A shiny new VC firm named the AI pioneer as a partner on Friday morning. By Friday night, the fund did not exist.
Yann LeCun has had a busy year. Now he has had a strange one. On Friday, a new venture firm called Extelligence Invest named the man often dubbed a “godfather of AI” as a partner. Within about eight hours, its website had gone dark, LeCun had walked away, and the fund had collapsed.
Sifted‘s Maya Dharampal-Hornby broke the story. She had checked LeCun’s involvement with his spokesperson before publishing. Documents seen by the outlet showed Extelligence planned to back early-stage startups across Asia, Europe and North America. Then the whole thing unwound in public, in a matter of hours.
What Extelligence was meant to be
On paper, the pitch was tidy. Extelligence would invest in technical founders building defensible intellectual property, across areas from longevity and healthtech to new mobility and compute. The firm listed LeCun as one of two “non-managing” general partners. The website even named 29 companies it had backed, which a source told Sifted were angel investments by the partners, there to show a track record.
