Deadline: 1-Oct-22

Applications are open now for Microsoft’s AI Grant Program.

Recent breakthroughs in large models are changing the way they relate to unimaginably large datasets. But the models are not products. There is a tremendous opportunity for founders who understand what these models can do to build products that will redefine how everyone work and live. They have seen this firsthand with GitHub Copilot. In files where Copilot is enabled, up to 40% of the code in those files are being suggested by Copilot.

Today Microsoft is thrilled to announce that they are taking this further by working with AI Grant to support “breakthrough products that will be AI-first, built by entrepreneurs who understand both what the latest AI models can do, and what people actually want to use.”

AI Grant is funded by Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, and Daniel Gross, an early investor in Stripe, Coinbase, Figma, and others.

Goals

The goal is to find and support the great entrepreneurs who are exploring this new frontier. They want to raise the status of building AI-first products. Research is important, but creating a product that people love on a new platform requires unusual levels of creativity and ingenuity – arguably more so than raising money and spending it to scale up a training cluster. And the rewards to the entrepreneurs who create these products will be enormous.

Funding Information

• Nat and Daniel have invested $10M in AI Grant. The company investments themselves are made by AI Grant LLC.
• If you are raising more than this, talk to them directly! they’re interested in great companies raising between $2M and $200M.

Benefits

If yours is one of the selected for the program, you will receive:

• A $250,000 investment via a no cap, no discount MFN SAFE
• $250,000 in Azure cloud credits
• Membership to Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub including a wide array of Microsoft and 3rd party benefits, go-to-market support, 1:1 mentoring and more
• $50,000 in credits for AssemblyAI
• $10,000 in human-labeling credits from Scale.ai
• An invitation to spend the week networking with peers and some of the smartest minds from the world of AI entrepreneurship, at the AI Grant summit in San Francisco in early November
• Early access to Stability AI models

Eligibility Criteria

• Anything that leverages AI models in a useful or engaging way.
• In particular, they’re looking for technical & pragmatic founders who want to build great products.
• If you get a thrill from making something that other people love to use, and you understand that building a new product is 1% idea and 99% iteration, they want to support you.

For more information, visit https://startups.microsoft.com/blog/ai-grant-launch/