Halcyon Ventures

Building resilience for the era of transformative AI

[Halcyon Ventures @HalcyonVC]

RT @MikeMcCormick_: If you're building things to harden society and infrastructure as we approach AGI - or even thinking about doing it - g…

[Mike McCormick @MikeMcCormick_]

How can impact-oriented founders preserve their missions, even when commercial pressures hit? We studied 20+ companies to answer this one question.

This is especially important in AI.

That's why we commissioned governance experts Steve Young and @artmin to lead comprehensive research studying companies from @OpenAI, @AnthropicAI, and @Meta to @Etsy, @patagonia and @benandjerrys—interviewing 22 founders, investors, and legal experts along the way.

Their research is timely because the AI capabilities that can build a brighter future may build a bleaker one, too. The models that could cure diseases might also help bad actors create pandemic viruses. Tools for cyber defense might also be used for cyber attacks.

At Halcyon, we back teams building a secure and resilient future as AI transforms the world. Getting governance right is crucial for these high-stakes businesses.

And we hear from impact-driven founders that they WANT to take their missions seriously.

Today we're releasing our findings on mission-preservation governance mechanisms for startups.

Some examples of mission-preserving governance that work:

• @TonysChocoUS's golden share with escalating remedies
• @patagonia's permanent mission lock (though few founders will give up that much)

There's a clear pattern: No perfect mechanism exists. But layered approaches—legal safeguards + cultural reinforcement + reputational accountability—create real durability.

We've packaged this into a practical playbook: decision trees for founders, implementation checklists by stage, and 6 proven governance mechanisms.

Founders, investors, board members—if you're thinking about these questions for your own company, reach out.

Download the full report today ⬇️

[Halcyon Ventures @HalcyonVC]

Read about the OpenPCC standard—
GitHub: https://t.co/c1zv9bc5yz
White Paper: https://t.co/chNApO3D7s
Announcement: https://t.co/c5SqfBFuxQ

[Halcyon Ventures @HalcyonVC]

Provably private AI inference should be the standard — not just a nice-to-have. It's a missing link for enterprises and critical sectors to reliably deploy AI at scale, reap its benefits, and protect against dangerous security and privacy risks.

Congratulations to our portfolio company @confident_sec on launching OpenPCC! Learn more⬇️

[Confident Security @confident_sec]

Introducing OpenPCC - open-source AI Privacy

No tracking. No training. No leaks. Just provably private infrastructure for AI.

Check out the repo, announcement, and whitepaper in the comments - hit us with a star while you're there!

[Tommy @Shaughnessy119]

@MikeMcCormick_ Mike you intro’d us to amazing people and ran an incredible meetup. Thanks so much.

If anyone wants to support Mike’s AI efforts I highly recommend checking out @HalcyonVC

ICYMI - Mike was our most recent podcast guest

[dAGIhouse @dAGIhouse]

What AI Founders Need to Know Before Raising & Scaling

Discussion with:
💡 Nikhil Raman, Investor at @usv
💡 Mike McCormick, CEO, @HalcyonVC
💡 Clayton Bryan, Head of Global Accelerator Fund, @500GlobalVC

Get actionable insights for AI founders navigating early-stage growth, fundraising, and product-market fit in the agentic era.

�� Secure Your Spot Now: https://t.co/N4Ene8yAbC

📅 October 24 • San Francisco • Open Source AI Week

[Ross Matican @rossmatican]

“Think of the nonprofit (@HalcyonFutures) as the platform team to the VC fund (@HalcyonVC).”

On @Shaughnessy119's @PodcastDelphi, Halcyon founder & MP @MikeMcCormick_ shares:

Before building Halcyon Ventures, we asked, what would the platform team look like? How do we develop relationships with the labs, researchers, lawmakers, biggest potential customers, CISOs at big companies? That’s what our nonprofit Halcyon Futures has been doing for the last two years. (9:56)

Halcyon backs entrepreneurs pursuing their life's work on businesses and orgs that foster trustworthy deployment and societal resilience for the superintelligence era—
like @GoodfireAI, @aiunderwriting, @confident_sec, @Fathom_org, @TransluceAI, and @GoldenGateInst (organizer of The Curve conference).

Listen today ⬇️

[Tommy @Shaughnessy119]

New In Person Podcast with @MikeMcCormick_ of @HalcyonVC 📽️

Mike left a $1.5B fund to start Halcyon and has given career grants to help kickstart leading AI companies like @GoodfireAI and @aiunderwriting

He has deep takes on China vs US, Safety vs Accelerationism and AI.

[Mike McCormick @MikeMcCormick_]

Here are five big questions we’re eager to answer at @HalcyonVC (plus some of our portfolio companies working on them).

Big picture, we back mission-driven founders working to solve the hardest problems in AI security and global resilience.

We want to know:

1. How can we make powerful AI systems transparent and steerable?

One thing we’ll need is the ability to understand what’s happening inside AI models – not just their inputs and outputs. So we backed @GoodfireAI. Their mechanistic interpretability tools empower developers to see inside the “black box” of AI models and to steer them in safer and more performant directions.

2. How do we secure the frontier AI supply chain from adversarial attacks or model exfiltration?

AI is vulnerable to attacks from bad actors, both at the software layer and the hardware layer. We backed @ConfidentSec which provides cryptographic guarantees against attacks at the inference level, and Lucid Computing which secures GPUs against misuse by adversarial actors.

3. How will we keep enterprises secure in a future where AI agents are autonomous digital employees with access to sensitive data and tools?

We backed Archia whose secure AI sandboxes allow companies to connect AI models to internal tools and data without exposing sensitive information.

4. How do we incentivize companies and governments to address AI risks before they cause major damage and liability?

We want to live in a world that systematically measures and mitigates AI risks. This is largely the domain of insurance markets, which is why we backed @aiunderwriting. They have pioneered AI agent risk insurance and have created a security standard that raises the bar for AI risk mitigation.

5. How do we prepare for global risks — like biological threats — that are exacerbated by AI?

We’ve backed a stealth company that works with frontier AI labs to reduce bio-risks in their models and develops medical countermeasures to potential pandemic viruses.

These are just a few of the questions we’re digging into. We’ll share more soon.

In the meantime, if you’re building or investing in these areas, we’d love to talk.

[Julian Michael @_julianmichael_]

Congrats to @HalcyonFutures! I think what Mike and team have built is legit in the very top few organizations worldwide in securing humanity’s future against AI risk. They’ve helped some super exciting new projects get off the ground, as we can all see for ourselves now :)

[Rajiv Dattani @RajivDattani]

congrats @MikeMcCormick_ and team! Halcyon is accelerating great orgs - I'm excited to see it come out of stealth

[Luke Drago @luke_drago_]

As someone who's worked with both orgs in the Halcyon family, I'm excited to see their public launch! Kudos to @MikeMcCormick_ and the team.

[Nathan Labenz @labenz]

Congrats to @MikeMcCormick_ & the @HalcyonFutures team!

I attended a ~20-person retreat last year and got huge value from it – I'm still in regular contact with at least 6 people I met there

If you're working on a relevant project – or want to – connect with Mike 👇

[Saturnin Pugnet @satpugnet]

Halcyon is doing great work. Go check them out.

[Logan Graham @logangraham]

...I could write about how Halcyon's portfolio are all tackling some important part of AI + security... but that's probably self-evident

what's under the surface is:
1/ the companies are really *cool*
2/ halcyon throws great gatherings.

[Gharib Gharibi @ggharibi__]

@MikeMcCormick_ @HalcyonFutures Congrats Mike, @rossmatican , Shelby, and portfolio companies!! And excited to partner with you to build safe and powerful AI for all!

[Mike McCormick @MikeMcCormick_]

Exactly two years ago, I launched @HalcyonFutures.

So far we’ve seeded and launched 16 new orgs and companies, and helped them raise nearly a quarter billion dollars in funding.

Flash back to 2022: After eight years in VC, I stepped back to explore questions about exponential technology and the future of humanity.

Then ChatGPT launched – we’d entered the exponential AI era.

The upside of AI is huge – but so are the risks: misalignment, loss of control, cyber and bio-threats, fraud, adversarial misuse, and more.

For humanity to thrive in this era, we’ll need to build a resilient and secure world.

And we’ll need an ecosystem of both nonprofit and for-profit solutions led by ambitious, thoughtful leaders from business, policy, academia and media.

I found myself asking:

1. How do we get the world’s most talented people working on these civilization-scale challenges?

2. What funding model would allow us to support many different types of projects?

With those questions in mind, I launched Halcyon. We’re building something a bit unusual:

- @HalcyonFutures, a nonprofit and grant fund that helps leaders and entrepreneurs pivot to ambitious, high-impact work.

- @HalcyonVC, a VC firm backing for-profit founders tackling the hardest problems in AI security and global resilience.

So far we’ve raised $25m in funding for Halcyon’s nonprofit and VC fund.

We’ve incubated or provided zero-to-one capital to 16 nonprofits and companies, and helped them go on to raise more than $200m — from @GoodfireAI's interpretability work to @aiunderwriting's AI risk standards and insurance, @TransluceAI's model behavior research, and @SeismicOrg's public opinion research and media.

We're a small team of three (me, Shelby Summerfield and @rossmatican) surrounded by a community of advisors and allies that includes leaders from frontier labs, governments, cybersecurity, philanthropy, startups and VC.

Over the coming weeks we’ll share more about Halcyon and what we’re building next.

If you're working on something we might be excited about, say hi. Visit our website below in comments ⬇️

[Halcyon Ventures @HalcyonVC]

@dan_lahav @Irregular Congrats Dan. Huge!!