Investment Insights and Trends

Mundus sine caesaribus — Latin for “a world without emperors” — was boldly printed on Jay Graber’s shirt as she took the stage at South by Southwest this March. It wasn’t just Latin flair, but a pointed parody of Mark Zuckerberg’s infamous motto, “aut Zuck aut nihil” (“either Zuck [Caesar] or nothing”). One shirt imagines a world without emperors. The other suggests total domination.

The venture world has long recognized the outsized influence of alumni networks from breakout companies — none more famous than the PayPal Mafia. But today, we’re seeing the rise of a new and potentially more transformative force: the AI Mafia. At Alumni Ventures, we believe the dense networks forming within companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and others represent one of the most compelling engines of innovation and venture opportunity in a generation. In this piece, we unpack how these “mafias” are forming, why they have structural advantages unlike any previous tech wave, and what this means for the future of startup creation, enterprise adoption, and investment strategy.

Below, we explore nine areas where artificial intelligence will accelerate progress and reshape healthcare by 2035. Along the way, we highlight several Alumni Ventures portfolio companies helping advance these changes. Some ideas may sound like science fiction, but they build on real-world efforts underway across research labs, startups, and industry.

Alumni Ventures’ U.S. Strategic Tech Fund exists to back the builders and technologies shaping America’s future security and competitiveness. Biotechnology is no longer confined to medicine — it’s becoming infrastructure. It’s reshaping national defense, industrial resiliency, and human performance. That’s why we hosted Defying Darwin Night in San Francisco: to gather founders, operators, and national security leaders at the bleeding edge of this transformation.

Sports are often seen as entertainment, but beneath the surface, they are driven by innovation and substantial financial returns. Billions of fans engage with sports, supporting an ecosystem of products, services, and investments that can yield massive rewards. This blog explores key segments of sports investments, highlighting successful ventures and emerging opportunities that are shaping the future of the industry.

“The Zepbound trade” is shorthand for the GLP-1 seismic shift. What started as a targeted diabetes treatment has evolved into a profound therapeutic breakthrough. GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound aren’t just changing waistlines — they’re reshaping healthcare and creating a universe of opportunities for visionary investors.

At Alumni Ventures (AV), we don’t just follow market trends — we strive to anticipate them, helped by our extensive community. Our 2021 investment in Groq perfectly demonstrates this approach: a calculated bet on revolutionary AI hardware that has positioned our investors at the forefront of computing’s next paradigm shift: Inference computing.

Tough markets don’t stop great ideas — some of the most game-changing companies were born in downturns. Venture capital isn’t about chasing headlines; it’s about staying patient, focused, and investing in real innovation over time. At Alumni Ventures, we play the long game, backing visionary founders and building portfolios built to thrive through all market cycles.

Seed-stage investing involves high risk and high reward, where bold ideas evolve into products with the potential for significant growth. Investors at this stage focus on assessing key factors such as founder expertise, market potential, product differentiation, and scalability. A diversified approach, thorough due diligence, and strategic involvement with founders can enhance the chances of success in this high-stakes investment space, despite challenges like high failure rates and unproven business models.

There’s a dark side to AI that’s underreported. It’s not deepfakes, mass surveillance, job displacement, or AI takeovers but rather every CISO’s (Chief Information Security Officer’s) worst nightmare. Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, employees have been feeding code, emails, and sensitive documents into generative AI tools, opening the floodgates to data leaks and security risks.