How Juniper invests
Juniper Ventures is an AI safety and assurance venture fund. Here are short answers to the questions founders ask us most. Updated October 2026.
What does Juniper Ventures invest in?
Juniper Ventures is an AI safety and assurance venture fund in San Francisco. We back founders making AI secure and beneficial for humanity. We invest in AI assurance infrastructure, in six layers:
- Hard: energy, hardware, physical networking.
- Cloud: compute, security, audits.
- Model: data, evals, interpretability.
- Runtime: inference, guardrails, observability.
- Distribution: authentication, agents, integrations.
- Governance: compliance, insurance, policy.
At what stage do you invest?
Mostly pre-seed and seed. We also invest in later rounds, for example Axiom Math (series A), Apollo Research (series A lead) and Goodfire (series B co-lead).
How much do you invest?
We write checks of $1M to $100M.
Do you lead rounds and join boards?
Yes, sometimes. We led the series A of Apollo Research, the seed rounds of Lucid Computing, Alien and Asymmetric Security, and the pre-seed rounds of Recurrent Research and Modaic. We co-led the series B of Goodfire. We are on the boards of Goodfire and Apollo Research.
Which companies has Juniper invested in?
Some of our investments: Goodfire, Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company, Apollo Research, Lucid Computing, Axiom Math, Kradle, Alien, Gray Swan, Asymmetric Security, Recurrent Research, Humanis, Workshop Labs (acquired by Thinking Machines Lab), Haize Labs (acquired by Beacon), Musubi Labs, FutureSearch, Softmax and Modaic.
Our previous angel investments include Anthropic, OpenAI, Cohere, Hugging Face, Perplexity, Supabase, Together AI and Lambda.
How do I pitch Juniper?
Email us at team@juniper.xyz.
What do you look for?
Founders who make AI secure and beneficial for humanity, building in the assurance layers above. We care about mission-aligned governance: our Governance Lab helps founders design and lock in their mission, and our guide Mission lock for early-stage AI startups explains the options.
How do you help after you invest?
Juniper is run by exited founders. We help founders resolve bottlenecks like fundraising, hiring, growth, product, governance, culture and well-being. The Shortlist lists open jobs at our portfolio companies and other AI safety organisations.
Who runs Juniper Ventures?
Nick Fitz, Griff Bohm, Esben Kran and friends. We are backed by people like Reid Hoffman, Woj Zaremba, Eric Ries, Geoff Ralston, Jan Leike and Elizabeth Yin.
Do you fund non-profits?
Juniper Ventures invests in companies. Juniper Foundation, the non-profit arm of Juniper, builds the venture-speed non-profits that need to exist before superintelligence.