From your first $100K to your last $100M, Lux will fully fund founders turning sci-fi into sci-fact, from startup to spinoff, company creation to sector consolidation, incubation to IPO

Infinity or ∞ is conveniently a 90-degree rotation of the number 8, a number with a prosperous reputation across the world that also stands for the 8 bits in a byte that symbolizes Silicon Valley. And it’s the prosperity of infinite progress that will drive the world — and also Lux — forward.

Today we are announcing our single largest fund to date with the successful closing of Lux Ventures VIII (Lux 8), an early-stage focused venture capital fund with $1.15 billion in Limited Partner commitments. With Lux 8, we will invest in and fully fund the most ambitious founders building hard science and deep technology companies, solving the world’s most pressing problems and futureforming the world we want to live in.

Futureforming is what the most audacious, aspirational founders do: take the combinatorial possibilities of the here-and-now and transform them into the soon and will-be, forging the inevitable from the infinite — against what others deem impossible.

With Lux 8 we will invest at any stage, from inception and early incubation all the way through expansion and exit. We're equally comfortable writing your first $100,000 check, where we believe before others understand, as well as doubling down with a war chest-building $100 million high-conviction investment. We’re emphasizing lots of early-stage activity and many themes including inner space (breakthrough biology + technology), outer space (manufacturing + aerospace + defense), and latent space (the magic of AI models + computational infrastructure).

Lux is now investing through its third market downturn, with proven playbooks and strategies for our founders to help them navigate whatever challenges lie ahead. We have always partnered with extraordinary, multidisciplinary founders at the earliest stage. 

Who are some of these polymaths? In AI, we think of some of the longstanding Lux family founders we’ve backed since their earliest seed or Series A rounds like Clem Delangue of Hugging Face, the largest platform for open source AI/ML; Cris Valenzuela of RunwayML, which co-invented Stable Diffusion and is building the future of generative video; and Qasar Younis of Applied Intuition, the sophisticated software infrastructure for autonomous vehicles. We are thinking of preeminent executives in biotech like Nancy Thornberry of Kallyope, which is pioneering our understanding of the gut-brain axis, and Roger Perlmutter of Eikon, which is accelerating life-saving drug discovery with Nobel Prize-winning microscopy and AI. And we are thinking of the next-generation of defense and aerospace titans like Laura Crabtree of Epsilon3, the OS for spacecraft and complex operations; Chris Power of Hadrian, which is building highly automated precision component factories; and the five brilliant founders of Anduril, which is transforming the defense capabilities of the United States and its allies.

While we consistently partner with early-stage founders, we also futureform by creating entirely new advanced technology ventures from scratch that should exist and don’t yet. Through our internal Lux Labs program, we have incepted dozens of new companies across a wide array of emerging technology areas and brought them to market, most recently with key elements of the breakthrough platform for delivering gene therapies at Aera Therapeutics, founded by CRISPR-cas9 discoverer Feng Zhang, as well as co-founding the digitization of smell at Osmo with ex-Google Brain director and researcher Alex Wiltschko. With new dedicated teammates and entrepreneurs in residence at Lux Labs, we will continue to found and fund companies that focus on the intersection of cutting-edge fields like AI x Biology, Manufacturing x Space, Scientific Tools x Automation, and boundless others.

From New York City to Silicon Valley, Lux has over 30 full-time dedicated experts to serve founders with new additions in investing, company creation, and value-add across the Lux platform including: Grace Isford, Lan Jiang, Tess Van Stekelenburg, Danny Crichton, Chris Gates, Saunaz Moradi, Samantha Cho, Sean Traynor, and Tracie Rotter. Our team now manages more than $5 billion in committed capital entrusted from leading philanthropies, foundations, endowments, and children’s hospitals, among others. Success for our founders means success for these mission-driven organizations as they investigate the frontiers of science, fund scholarships, tackle disease, eradicate poverty, as well as advance human rights, ocean protection, environmental preservation, educational equality, and health equity. 

We like to say that we invest in “matter that matters,” which is increasingly important in today’s chaotic times when every day brings new barriers against the globalized, open world that defined a generation. But that hasn’t stopped the march of science, nor innovation, and certainly not founders. It is the founders who are the cause of our steadfast optimism — infinitely resilient, determined, and adaptable — pushing the frontiers of what’s possible. And like the founders we back, we too have a forever chip on our shoulder, a constant reminder to maintain our scrappy roots with fiery competitiveness and heightened intensity to futureform and create the world we want to live in. To the many who say “no” and “not possible”, we insist on pursuing the prediction of that great nostalgic arbiter of fate: “Signs point to yes.” Yes, yes, infinite yes.

~Team Lux