Bryan Kim, a former partner at Andreessen Horowitz, is setting up a new firm, Mido Capital. He plans to raise around $100m for its first fund, the Wall Street Journal reported. He filed formation papers in Delaware last month. The debut fund will back early-stage consumer AI and other startups. Kim did not comment.
Kim spent more than five years at the firm, on its consumer and AI-apps team. His standout bet was ElevenLabs, the voice-AI company. Andreessen co-led its Series A and B rounds, and it has grown into one of the category’s biggest names. He also backed Function Health, the invitations app Partiful and mental-health startup SlingshotAI. Before venture, he worked at Snap.
A contrarian corner of AI
Consumer AI is a narrow slice of the boom. Roughly 12% of about 26,000 AI and machine-learning companies are consumer-facing, according to PitchBook. And the money has been oddly flat. Strip out OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, and investors put $17.5bn into consumer-AI startups last year, up just 3.6% on 2024.
The category also lives in OpenAI’s shadow. ChatGPT and a handful of platforms dominate how most people meet AI, so smaller apps struggle to stand out. Kim’s wager is that the interesting companies are not the ones trying to be OpenAI. They are the ones building on cheap, abundant intelligence rather than racing to supply it.
