Conviction is a new venture firm built specifically for the next generation of AI-native, “Software 3.0” companies—the ones poised to become tomorrow’s defining businesses. If Software 1.0 was driven by human-written code, and Software 2.0 by labeled datasets, Software 3.0 is powered by the ability to shape and steer foundation models. We’re still in the earliest phase of turning these models into real products that reshape entire industries.
Pushing into frontiers like this can feel exciting, strange, and a bit lonely. That’s why small, tight-knit communities matter. To support founders working at the edge of AI, we created Embed—an invitation-only program for exceptional early teams. Embed brings together a deep network, hard-earned company-building insight, and an AI-native community where founders learn from each other and gain an edge.
We’ve already run three cohorts and had the privilege of working with teams behind Chai, Cognition, Listen Labs, Physical Intelligence, Pika Labs, Reflection, Somite, Yutori, and others. And we’re just getting started.
$150K investment, uncapped, no-discount MFN SAFE, or at the same price as a round within the last 60 days
$350K in AWS credits, $350K in Azure credits, $500K+ of other compute/inference/hosting credits: OpenAI, Anthropic, Baseten, Pinecone, Vercel, and Weights & Biases
Early access to Mistral models
Rolling admissions over the month
Class size of 10-12 companies, highly selective (<1% selection in first batches)
We have backed engineers, researchers, product folks, domain experts, and dropouts. We gravitate towards technical teams who build with velocity and pragmatism. We're lucky to already be in business with extraordinary founders and companies, like the ones listed below and others still in stealth.
Baseten, founded by Tuhin Srivastava, Amir Haghighat, and Phillip Howes
Cartesia, founded by Karan Goel, Albert Gu, Brandon Yang, Arjun Desai, and Chris Re
Cognition Labs, founded by Scott Wu, Steven Hao, and Walden Yan
Distributed Spectrum, founded by Alex Wulff, Isaac Struhl, and Ben Harpe
Essential, founded by Ashish Vashwani and Niki Parmar
Foundry, founded by Jared Quincy Davis
Harvey, founded by Gabe Pereyra and Winston Weinberg
HeyGen, founded by Joshua Xu and Wayne Liang
Latent, founded by Rish Jain and Sri Somasundaram
Listen Labs, founded by Alfred Wahlforss and Florian Juengermann
Mistral, founded by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix
Open Evidence, founded by Daniel Nadler and Zachary Ziegler
RunSybil, founded by Ari Herbert-Voss
Sierra, founded by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor
Sola, founded by Jessica Wu and Neil Desmukh
One of our favorite parts of the job is when founders surprise us with ideas we've never thought about.
That being said, we do spend a lot of time learning about thinking about AI, both what's becoming possible from the research and engineering side and what customers want to buy. We compiled a growing and continuously updated list for where we think important companies might lie.
To be clear, we don't think you have to work on any of these ideas to get in to Embed! We just share them as a way to demonstrate our thinking and a slice of what we're thinking about today.
Seed, pre-seed
San Francisco, California, United States