Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Want to write with us? In episode 48 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Nathan Benaich. Nathan is Founder and General Partner at Air Street Capital, a venture capital (VC) firm focused on investing in AI-first technology and life sciences companies. Nathan runs a number of communities focused on AI including the Research and Applied AI Summit and leads Spinout.fyi to improve the creation of university spinouts.

The AI-focussed venture capital firm Air Street Capital today announced the closing of a €14.6 million fund, targeting early-stage founders in Europe and the US who combine AI expertise with deep sector-specific knowledge. Led by Air Street Capital founder and general partner Nathan Benaich, the London-based fund represents a new way of investing in AI companies. Its partners are embedded in the AI community and apply technical expertise to spot new talent and to source viable AI applications. Before starting Air Street Capital, its founder Nathan Benaich launched RAAIS and London.AI, which connect AI practitioners from large companies, startups and academia. Benaich's prior investments include Mapillary (acquired by Facebook), Tractable, LabGenius, Thought Machine, Starship, Ravelin, PolyAI, Jukedeck (acquired by ByteDance), and Numerai.

He is the founder, CEO, and lead designer of SpaceX; co-founder, CEO, and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; and co-founder and CEO of Neuralink He was ranked the No. 1 global FinTech influencer and the No. 2 InsurTech influencer by Onalytica. He is a senior advisor at Arbidex, Glance Technologies, Datametrex AI, kapilendo.de, She is the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Stanford Vision Lab. Since age 15, the main goal of professor Jürgen Schmidhuber has been to build a self-improving Artificial Intelligence (AI) smarter than himself, then retire. His lab's Deep Learning Neural Networks (since 1991) such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) have revolutionised machine learning, and are now available to billions of users through the world's most valuable public companies, e.g., for greatly improved speech recognition on over 2 billion Android phones, greatly improved machine translation through Google (since 2016) and Facebook (over 4 billion LSTM-based translations per day as of 2017), Apple's Siri and Quicktype on almost 1 billion iPhones (since 2016), the answers of Amazon's Alexa, and numerous other applications.

For those out there who know me, it'll be no surprise to learn that I'm going long on the transformative power of artificial intelligence (AI). Since 2013, I've spent most of my energy studying, researching, investing (e.g. Mapillary, Numerai, Ravelin) and building AI communities (AI Summit 2015and 2016, LondonAI meetup), with a mission to accelerate its real-world applications. I am passionate about seeking out and bringing technology advancements to markets that can enable us to solve the high-value (and often complex) problems we face in business and society. Importantly, this includes ones that were previously intractable from either a technical or commercial standpoint.

Just 5 months ago we started Zeroth . And this Sunday, September 25 will be the application deadline for my first cohort. I'm experienced with accelerator programs. Before Zeroth, I was at Techstars, first in New York and then starting the first international Techstars program in London alongside Jon Bradford and Jess Williamson. Through that experience, I worked with over 50 startups, managed over 120 mentors, and hired over 40 Associates and Hackstars.