Vannevar Ventures - Investing at the Intersection of Bits, Atoms, AI, and American Dynamism
Fund Overview
Vannevar Ventures, named after “America’s First CTO,” Vannevar Bush, and led by Tyler Knight, is an early-stage VC fund on a mission to support the most ambitious founders on the planet developing fundamentally pragmatic yet equally innovative, high-impact technology solutions across critical infrastructure and national security — the intersection of bits, atoms, AI, and American Dynamism (B+A+AI+AD).
Our foundational belief is that in the wake of decades of domestic digitization and deindustrialization, (over)financialization and globalization, the great financial crisis, and COVID-19, there are macroeconomic, geopolitical, and technological forces converging into a tidal wave of change that will manifest in a generation-defining technology innovation cycle.
The B+A+AI+AD category is derived from patriotic accountability and recognition that domestic infrastructure decay, institutional inefficiency, supply chain fragility, adversarial over-reliance, industrial stagnation, power generation and distribution bottlenecks, and the emergence of asymmetrically impactful domains, such as space and information warfare, in parallel with asymmetrically impactful technologies such as artificial intelligence, general-purpose robots, and highly intelligent, autonomous, and attritable systems of various form factors, has materialized into an inflection point of kinetic potential — both economic and militarily.
Investment Thesis: The highest density of this next decade’s power law returning investments will be generated by the cohort of startups solving hard engineering problems at the intersection of bits, atoms, AI, and American Dynamism.
Venture Fund + Syndicate Snapshot:
- Investment Stages: pre-Seed to Series B
- Investment Size: $100k - $10M
- Number of Syndicate LPs: 3,000+
- Assets Under Management (AUM): $80M+
Investments
Building the standard space traffic control network in space
Generative AI-native cybersecurity platform for modern AI threats
Mapping the earth with space-based LiDAR for the first time
The foundational, interoperable AI for defense
Plug & play hardware + software suite that equips any satellite or spacecraft with autonomous navigation capabilities
Building an AI-native “answers” engine
The world’s first photonic AI computing platform
Developing analog AI-on-the-Edge chips mirroring the brain
Developing the world’s smallest + brightest Micro-LEDs
The largest clean energy BTC miner in North America
High-density and ultra-fast AI inference combining photonic + neuromorphic computing
AI-native compute architecture optimized for AI workloads
World’s first reversible computing, near-zero energy chips for Generative AI
Building an army of AI-enabled robotic blacksmiths
Generative AI for automated tool & die design
Mobile factories optimized for near-site modular construction
Developing first-generation LARGE BWB airfreight drones
Developing a portfolio of advanced bio-based materials
AI-enabled and vertically integrated metals exploration
Advancing technology metal mining & processing with bioengineered enzymes
Industrializing production of and commercializing advanced nuclear SMRs
Building the technology infrastructure for the atomic era 2.0
