Investing in AI - 2024 my most "Exciting Year!"

2024 marks 10 years since I made my first investment in an AI First Startup* and I am glad to say as one of the founding partners of Twin Path Ventures , this year is likely to prove the most productive and profitable yet. On the evening of the 17th January we are staging an event in Bishopgate to open up our 2024-25 fund to new LP investors. We are super happy to be able, especially in these difficult fundraising times, to confirm that our anchor LP's have re-committed and upped their funding to our 24-25 fund, and we are now inviting High Net Worth's and Sophisticated Investors and Family Offices, (especially those interested in exploring using their SEIS and EIS tax allocation to invest with myself and team in UK based AI startups) to come along to our event to find out more. If this is you then please sign up here (I will then send a form for you to confirm your status as a HNW/ Sophisticated investor for this event is not for startups but only serious investors)

In 2023 Twin Path Ventures raised ￡6m to invest first cheques in some of the best founders amongst the current wave of AI startups. I am happy to report, that as 2023 closed, we managed to deploy pre-seed/seed cheques in 12 AI First Startups and with the next investment, (this time in a super innovative exciting startup in the AI Drug discovery space), expected to close this week and a further two investments in our pipeline expected to close by the middle of this month we will close out our 23-24 pre-seed fund with a portfolio of 15 Applied and Frontier AI startups . Some of our portfolio such as Treefera , 5th Dimension Technologies , FinCrime Dynamics and Jenesys AI have been announced in the press and are going great guns whilst we expect the remaining to come out of stealth this quarter and when they do, expect to be amazed by their technical abilities (especially those building self-learning LLM augmented agents) and the range of industries and sectors they are disrupting and enhancing.

Since our launch in June last year we have managed to see over 300 AI First startups seeking to raise their first round of investment and have carried out extensive technical due diligence ( which kicks off with the startups completing a 55 question questionnaire and then for the lucky ones follow up meetings with our amazing small army of AI technical specialists) with over a 120 startups. A large percentage of these start-ups are referred to us by AI startup founders that I have invested in before (so big shout outs to the likes of Huss E. , Tom Harte , Alastair Moore , Guillaume Bouchard , Dan Stoyanov , Naré Vardanyan , Leonard Wossnig , Madeline Parra and Harry Keen for their ongoing support) whilst others are sourced from our ongoing long standing relationships with the likes UCL Centre of AI , Creative Destruction Lab (Oxford), Conception X , Cancer Tech Accelerator, EF London and Innovate UK. Although Twin Path Ventures has lead the vast majority of the deals we have completed so far, we are also super grateful for the opportunity on individual deals to co-invest and work alongside Concept Ventures , 10X Capital , Love Ventures , Samos Investments and Seedcamp . So in short a 2023 was a fantastic start for Twin Path Ventures and 2024 we expect to be even better.

As my colleague Alastair Moore has pointed out, one thing is almost certain in 2024 is that the performance of Large Language Models ( whether they be Closed or Open Source)will only get better and better. This leads us to concur with the New Year annual forecast from one of the worlds best performing VC funds AVC that confidently predicts that "we will see new AI-first applications emerge in 2024 that will start to move the focus and the conversation (from the impressive LLM such as Open AI & Anthropic) up the stack" ( where startups will do most of the innovation and hard work of bringing to market this once in a lifetime changing technology).

We also think 2024 will be breakthrough years for AI in drug discovery, Computer Vision in medical diagnostic and treatments and Causal/ Explainable AI in augmentation of corporate decision making, but the major waves we predict 2024 will see will be the extent of how LLM foundational AI applications will change for ever the software development, product design, financial management and professional service market- and it will not stop there.

Not only am I seeing this at Twin Path Ventures , but I see the strong signs of a changing-for-a-better-world AI technology now being productised, market adopted (and as day follows night, likely then to provide excellent returns) from the achievements and prospects of my own business angel portfolio of AI first startups such as Menten AI , Kuano , Odyssey Therapeutics , Infinitopes , TORTUS , Cosine , Purple Dot - The Pre-Commerce Company , Checkstep TitanML , Ntropy , and Daedalus. -expect great news from these startups in 2024

As I began I have now been investing in AI first startups since 2014 (not surprisingly it has not always been plain sailing) but as I look forward to 2024 (with the caveat that nothing is certain and the gods are cruel) it is hard not to be justifiably excited.

2024 bring it on.

*My first investment, an angel cheque, was in an AI first startup called Biobeats that was eventually acquired by Huma .