We are the Artificial
Research &
Development Fund.
For one hundred years,
technology was a tool.
Now it's intelligent, and
everything is Artificial.

Artificial is a fund for the age of machine intelligence. Named after the first venture capital fund ever created, built to back the last generation of companies that will need to be.

Est.2026

HQNYC & SF

StageSeries A & B

Our Namesake

1946

A French immigrant and Harvard professor did something Wall Street thought was insane. He was right. They were wrong. The entire industry exists because of him.

Georges Doriot founded the American Research & Development Corporation in 1946 with a premise so radical it was almost funny: that professional investors, not dynasties or bankers, could identify and fund entirely new industries before they existed. He pointed capital at technologies nobody understood yet. The financial establishment dismissed him.

Then he put $70,000 into a company called Digital Equipment Corporation. That investment returned $355 million. Modern venture capital was born, and every fund that has existed since, including this one, is a footnote to what Doriot started. Eighty years later, we are doing exactly what Doriot did: pointing capital at industries that only the few understand. We named ourselves Artificial because the most important research and development of the next century will be artificial in origin. The name is the thesis.

$3.5M

ARD's first fund, 1946

5,000x

Return on DEC

Year Zero

Birth of venture capital

What We Believe

Software ate the world in the last super cycle. Now intelligence is rebuilding it. Every industry that exists will be re-implemented as an AI system. Most of the companies doing it haven't been started yet.
The division between "software company" and "hardware company" is a relic. The most important companies of the next twenty years will ship atoms and bits as a single product. We underwrite both.
Autonomy is the endgame. Not autonomy as a feature. Autonomy as the default state of every system, vehicle, weapon, factory, and supply chain on earth. The companies that deliver it will be the most valuable enterprises ever built.
The best founders are not building "AI companies." They are building companies that happen to be impossible without AI. That distinction is everything.

Research Domains

Four domains. Each one is a structural shift that will take decades to fully resolve. We are not chasing cycles. We are positioning at the beginning of curves.

Vertical AI

Every industry has a $100B software company hiding inside it that couldn't exist until foundation models worked. Legal, financial services, clinical, industrial. The winners won't be horizontal platforms. They'll be the teams that go so deep into a single domain that they become the operating system for it.

Legal Finance Healthcare Industrial

Physical Intelligence

Intelligence trapped in a data center is a research project. Intelligence that can see a room, pick up an object, and navigate a warehouse is a trillion-dollar industry. We fund the teams building the eyes, hands, and nervous systems of machines that operate in the real world.

Robotics Embodied AI Autonomy Sensors

Space Systems

Launch costs dropped 100x in fifteen years and nobody updated their models. The orbital economy isn't coming. It's here and it's under-capitalized. We invest in the infrastructure layer: the companies that make space economically productive, not just technically possible.

Launch Satellites Observation Manufacturing

Defense Technology

The next conflict will be decided by software, not personnel. Autonomous systems, AI-native intelligence platforms, and cyber infrastructure are not optional line items in a defense budget. They are the defense budget. We back the companies building what the DoD needs but cannot build itself.

Autonomous Systems Cyber Intelligence C2

General Partners

Emery Wells

General Partner

Built Frame.io from a prototype into the industry standard for video collaboration. Sold the company to Adobe for $1.275 billion. Spent fifteen years watching the same pattern repeat: a new technology appears, incumbents ignore it, a small team rebuilds the entire category. That pattern is now playing out across every industry simultaneously.

$1.275B

Frame.io exit

15 yrs

Building software

Seth Berman

General Partner

Co-founded Susa Ventures and built a portfolio that includes Flexport, Robinhood, and Expanse. Founded Kivu Ventures focused on AI infrastructure, logistics, and deep tech. One of the earliest institutional investors to underwrite the convergence of AI and physical systems at scale.

Susa

Co-founder

Kivu

Founder & GP

We are the Artificial Research & Development Fund. For one hundred years, technology was a tool. Now it's intelligent, and everything is Artificial.