Navin Chaddha, the leader and managing partner of 55-year-old VC firm Mayfield Fund, has a penchant for approaching venture investing in a way that deviates slightly from other established firms.
When Mayfield raised a $955 million fund last year, Chaddha told TechCrunch the firm doesn’t need a multi-billion-dollar fund because “copying somebody else is strategy for disaster, strategy for failure.”
The firm is again trying to do something that it sees as unique. On Wednesday, Mayfield said it is launching AI Garage, a $100 million initiative for ideation-stage founders interested in building “AI teammate” companies.
AI Garage wants to distinguish itself from accelerators such as YC or pre-seed programs like Sequoia’s Arc or Greylock’s Edge by modeling the effort on its entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR) experience. For the past 40 years, Mayfield Fund has hired one or two EIRs each year and helped them turn a raw concept into a new, fundable company.
With the new program, Mayfield plans to scale and formalize its EIR program by welcoming up to five aspiring founders into its office every six months.
Just like with EIRs, AI Garage participants won’t receive capital on day one, but Mayfield will allocate a minimum of $1 million and as much as $5 million as soon the business plan is hatched with the help of a firm’s partners and other support staff, including marketing, talent and business development team.
As for why Mayfield decided to quintuple and formalize its EIR program, the answer comes down to Chaddha’s interest in getting early access to AI application startups, specifically in the area he calls “AI teammates.”
“They haven’t even started the company. We will help them start it,” Chaddha said.
According to Chaddha, AI teammates differ from copilots and agents because they are more than simple assistants, which can answer questions or perform actions autonomously, like booking meetings or offering refunds. “Teammates collaborate with humans on complex tasks to achieve a shared goal,” he said. “AI teammates are digital companions that elevate humans to superhumans. They are going to take 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 seen as a clever marketing tactic because it just seems more human-friendly.
“We believe there are endless opportunities for AI teammates to collaborate with humans and to shape the future of our workplace by having AI work together with 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 (an AI sales engineer) and Neubird (site reliability AI engineer.)
In Neubird’s case, human site reliability engineers tell its AI to detect any site outages, and then triage and troubleshoot problems. If the AI discovers it can’t fix the problem, it calls human engineers for help. “That’s an example of a teammate,” Chaddha said.