AI Safety Startups and Venture Funding
Founder scarcity, early incubation dynamics, and investor interest in dedicated AI safety ventures.
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Sep 27, 2026
Sep 25, 2026
- Mike McCormick Mike McCormack's core claim is that AI safety's binding constraint is founders, ahead of ideas and money: "the field is not hurting for people who have awesome Google Docs with a bunch of great ideas... it's hurting for world-class founders who can take those big squishy ideas and turn them into organizations that actually make the world …
- The proof-of-concept is Goodfire: Halcyon's first-ever grants were career-transition grants so Eric Ho and Dan Balsam could "pay their rent while they figured out what to do in AI safety," and the company recently raised a "well over $100 million Series B above a billion dollar valuation." McCormick calls it "probably the best place in the world to work on interpretability research, even including the labs," and attributes the …
- On timelines, McCormick says we're "kind of on the AI 2027 timeline, give or take a few months," yet insists "the best time to start an AI safety company is 20 years ago, and the second-best time is today." He prioritizes things relevant in one to four years; if there are truly only three to six months to an RSI fast takeoff, "all bets are …
- A potential liquidity wave is coming and the fundable supply isn't ready: if labs go public and employees worth hundreds of millions cash out, McCormick fears "this near-future moment where there's this mountain of billions and billions of dollars and not all that many great things to fund." His friend's line frames the play: "The philanthropists and founders of today will write the menu for the philanthropists of tomorrow." The …
- Every safety subfield is still single-digit-org small — "let a thousand METRs bloom" — and even today's frontier is uncontrolled: "look at OpenAI–Hugging Face... these are just unsolved problems. We're not on track." Biosecurity is relatively more legible: "with the gumption and three hundred million …
- His filter is four boxes — safety-core product, viable business, missionary motivation, great founder — with motivation especially important, because governance structures can't save you: PBCs, safety boards, and aligned cap tables are "nudges in the right direction... but nothing's a silver bullet." On the frontier labs, he concedes Nathan's framing outright: "there's been some drift, man."