Two people, one decision
NFDG operated as a partnership of two operators rather than a fund with an investment process. Founders got a decision from the people who would actually help them, usually within a week.
Nat Friedman
Nat Friedman co-founded Xamarin, sold it to Microsoft, and ran GitHub as CEO from 2018 to 2021 through the Copilot era. He then invested as one half of NFDG alongside Daniel Gross, a two-person partnership that wrote some of the earliest cheques into voice, image, music and coding AI companies. In mid-2025 both partners joined Meta's new Superintelligence Labs — Friedman as VP of Product & Applied Research, co-leading the unit with chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, and Gross leading the AI products division — after which NFDG stopped making new investments; the positions below are the disclosed ones from the partnership's active period.
Nat Friedman
Individual investor
- Role
- Investor, NFDG; ex-CEO of GitHub
- Based
- San Francisco Bay Area, CA
- Background
- Xamarin co-founder; GitHub CEO 2018–2021
- Partner
- Daniel Gross
- Stage
- Seed and Series A
- Focus
- AI-native products and infrastructure
How NFDG approaches AI investing
Product taste over market maps
The pattern across ElevenLabs, Suno and Cursor is the same: a product good enough that users adopt it before any enterprise sales motion exists.
Developer tooling as home turf
Having shipped Copilot at GitHub, Friedman moved early on AI coding tools and on the inference and infrastructure layer they depend on.
Access to research labs
The pair's credibility with researchers — and Gross's role as co-founder of Safe Superintelligence — gave them access to frontier labs that were not raising broadly.
AI portfolio
Disclosed NFDG investments across generative media, AI coding tools, search and frontier research labs.
ElevenLabsVoice AIText-to-speech and voice cloning models that became the default voice layer for AI products.
PerplexityAI SearchAI answer engine; one of the partnership's best-known early positions.
SunoMusic GenerationGenerative music model producing full vocal tracks from text prompts.
CursorAI CodingAnysphere's AI code editor; Friedman joined its OpenAI Startup Fund-led seed round in October 2023, a direct extension of his GitHub Copilot thesis.
Character.AIConsumer AIConversational AI characters with heavy consumer engagement.
- Safe SuperintelligenceFrontier Research
Ilya Sutskever's research lab, co-founded by Daniel Gross, who led it as CEO until joining Meta in July 2025; NFDG took part in the lab's inaugural US$1B financing announced in September 2024.
FigmaDesign SoftwareDesign platform now shipping generative design features across its product.
Operating background
Not investments — the companies he built and ran, which explain the access and the developer-tooling focus.
- GitHubDeveloper Platform
CEO from 2018 to 2021; launched Copilot, the first mass-market AI coding product.
- XamarinDeveloper Tools
Co-founder and CEO; cross-platform mobile development toolchain acquired by Microsoft in 2016.
Related rounds
No rounds led by Nat Friedman are in the tracker yet. Deals will appear here as they are recorded.