AIX Ventures
AIX Ventures is an early-stage AI venture firm co-founded by Richard SocherRichard SocherRichard Socher is an AI researcher, entrepreneur and investor. He is co-founder and CEO of Recursive, founder and CEO of You.com, and co-founder and managing partner of AIX Ventures. A Stanford computer science PhD, he contributed to the Stanford Sentiment Treebank and GloVe, founded MetaMind, and served as chief scientist at Salesforce.Open the full entry and Shaun JohnsonShaun JohnsonShaun Johnson is a technology executive and investor who co-founded AIX Ventures and previously held product, design and engineering leadership roles at Lilt and NimbleRx. He left AIX in December 2025.Open the full entry in 2021, combining AI research, entrepreneurial and investment experience.
Contents8 sections
Key facts
2021Founding
Richard Socher and Shaun Johnson co-founded AIX Ventures in 2021 to invest in AI startups.[1]
March 2022First fund introduced
On March 23, 2022, AIX introduced its $50 million first fund for pre-seed and seed-stage AI companies.[2]
Investment approach: Researchers and founders
AIX emphasizes participation by researchers and founders actively working in AI, combining technical judgment with company-building support from its investment team.[3]
February 2024Second fund
2025–2026Team changes
Shaun Johnson left AIX in December 2025. Its current website lists co-founder and managing partner Richard Socher, AI partners Anthony GoldbloomAnthony GoldbloomAnthony Goldbloom is an Australian-born entrepreneur and the co-founder and former chief executive of Kaggle, a data science competition platform. After Google acquired Kaggle in 2017, he continued to lead Kaggle within Google until 2022; he is now co-founder and CEO of the sales intelligence company Sumble and an investment partner at AIX Ventures.Open the full entry and Christopher ManningChristopher ManningChristopher Manning is a natural language processing researcher and Stanford professor emeritus, a former Stanford AI Lab director and an AIX Ventures investor. He collaborated with Richard Socher on recursive neural networks, sentiment analysis and word vectors.Open the full entry, and investment and operations staff.[1][4]
Portfolio: AI tools and infrastructure
Its website lists portfolio companies including Hugging Face, Weights & Biases, Perplexity and You.comYou.comYou.com is an AI search and infrastructure company founded by Richard Socher and Bryan McCann. It provides search, content extraction and research tools connecting AI models and agents with web information.Open the full entry, spanning models, developer tools and search applications.[5]
Public accounts: Website and social media
Its website, https://www.aixventures.com/ (opens in a new window), links to X at https://x.com/aixventureshq (opens in a new window) and LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry at https://www.linkedin.com/company/aixventures (opens in a new window).[5]