Gradient is an early-stage venture firm that invests exclusively in AI, aiming to be founders' first institutional check at pre-seed and seed. Founded in partnership with Google, it has backed 500+ AI founders including Lambda, Oura and Writer. Its US$220M Fund V (March 2026) brought AUM to roughly US$1.2B.
Gradient's core areas have always centered on applied AI: with Fund V it actively invests in reinvented B2B software built AI-native from day one, AI agents reshaping how work gets done, and the AI developer stack powering the next generation of builders, leading pre-seed and seed rounds.
Gradient invests in every layer of AI — from infrastructure and model/tooling layers to applications — and extends into real-world AI spanning biology, materials, robotics and compute substrates, as well as open-source and small-model approaches that optimize capability against compute.
Gradient describes itself as builders, mentors and champions for founders (founder-centric, collaborative, transparent, bold), backing founders with technical rigor, an obsession with quality, and the speed to iterate faster than the market can copy.
Gradient was founded in 2017 in close partnership with Google — when few institutions would back an AI-only fund — and spun out as an independent firm (Grdnt LLC) in October 2025, with Google remaining a valued LP. Over nearly a decade it has backed 500+ AI founders. The firm is based at 560 Davis St, Suite 150 in San Francisco.
Companies Gradient currently showcases as its featured AI portfolio on gradient.com (default Featured view of /portfolio, mirroring the homepage logo marquee). Gradient hosts no per-company logo images on its site, so logos below are each company's own official site asset. Note: two further names in the featured view — CentML (acquired by NVIDIA) and Syrup (acquired by Anaplan) — are excluded here because no official logo or live company site could be verified.
Airspace Intelligence applies AI to help the world's most complex air operations succeed.
Clarify's AI automates pipeline creation, meeting admin and CRM updates so sales teams can stop clicking and close more deals.
Gigs is building 'Stripe for phone plans' — enabling platforms to sell phone and data subscriptions to their users.
Krea is an AI design tool: a creative suite for generating, editing and interacting with images and video in real time.
GPU cloud, workstations, servers and laptops built for deep learning.
Mural is a digital workspace for visual collaboration that keeps distributed teams creative and productive in real time.
Openly is a premium, tech-forward insurance platform and provider built to be sold through independent brokers.
Oura designs wellness wearable rings that track sleep, readiness and activity.
Acquired by Axon. Prepared empowers emergency operators to use real-time data from callers.
Rad AI is a platform built by radiologists, for radiologists, that optimizes workflows to save time and energy.
Range is an all-in-one AI-driven wealth management platform for investments, taxes, cash flow, retirement and estate planning.
Sona provides intelligent workforce management for modernizing frontline enterprises' labor and productivity.
Acquired by Asana. Stack AI offers a no-code platform to deploy enterprise-grade AI applications and automated workflows.
Acquired by Snowflake. Streamlit lets machine-learning engineers quickly create apps for data exploration, model debugging and results presentation.
Unit21 protects businesses against money laundering, fraud and other financial risks with detection and case management.
Writer is the AI writing platform for teams.
No rounds led by Gradient are in the tracker yet. Deals will appear here as they are recorded.
Because 2017 was the contrarian moment: few institutions would back an AI-only fund, so Google co-founded the vehicle instead. Radical Ventures launched the same year in Toronto; Conviction followed only in 2022, after ChatGPT. Gradient's decade of AI-only investing — Lambda, Oura and Writer from their earliest days — is the credential the US$220M Fund V now monetizes.
Structure, not strategy. The firm reorganized as Grdnt LLC with Google remaining a limited partner, converting a nine-year corporate partnership into an independent firm just as AI seeding re-priced. It kept the founding playbook — first institutional check, ~US$1–5M, 10–15% ownership — and within five months announced the oversubscribed US$220M Fund V, taking AUM to roughly US$1.2B across five funds.
That roughly 28% of its disclosed book has already exited, almost entirely by acquisition — Streamlit to Snowflake, Stack AI to Asana, Prepared to Axon. For a seed fund holding 10–15% of AI-native software companies, M&A is the natural liquidity path; the current featured view alone has produced NVIDIA buying CentML and Anaplan buying Syrup.
Because the model is ownership, not scale. Fund V's US$220M is a fraction of Lightspeed's US$9B December 2025 close, but Gradient only needs ~US$3M average cheques for 10–15% of pre-seed and seed rounds — a size engineered for first-institutional positioning, not for following billion-dollar rounds. The five-fund structure exists to keep that entry discipline repeatable across vintages.
Ownership is the asset a seed fund actually sells its LPs. At a ~US$3M average cheque, 10–15% implies entry prices around US$20–30M post-money — early enough that later rounds re-price the position without the fund needing reserves for mega-follow-ons. It is the arithmetic that let the earliest entries — Lambda, Oura, Writer — become the signature positions as AI valuations re-rated.