artificial intelligence fund, or Saif, which is also an explanation of his thesis and a game of words.
Ralston is specifically looking for beginnings that “improve security, security and responsible setting of it”, as his Fund’s website describes. He plans to write $ 100,000 checks as a secure place, “intended goal,” he says, with a $ 10 million lid. A safe is, of course, the investment tool pre-what later Invest/Price later pioneered by Y Combinator.
While most VCs these days are seeking to invest in the beginnings of it, taking Ralston is a little more focused on the idea of safe, although he admits that the concept is slightly wide.
“The vast majority of the projects of it in the world today are using technology to solve problems either to create efficiency or create new skills. They are not necessarily essentially unsafe, but security is not their main concern,” Ralston Techcrunch tells. “I aim to finance the beginnings whose main objective is the safe – as I have (very widely) defined it.”
This list involves the start of the focus on improving the security of it, such as those that explain the decision -making process of a one, or the security of it. It includes products that protect intellectual property, those that ensure that it complies with the requirements of compliance, fights the disinformation and detection of the attacks created by it. He also wants to invest in the functional tools of he with certainty built in mind, such as the best means of anticipating him and the tools of business negotiations activated with those who will not reveal corporate secrets for foreigners.
If this sounds like a list of the beginnings of the one that many VCs are following, Ralston says an example of something he would not return: fully autonomous weapon.
“Of course there are uses of the one who (will) will be unsafe: the use of technology to create boweapons, to manage conventional weapons without a man in the loop, etc.,” he explained.
In fact, one area he would like to fund are “weapons security systems” that can detect or prevent attacks by his weapons.
This is an interesting contractual perspective by many of today’s founders of protection technology and VCs. As Techcrunch previously reported, some of the people who build weapons have been increasingly navigating the idea that such weapons would work better without a man.
Still all things he is a crowded field for QV these days. Here Ralston hopes that his YC links can give him an advantage. Ralston left YC in 2022, after three years as president (followed by Garry Tan) and over a decade as an adviser.
Ralston plans to offer the mentoring of the type he made in the accelerator of the storned start and has promised to train them on how to apply to YC. And he is offering to help them get into his considerable network of investors.
Ralston refused to say how big this fund is, how much it aims to return, or who are its LP supporters.
