New York Metropolis-based Betaworks has closed its $66 million Fund III, which can concentrate on investing in early-stage AI corporations.
Betaworks has been investing in AI since at the least 2016 and, by its funding program Camp, has backed corporations akin to Huggingface and Granola. Jordan Criminal, a accomplice on the agency (and former TechCrunch worker), stated the brand new fund will concentrate on brokers, native AI interfaces, and application-layer AI.
“Round these themes, we are going to proceed to do straight seed investing and the Betaworks Camps,” Criminal stated.
Fund III will search to put money into at the least 25 pre-seed to seed investments, in addition to make at the least 50 investments into startups as a part of the Betaworks Camps program. “To this point, we’ve achieved round 37 offers,” Criminal stated, including that the typical verify dimension was round $500,000.
Criminal known as the present fundraising setting “frothy” for startups, and “spiky” for funds, however she famous that Fund III noticed lots of the agency’s earlier restricted companions returning to speculate.
“The fundraising setting in enterprise was difficult in 2024, and we weren’t exempt, provided that we had been upsizing our fund,” she stated.
Betaworks beforehand raised a $46 million Fund II in 2020, and a $48 million Fund I in 2016. It launched in 2008 as a enterprise studio, and has since change into a staple within the New York Metropolis tech ecosystem, launching its Betaworks Camps program in 2016. The agency’s different notable investments embrace Tumblr and Kickstarter.
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