Pear is built to support early-stage AI founders

2023 was the year that generative AI went mainstream. 2024 is shaping up to be the year founders put AI to work across the board. Here at Pear, we specialize in pre-seed and seed stage investing, backing AI-first companies and helping you go from 0 to 1. We provide deep technical expertise, we’ve built a first-of-its-kind GenAI studio, and we have a unique platform team that helps you take off.

At Pear, we’ve been backing AI builders for over a decade, including these companies:

Historic Pear investments include: Gradio (acquired by Hugging Face), Solvvy (acquired by Zoom), Viz AI, Federato, Valar Labs, Orby AI

Since closing our fourth $432M fund in May 2023, we’ve doubled down on investing in the AI space. Below are just a few of our recent investments, with many more in stealth mode and 21 of our current 22 PearX S24 companies currently building in AI:

Recent Pear investments include: Cognition Labs, Guardrails AI, Ideogram, Kindroid

We believe that we’re just scratching the surface when it comes to what’s possible with AI. While we’re not alone in investing in the AI space, I do think we’re uniquely positioned to help early-stage AI founders for a few major reasons:

We’re deep AI experts and operators

Our AI partners are all former senior engineering leaders (Robinhood, Stripe, Dropbox, Cisco) and highly technical founders who have built high growth successful startups that were acquired by leading tech companies. As true experts, we’re able to deeply understand your technology and operating environment— and then work in the trenches with you. While many VCs can advise you on AI, Pear will dive in to actually help you whiteboard ideas, build out product roadmaps, get through difficult pivots, and scale out your company.

Pear’s AI team: Arash Afrakhteh, Arpan Shah, Shravan Reddy

We work as a team

Pear’s vertical experts, like Eddie in biotech, Vivien in healthcare and Arpan and Shravan in fintech, are also here to support you, combining their industry expertise with our AI team’s long standing AI competency. Having founded, built, and scaled over 13 companies, when you get one of Pear investors, you get all of us.

We offer unparalleled resources at the early-stage

We’re an early-stage firm with the platform team of a much larger firm. Our talent team has four experienced recruiters, dedicated to help our founders find the best people, fast. They’ve already made over 116 hires for Pear companies, including 80 R&D hires such as AI engineers, NLP specialists, AI researchers, and more.

Similarly, our go-to-market team equips our founders with all they need to successfully navigate founder led sales: providing support with determining ideal customer profile and messaging, pricing and contract strategy, call coaching, co-piloting deals, and more. The team has supported technical founders like Streamline and Orby AI in getting their revenue engines going. Results of this support include doubling one AI company’s ARR in just one month and seeing a 150% increase in close rates and sales representatives efficiency.

We’re running Pear Studio: a first-of-its-kind GenAI studio and an elite founder network

Earlier this year, we opened Pear Studio SF, a first-of-its-kind 30,000 square foot working space in Mission Bay. This unique community includes over 200 entrepreneurs working alongside one another to launch the next generation of AI companies. We also host events like the Pear VC + Open AI Hackathon, where 150 developers and entrepreneurs brought their AI-powered ideas to life. We also help startups grow with unique access to perks like credits from Open AI, Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, discounted legal formation packages, and payroll and HR benefits. 

Work with us, even if you are early in your journey

PearX is our elite accelerator for early-stage builders. We back companies early, when it’s often just a co-founder with an idea. Through PearX, you can with with the Pear team in Pear Studio to refine your MVP, design your GTM plan, expand your team, and launch successfully.

AI Spaces we’re especially excited about

Over the past year, Pear’s AI team has developed a thesis covering 16 pivotal areas in AI. We have already begun backing companies within many of these areas and look forward to meeting more exceptional founders innovating in these fields:

1. Human-Simulating Agents: AI agents that simulate human interactions, from companions to customer support.
2. Security and Assurance: AI leveraged solutions for defense through risks detection, prioritization, and automated mitigation, as well as evaluation and improvement of LLMs reliability
3. Synthetic Data Pipelines: Automated data gaps detection and synthetic data generation to train and improve LLMs performance.
4. Video: GenAI enabled creation, efficient editing, and enhancement of videos, revolutionizing both the movie and marketing industries.
5. Robotics: The era of robots has arrived. Standardization across hardware and software as well as model proliferation, allowing growing adoption of AI powered robots.
6. Domain-Specific Agents: Industry specialized AI agents capable of making intelligent decisions independently in code, healthcare, marketing and more.
7. Data is the New Code: Advanced data pipelines and integration solutions for AI orchestration layer.
8. Healthcare and Biotech: AI solutions that enhance and automate both non-clinical and clinical workflows, optimizing efficiency and quality of patient care and accelerating drug discovery, development, and access.
9. Enterprise Apps: Lean and customized apps built and powered by AI, delivering improved performance with minimal implementation effort.
10. New Models Modalities: Generative AI models capable of processing new, varied inputs such as biological and sensors data.
11. Dev Tools: Highly reliable and productive dev tools to detect bugs, test, and fix code, as well as to build new internal AI applications.
12. Simulations: AI-driven simulations allowing high accuracy and fidelity in complex simulations in a shorter time and less labor involved.
13. Application Layer: AI-based applications enhancing employee performance, saving time, and reducing manual work.
14. Marketplaces: AI-enabled marketplaces supercharging demand, supply or both sides with AI.
15. Evolution and Observation: New CI/CD platforms for AI systems.
16. Automations: AI-powered automation of workflows for process discovery, abstraction, and improved execution.

In the coming weeks, we’ll share more around each of these 16 areas and why we’re excited to back founders building in these spaces. If you want to learn more, visit our AI page.