Elad Gil returns for Part II of our conversation to unpack the story behind Brain Co, his new AI incubation venture with Jared Kushner (Affinity Partners) and Eric Wu (Fmr Founder & CEO of Opendoor).
Brain Co was founded to solve a glaring problem: Fortune 100s and government institutions desperately want AI adoption but lack the engineering depth and infrastructure to make it real. Backed by a $30M Series A led by Gil Capital and Affinity Partners, Brain Co is already pulling in some of the sharpest AI minds and heavyweight backers across tech and finance.
We dive into:
The origins of Brain Co & why Jared Kushner approached Elad
Eric Wu’s role with Brain Co after Opendoor
Why enterprise AI adoption is broken & how Brain Co fixes it
The $30M Series A & the powerhouse angels behind it (Databricks, Stripe, Coinbase, OpenAI leaders, Naval, Reid Hoffman, & more)
“Why aren’t the biggest institutions implementing cutting-edge AI?” That was the question Jared Kushner asked Elad Gil over coffee in February 2024, at Elad’s office in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood.”
That conversation became the spark for founding Brain Co., a company built to empower the world’s most important institutions to create an abundant AI future. Today, I’m excited to share our public launch and announce our $30 million Series A financing alongside our progress to date:
Partnerships with 10+ Global 2000 customers
Strategic partnership with OpenAI
Operating in global sectors including government, healthcare, energy, hospitality, and more
And most importantly, building real-world AI applications that are already delivering value in the hundreds of millions
To execute on this vision, I was brought in as a co-founder and chairman. Dan Ashton, Mircea Pasoi, and Revant Kapoor also joined as co-founders to deepen our bench of world-class talent and build our first set of applications. Luis Videgaray joined as a board member, with Charlton Boyd and Nick Butterfield from the Affinity team facilitating partnerships.
Clemens Mewald joined as CEO after spending more than a decade at Google Brain, Databricks, and Instabase delivering AI to large enterprise customers. Today we are a team of 40+ AI experts with deep experience applying AI at companies like Tesla, NVIDIA, and DeepMind.
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