Betaworks’ Third Fund Closes At $66m To Invest In Early-stage Ai Startups

New York City-based Betaworks has closed its $66 cardinal Fund III, which will attraction connected investing successful early-stage AI companies. 

Betaworks has been investing successful AI since astatine slightest 2016 and, done its finance programme Camp, has backed companies specified arsenic Huggingface and Granola. Jordan Crook, a partner astatine nan patient (and erstwhile TechCrunch employee), said nan caller money will attraction connected agents, autochthonal AI interfaces, and application-layer AI. 

“Around these themes, we will proceed to do consecutive seed investing and nan Betaworks Camps,” Crook said. 

Fund III will activity to put successful astatine slightest 25 pre-seed to seed investments, arsenic good arsenic make astatine slightest 50 investments into startups arsenic portion of nan Betaworks Camps program. “Thus far, we’ve done astir 37 deals,” Crook said, adding that nan mean cheque size was astir $500,000. 

Crook called nan existent fundraising situation “frothy” for startups, and “spiky” for funds, but she noted that Fund III saw galore of nan firm’s erstwhile constricted partners returning to invest. 

“The fundraising situation successful task was challenging successful 2024, and we weren’t exempt, fixed that we were upsizing our fund,” she said.

Betaworks antecedently raised a $46 cardinal Fund II successful 2020, and a $48 cardinal Fund I successful 2016. It launched successful 2008 arsenic a task studio, and has since go a staple successful nan New York City tech ecosystem, launching its Betaworks Camps programme successful 2016. The firm’s different notable investments see Tumblr and Kickstarter.