Introducing Brain Co.

From Coffee to Company

“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.

At the time, Jared and his business partner Luis Videgaray had spent months with global leaders, observing a recurring challenge: leaders understood the necessity of having an AI strategy but lacked the access to top talent needed to implement and deliver results. Meanwhile in Silicon Valley, the world’s best AI talent was advancing the technology at unmatched speed but lacked the access to drive impact at the world’s most important institutions.

The obvious solution was to bridge Silicon Valley’s best AI talent with global leaders who needed it most. Jared and Luis were looking for a company that could help bring this vision to life. Elad had an idea: “Why don’t we create a company to address this opportunity?”

Meet Brain Co.

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.

Our Investors

Our $30M Series A is led by Elad Gil and Affinity Partners and we’re fortunate to be backed by many of the sharpest minds in AI:

• Ali Ghodsi — CEO, Databricks
• Andrej Karpathy — AI researcher and builder
• Andrew Liveris — Former Chairman and CEO of Dow Chemical
• Aravind Srinivas — CEO, Perplexity
• Brian Armstrong — CEO, Coinbase
• Fidji Simo — CEO, Applications at OpenAI
• Kevin Weil — Chief Product Officer, OpenAI
• Mark Weinberger — Former Chairman and CEO of EY
• Nadeem Meghji — Global Co-Head of Blackstone Real Estate
• Naval Ravikant — Founder, AngelList; Investor
• Nikesh Arora — CEO, Palo Alto Networks
• Noam Brown — AI researcher, OpenAI
• Patrick Collison — CEO, Stripe
• Reid Hoffman — Partner, Greylock; Co-founder LinkedIn and Inflection AI
• Sarah Guo — Founder, Conviction
• Vipul Ved Prakash — CEO, Together AI
• …and more

The Path Ahead

What started as a bridge between AI talent and large institutions has expanded into real-world applications. While the foundation models unlock transformational capabilities, they require combining with other components and integrating into workflows to deliver real impact.  

Moreover, we are developing an entirely new way to build applications. Traditional software development—build, deploy, integrate—worked in eras of slower technological change. But with AI capabilities advancing daily, that model often results in software that is obsolete before it’s even adopted.  When new AI capabilities are released, our applications automatically incorporate them.   Our approach ensures our partners not only realize value from the initial deployment of AI applications faster, but also immediately benefit as the underlying AI capabilities improve.

To date, we have already solved a number of high impact problems including:

• Automating construction permitting workflows
• Optimizing energy consumption across industrial plants
• Streamlining patient care paths within hospital systems
• Handling complex customer interactions like hotel or restaurant bookings

On a personal note, it has been energizing to watch how advances in AI are being applied to real life impact. Given the rate of progress, I couldn’t be more optimistic about the possibilities that lie ahead. If this also excites you, we’d love to have you join us here at Brain Co.

For more information, visit www.brain.co.

- Eric Wu

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