The fund will make early-stage AI investments aimed at reducing barriers to entry for building, training, and deploying models.

ZURICH, Nov. 12, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Dr. Steven Waterhouse, an early AI researcher, serial investor, and entrepreneur in crypto, web3, and decentralized technologies, has announced the launch of Nazaré Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund targeting emerging AI infrastructure. The fund will focus on making AI cheaper, addressing the high costs and centralization plaguing the current AI landscape.

Waterhouse, a key figure in the evolution of decentralized web and privacy technologies, served as a founding Partner at Pantera Capital, overseeing the fund’s shift to Bitcoin in 2013, founded Orchid, a network for incentivizing distributed resources such as VPN nodes, and was a Venture Partner at Fabric Ventures. Nazaré Ventures is his first independent fund as General Partner and reflects his commitment to reshaping the AI landscape by reducing barriers to entry for building, training, and deploying AI models.

Disrupting the Expensive & Centralized Status Quo
The current AI industry is oligopolistic, dominated by massive incumbent technology companies that control most of the necessary resources, leading to a prohibitively expensive and highly centralized status quo.

Nazaré Ventures will disrupt this oligopolistic structure by investing in open-source infrastructure that reduces these barriers, fostering innovation by making AI more affordable. This will pave the way for advancements in privacy, security, composability, and performance, enabling a new wave of developers to create using AI.

“Decentralization is not the answer in itself,” says Dr. Waterhouse, “it’s a consequence of making AI more affordable and accessible, both financially and technically. Lowering the cost of AI will naturally lead to broader participation, and decentralization will follow.”

In the Beginning…Before it was “AI”
Waterhouse’s journey with AI began in 1993 with his PhD research on neural networks for speech recognition at Cambridge, specializing in “mixtures of experts” – before the industry was known as “Artificial Intelligence.” Post-graduation, he worked at NASA Ames Research Center, applying machine learning to diverse data sets, from space exploration to more earth-bound applications. After participating in the first wave of the Internet with a startup that sold to Sun Microsystems, he grew frustrated with AI’s growing role in ad tech and “mining humans”. This led him to pivot towards technologies that counter surveillance capitalism, exemplified in his work with Orchid Labs, the decentralized privacy network he co-founded in 2017.

“Nazaré Ventures marks a return to my roots in AI, albeit with a vastly different purpose. With the emergence of transformative technologies like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, the AI landscape is evolving. We will fuel this new wave of AI infrastructure,” said Waterhouse.

Big Wave Hunting
Named after the small Portuguese town famous for its record-breaking surfable waves, Nazaré Ventures is the culmination and intersection of Waterhouse’s work in AI, decentralized systems, and investing. It is the manifestation of his ambition to democratize technology to spur innovation and reflects his belief in harnessing the powerful, transformational wave of AI.

For the past decade, Waterhouse has been dedicated to the growth of decentralized technologies. Now, with Nazaré Ventures, he aims to bridge his foundational AI knowledge with recent advances in decentralized infrastructure, reshaping the future of AI.

About Nazaré Ventures
Nazaré Ventures is an early stage venture fund committed to developing the AI infrastructure needed to give rise to the next generation of AI applications. Just as infrastructure in the dot com era was displaced by open source software and commodity hardware, AI infrastructure will be replaced, renewed and improved. Nazaré Ventures will be a driving force of that movement. Founder & General Partner Dr. Steven Waterhouse is a seasoned tech investor, founder and entrepreneur whose first startup sold to Sun Microsystems in the early 2000s and second, RPX, had its IPO on the Nasdaq exchange in 2011 before he pioneered Web3 investing at Pantera Capital. Nazaré Ventures is investing in the next big wave of the AI innovation curve. To learn more, visit https://nazare.io/

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SOURCE Nazaré Ventures