Navin Chaddha, leader and managing partner of the Mayfield Fund, a 55-year-old venture capital firm, tends to approach venture investing a little differently than other established firms.
When Mayfield raised $955 million last year, Chaddha told TechCrunch that the company didn't need billions of dollars because “copying others is a strategy that's asking for disaster, it's a strategy that's asking for failure.”
The company is also taking another step that looks unique: Mayfield announced Wednesday that it is launching “AI Garage,” a $100 million initiative aimed at ideation-stage founders interested in building AI teammate companies.
AI Garage wants to differentiate itself from accelerators like YC and pre-seed programs like Sequoia's Arc and Greylock's Edge by modeling its efforts on the entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR) experience: For the past 40 years, Mayfield Fund has hired one or two EIRs each year to help turn greenfield concepts into new, fundable companies.
Through this new program, Mayfield plans to welcome up to five aspiring founders into his office every six months, expanding and formalizing the EIR program.
Like the EIR, AI Garage participants won't receive funding from day one, but Mayfield will allocate a minimum of $1 million and a maximum of $5 million once a business plan is developed with the help of corporate partners and support staff such as marketing, human resources and business development teams.
As for why Mayfield decided to expand and formalize its EIR program fivefold, the answer comes down to Chadha’s interest in getting early access to AI application startups, specifically what he calls “AI teammates.”
Image credit: Mayfield
“They haven't even started their companies yet. We will help them start their companies,” Chaddha said.
Unlike a co-pilot or an agent, Chaddha said, an AI teammate is more than just an assistant that can answer questions and take actions autonomously, like booking meetings or suggesting refunds. “Teammates collaborate with humans on complex tasks to achieve a common goal,” Chaddha said. “AI teammates are digital companions that elevate humans to superhumans. They will lead us into a new era of collaborative intelligence.”
Although the terms “copilot,” “agent,” and “teammate” can be used interchangeably, labeling an AI app as a teammate can be considered a clever marketing strategy as it appears more human-friendly.
“We believe there are endless opportunities for AI teammates to collaborate with humans and shape the future of the workplace, with AI working alongside humans in many areas including product and engineering, data, sales and marketing, customer service, IT and security, finance, HR, legal and many administrative functions,” Chaddha said.
Mayfield has already invested in nearly a dozen AI teammate companies, including DevRev (customer service support AI), Docket (AI sales engineers), and NeuBird (site reliability AI engineers).
In NeuBird's case, human site reliability engineers instruct the AI to detect site outages, prioritize and troubleshoot the issues, and if the AI determines it can't solve the problem, it contacts a human engineer for help. “That's one example of a teammate,” Chaddha says.