While most students were stumbling back from bars over the weekend, Songye Yoon was rushing across campus in South Korea. When dinner time came around, she ran some programs on the university's supercomputer and waited sleeplessly in her dorm for the computer to run the programs at high speed. “I woke up at 2 or 3 a.m. and walked around campus because I wanted to know the results,” she said.
She was such an oddity on campus that a writer used her as inspiration for a TV show about her college.
“The idea was never to create a character based on a real character,” she said. But as the author spoke to the students to get the material, “she kept hearing stories about this strange girl.”
And Yoon was the inspiration for the Korean TV show KAIST's “Genius Girl.”
If writers were to make a show about Yun's life today, it would be something akin to HBO's “Silicon Valley.” After earning her PhD at MIT, she worked her way up to become president of South Korean video game developer NCSoft, and today she founded Principle Venture Partners (PVP), a $100 million fund backing AI startups. Announced. The fund has written early-stage checks ranging from $100,000 to “single-digit millions,” and has already invested in six startups, including model maker Liquid AI.
Her peer partners include some of the biggest names in the AI academia. There's Daniela Russ, a well-known researcher who I met through Yun's work on the MIT Board of Directors. Dawn Song is a MacArthur Fellow and has published extensively on computer security. Jeremy Nixon is the founder of AGI House, an AI hacker house that has gained attention for attracting young and talented founders.
PVP is one of the few investment firms to have such a strong roster of academic heavyweights, which Yun sees as an advantage as the firm seeks to land deals.
“I think founders are looking for diverse advisors who bring different perspectives,” she says. Yoon believes the PVP team's research background provides a deep understanding of how AI “has evolved over time” and where it is headed.
The team is betting that the next generation of unicorns will be AI-native companies. This means that these companies were built with AI in mind from the beginning, rather than just adding AI applications to their platforms later. Yun isn't worried that he missed the boat by investing in foundational companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. “If you look at the top 10 companies on the Nasdaq, more than half of them are digitally native companies that were founded after broadband was introduced,” she says.
Yun said the company will invest in all areas. She is particularly excited about the potential of AI to transform the insurance industry. Examples include using AI to help people understand insurance plans, and insurance companies specializing in autonomous robot underwriting.
Yun is also concerned about the potential for AI to exacerbate cultural colonialism, an issue he wrote about last year. She gave the example of a large model manufacturer declaring, “Oh, we're going to use all the data in the world to train this AI.”
“But if you think about it, 35% of the world's population doesn't even have access to broadband,” Yun said. “And they should not be the creators of the data used to train this AI, so it is inevitable that those cultures and perspectives will not be reflected.”
She acknowledges that this is a complex issue that can only begin to be resolved through continued dialogue and increased industry representation. For example, an AI-focused fund with three female partners.
“We don’t say we’re a women’s fund, but I think a lot of female founders come to us because they know we can resonate more,” Yun says. he said. “And you get to see their real strength and their real superpowers.”