Our mission is to turn groundbreaking AI research into transformative investments, fueling the next generation of AI-first startups.
- Research-driven: We prioritize in-depth research, bringing cutting-edge intelligence to our portfolio companies and community.
- First check investors: Value is created at the earliest stage. That’s why we are usually the first institutional check into seed and preseed startups.
- AI-focused: We believe AI is a supercycle technology that will create transformative value. We back startups that are AI-first.
Pioneering a new way of seed investing
We are a venture fund that’s built like a startup and we’re trying to chart a new course in seed-and pre-seed-stage investing.
Founded in 2021, Leonis Capital was born from the vision that AI is a supercycle technology that would power the next industrial revolution. We realized the immense potential of technological breakthroughs and made it our mission to back the new generation of AI-first companies.
From day one, we’ve believed in a thesis-driven approach to investing and resisted the spray-and-pray style that unfortunately characterizes many early-stage investors.
Along the way, we have come to realize the massive perceptive gap between the world of cutting-edge research and venture capital -- it would take years, if not decades for VCs to realize a trend that’s been developing in research circles. But it is these trends that ultimately shape the face of technology startups.
We decided to pioneer a research-driven approach to investing in early-stage AI companies. This means investing a lot of time and energy in understanding the fundamental technological trends and their commercial applications.
To us, “research” does not only mean technical research, but also research on markets, customers, and macro economic trends. This is why we built a multidisciplinary team with backgrounds spanning investing, operating, and technical research.
Doing research at the early-stage is hard, especially when there is so little information about the market and the companies. But here are some things that we do to help us identify new opportunities:
- Reading state-of-the-art research papers.
- Building test projects with the newest models and developer tools.
- Collaborating with domain experts to map out AI applications in specific verticals.
Today, more than 80% of our investments are driven by our research. Our research efforts have also helped us accumulate deep domain expertise that benefit our portfolio companies and the Leonis ecosystem.