Brian McCullough and Chris Messina present

The Ride Home AI Fund

We see the next technology waves form — by reporting on them in a top daily tech podcast and by helping founders nail their first public launches on Product Hunt.

Invest now

Pre-seed • Seed • Series A

A partnership forged in the tech trenches

Chris and Brian are “nerd famous” — respected in the founder and developer communities and get unique access to new opportunities as they arise.

We have first-look at projects that others don't.

Move fast with purpose

We intend to be a startup's first check in and take the round where possible so founders can get back to building.

Prioritize product

Technology is necessary but insufficient to win the market. We will seek out and support product-led initiatives.

Lean into advantage

Our deep network and built-in audiences give us visibility into high quality deals and the credibility to close them.

Strategy

Chris Messina

Best known for inventing the hashtag. Yes: the hashtag.

#1 Product Hunter — with over 3500 launches to date.

Previous founder in the AI space; backed by Y Combinator, First Round, Betaworks, Alpha Bridge and others.

Worked at Google, Uber, and Republic and many startups.

Helped Mozilla Firefox reach its first 100 million downloads; co-organized the first BarCamp and spread the event to over 350 cities around the world; opened the first coworking spaces in the world, giving rise to a global movement.

Brian McCullough

GP of the Ride Home Fund.

4x founder of technology companies since 1999.

Host of the Internet History Podcast and Techmeme Ride Home podcast, Silicon Valley's trusted news source.

Author of How the Internet Happened - From Netscape to the iPhone.

Named an “Emerging 50” fund manager by Signature Block.

Theses

Adversity begets grit

Post-pandemic, post-ZIRP market volatility, with layoffs in tech, talent is pooling on the sidelines. This sleeper cohort has a chip on its shoulder and is eager to prove itself with big wins.

Data as terroir

Data is the new oil is the refrain, but we believe a more nuanced, hands-on approach is needed to unearth the most promising plays. "AI Varietals" captures our sentiment.

Reset assumptions

It's insufficient to graft an LLM onto a spreadsheet and call it a day. How we define software and apps will shift as Airbnb and Uber shifted the definition of a hotel and transport respectively.

Advantages

The Techmeme Ride Home Podcast

50k–70k Daily Listeners

The most connected collection of tech industry denizens in any one place. From the C-Suite of FAANG companies to VC firms to founders.

In Silicon Valley's Ear

The tech industry's must-listen podcast. Based in the tech hub of New York City. An unparalleled reputation for authority in the space.

An Engaged Audience

Founders, operators, software engineers, developers, all working in the trenches at startups — right now, today.

Advantages

Product Hunt Royalty

Many of Chris's discoveries top the Product Hunt leaderboard and go on to earn critical acclaim and investment.

What started out as a lifelong obsession with new apps turned into a golden opportunity to source dealflow from the most eager and capable founders.

As the top hunter on Product Hunt, Chris sees several dozen deals a week, often before a company has made its first splash in the market.

Having hunted over 3600 products since 2014 (and increasing), he is able to spot unique and compelling launches before anyone else — and is sought after for his coaching, insights, and his launch and product strategies.

Portfolio Companies:

SGNL

Identity security — continuous, real-time access control for human, non-human, and AI identities.

Learn More

Heyday

AI research assistant and memory layer that resurfaced what knowledge workers read and forgot.

Learn More

Aomni

Autonomous AI agents for revenue teams; recently launched Duet, an AI coworker for small businesses.

Learn More

Attunement

Clinical memory layer for complex healthcare operations.

Learn More

Automated Data

AI data platform for alternative assets — turns capital calls, K-1s, and statements into verified data.

Learn More

CalmWave

Transparent AI for hospital operations — cuts ICU alarm fatigue and turns clinical signal noise into actionable data.

Learn More

CaseMark

Legal operating system for the agent era — AI litigation workflows plus a developer infrastructure platform.

Learn More

Cognitive Talent Solutions

Organizational network analysis and people analytics — maps how work and influence actually flow inside enterprises.

Learn More

Featherless AI

Serverless LLM hosting with instant access to thousands of open-source models; research lab for efficient architectures.

Learn More

FYI.ai

Collaborative communication and digital-asset management platform built for creative teams.

Learn More

HealthScope

Building the largest T-cell biobank; data infrastructure to train frontier AI models for medicine.

Learn More

Leap Laboratories

AI interpretability research lab building tools that explain what deep learning models actually see and learn.

Learn More

Minded

AI support agents that resolve customer service tickets end-to-end; customers include DoorDash and eToro.

Learn More

Nanome

Molecular visualization and drug discovery across VR, browser, and AI; enterprise customers include Sanofi.

Learn More

Principle

AI strategic simulation — digital twins of your company, competitors, regulators, and market forces.

Learn More

Ready Practice

AI-native all-in-one operating platform for clinics, med-spas, and longevity and wellness practices.

Learn More

SF Compute

Marketplace and vertically integrated provider of AI compute — builds, buys, and resells GPU capacity on an order book.

Learn More

Spline

Collaborative 3D design tool for the web, with AI generation for models, textures, and animations.

Learn More

Tactogen

Developing next-generation entactogen medicines for mental health; currently raising a Series A.

Learn More

Toolhouse

Cloud platform for building and deploying AI agents from plain English, with 110+ integrations and managed infra.

Learn More

Yoneda Labs

AI for chemistry — robotic wet lab generating reaction data to train models predicting optimal synthesis conditions.

Learn More

Invest with us