The Midas Seed List 2024: The Early Venture Capital Backers Of Tomorrow’s AI Giants

Investments in AI are making headlines today, but the members of the 2024 Midas Seed List had the foresight to start writing checks much earlier.

Now in its third year, the Midas Seed List recognizes the top-performing investors backing companies at the earliest stages of formation. While many of the mega-exits that drove placements on this year’s list have become household names – Stripe, DoorDash, Uber, Roblox, Instacart and the like – there is a huge ecosystem of lesser-known, early-stage companies that are delivering significant wins for their early backers.

For this year’s list, we’re taking a closer look at venture capitalists who wrote the first checks into companies at the forefront of artificial intelligence, which promises to be the biggest revolution in technology since the internet itself.

Below, we highlight those trendsetters – some of whom made recent bets that have yet to pay off and some who backed companies more than a decade ago and are seeing that early promise (or late-breaking pivots to AI) deliver returns.

Pejman Nozad, Pear (#1)

Pejman Nozad has taken one of the top two spots every year since the Midas Seed List launched in 2022, so it is no surprise that he continues to set the tone for what’s happening in the early-stage venture market. As a cofounder and managing partner of Pear, he has been a seed investor in iconic tech companies, from Doordash to Dropbox to Applovin. An immigrant from Iran, Nozad has been referred to as one of tech’s most unlikely venture capitalists, but he’s also a successful one, with a track record of both identifying talent and taking promising ideas to the next level.

Nozad’s longevity in the industry paid off handsomely with SoundHound’s IPO. Although AI was barely on anyone’s radar in 2006, he led the company’s Series A and served as an advisor for over a decade until the AI-enabled voice recognition platform went public at a valuation of over $2 billion in 2022. Viz.ai, a pioneer in using AI and machine learning to assist hospitals and health systems in diagnosing diseases and customizing care, was valued at $1.2 billion in its last round of financing after receiving a seed investment from Pear in 2016.

Last year, Pear announced the close of its oversubscribed $432 million fund – one of the largest seed funds raised in recent years – and indicated that much of this capital could be invested in pre-seed and seed rounds with a focus on AI. If the past is any indicator, we expect Nozad to retain his spot on the Seed List and status as a trendsetter for years to come.

Relevant Investments*:

· SoundHound AI

· Viz.ai

David Frankel, Founder Collective (#2)

Hailing from South Africa, entrepreneur-turned-VC David Frankel is a cofounder and managing partner of Founder Collective, which has seen successful exit after exit since its founding in 2009. Due to the unfortunate increase in geopolitical tensions and an uptick in worldwide defense spending, Frankel’s investment in AI pilot startup Shield AI, like other aerospace and defense startups, has fared extremely well despite the broader struggles in the VC market. In late 2023, the company raised a massive Series F that boosted its valuation to $2.8 billion.

Frankel also made an early investment in (and saw an attractive exit from) one of the most uniquely situated and legendary startups of the past decade – Stack Overflow. The Q&A platform for programmers has fueled the AI boom in more ways than one. Beyond a long history of enabling coders to share information and sharpen their skills, the company recently inked a deal with Google to help power Google’s generative AI chatbot, Gemini.

Relevant Investments*:

· Shield AI

· Stack Overflow

· Sift

Satya Patel, HomeBrew (#7)

Satya Patel returns to the list this year bolstered by investments in Chime, Plaid and Gusto, among others. But, like many savvy investors, he has also made recent bets on several up-and-coming AI companies. He gained his reputation as an astute technologist with time spent as Twitter’s Vice President of Product following stints at Google and DoubleClick.

With Patel serving as co-lead of Homebrew’s seed- and early-stage investments, his team led Slang.ai’s $20 million Series A in June of 2023. The company, founded by former data scientists from Spotify, provides restaurants and retailers with generative AI-powered products that enhance a storefront’s ability to answer queries by phone, helping to answer common questions about hours, location and menu items or to take reservations.

Relevant Investments:*

· Concentric AI

· Shield AI

· Slang.ai

Larry Li, Amino Capital (#19)

Larry Li is founder and managing partner at Amino Capital. He has had a hand in funding hundreds of the most valuable startups to come out of Silicon Valley. Amino Capital backs seed to growth stages in a variety of industries, including AI, and counts icons like Chime and Rippling in its portfolio.

Several early bets on AI companies have propelled Li onto the Seed list. He led an early round in Turing.com, which uses proprietary AI to help companies build enterprise applications, train and enhance large language models and hire on-demand technical professionals. Turning.com raised an $87 million Series D round at a $1.1 billion valuation in 2021, showcasing Li’s ability to spot and back unicorns at the earliest stages. Similarly, he backed Oasis Labs, a cloud computing platform built on the blockchain with several AI-focused projects, including a partnership with Meta intended to advance fairness measurement in AI models while maintaining privacy.

Relevant Investments*:

· Oasis Labs

· Replit

· Turing.com

Topher Conway, SV Angel (#24)

Topher Conway, like many others on this year’s Seed list, has long been an AI backer. His firm, SV Angel, made an early bet in Hugging Face back in 2018, leading a $4 million round in the company that bills itself as “the AI community building the future.” Five years later, Hugging Face raised a whopping $235 million at $4.5 billion valuation, reflecting VC appetite for AI and platforms like Hugging Face that support its development.

Character.AI is another example of his ability to spot AI leaders. The company was founded by ex-Google employees who were at the forefront of the development of large language models. Having raised seed funding back in December 2021 from SV Angel and others, the company subsequently closed a $150 million round that valued it at $1 billion in March 2023. With early bets like these in AI, he is staking his claim as an investor to watch in this space.

Relevant Investments*:

· Hugging Face

· Character.AI

*Does not include all investments.

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