1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Jukka Alanen, Rebellion Ventures (Part 1)

Jukka Alanen, Managing Partner at Rebellion Ventures, discusses his portfolio, investment thesis and related trends.

Sramana Mitra: We’re going to start today’s session with a conversation with Jukka Lannan, managing partner of Rebellion Ventures. Jukka and I met first when he was doing corporate development for PagerDuty, now a public SaaS company. I remember Jukka came to see me and discussed that he was starting a venture fund, and we’ve kept in touch. I’ve invited him back to discuss what his AI investment thesis is, given that the industry is flooded with AI investments right now. So Jukka, welcome. I’m looking forward to our conversation and catching up with you.

Jukka Alanen: Likewise, thank you, Sramana. It’s fantastic to be here with you and congratulations on everything you and One Million by One Million have done in terms of inspiring entrepreneurship and guiding founders throughout the world. It’s a fantastic initiative with massive potential to have an impact and contribute to entrepreneurship worldwide – what a series of roundtables, 648 thus far. So congratulations, very excited to be here with you.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you. So let’s start there. How are you thinking about AI investing in this time?

Jukka Alanen: Absolutely. So I’ll talk a bit about our thesis. We’re focused on what we call artificial super capability (ASC). I’ll talk more about what that means, but I’ll first give a quick overview of our fund. Rebellion Ventures is a pre-seed and seed VC firm here at Silicon Valley that partners with entrepreneurs to build what we call autonomous operations and AI agents. Our goal is to help entrepreneurs revolutionize business models with what we call 10-100X productivity gains and create the era of artificial super capability.

The way we look at this artificial super capability is that we see a shift from passive intelligence-focused AI to action-oriented artificial super capability that can drive business outcomes autonomously. In the real world, it’s really the context specific capability to act that delivers results, not just general intelligence. So, we see AI capabilities evolving to be superior to humans in areas such as speed, cost, and accuracy.

On one hand, there’s this shift to action-oriented capability to deliver results autonomously. On the other hand, we’ve capabilities in speed, cost, and accuracy that are superior to humans – this shift is what we call the era of artificial super capability. We believe it has the potential to unleash the greatest productivity boost in human history, drive the next 100X type of productivity gains, and transform business models across industries.

As part of this, there’s a diverse AI workforce emerging across industries – AI workers, digital humans, autopilots, and autonomous agents. These AI workers basically will bring superhuman capabilities and they’ll be continuously learning, observing, thinking, and acting to 24/7 to practically drive goals and elevate human work as part of that.

So, we’ve partnered with entrepreneurs from this fund to help them build revolutionary new ventures around autonomous operations and AI agents. We have a goal to help entrepreneurs create at least a $100 billion in annual productivity value by 2030. We’re on track to do based on the initial ROI metrics so far.

To help entrepreneurs with this fund, we’ve pulled together a network of over 70 unicorn founders, operators and industry experts who are limited partners in the fund. And then they also advisors to our entrepreneurs. So, we bring a lot of access to industrial relationships, operating playbooks, and expertise to help entrepreneurs build and scale disruptive startups in this area.

Rebellion has helped build three VC-backed startups to $3.5 billion in IPO and has had several exits. So for us, it’s about bringing in this set of operating expertise and industrial relationships to help entrepreneurs build an era of artificial super capability, unleash massive productivity gains, and elevate human work as part of that.

Sramana Mitra: How big is the fund, Jukka?

Jukka Alanen: It’s a $12.9 billion fund focused on pre-seed and seed.

Sramana Mitra: And what size checks are you writing?

Jukka Alanen: It’s in the range of a few hundred thousand dollars per company typically in the pre-seed or seed. It ranges depending a little bit on the company, the stage and what’s needed, but typically a few hundred thousand dollars. Often, it may be the first check into the company, or then we may collaborate with entrepreneurs as part of a bigger pre-seed or seed round.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Jukka Alanen, Rebellion Ventures
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