Nazaré Ventures launches first fund to focus on emerging AI infrastructure

Steven Waterhouse, an early AI researcher, serial investor, and entrepreneur in crypto, web3, and decentralized technologies, has announced the launch of Nazaré Ventures, a Zurich-based early-stage venture capital fund targeting emerging AI infrastructure. The fund will focus on making AI cheaper, addressing the high costs and centralization plaguing the current AI landscape.

Waterhouse, a key figure in the evolution of decentralized web and privacy technologies, served as a founding Partner at Pantera Capital, overseeing the fund's shift to Bitcoin in 2013, founded Orchid, a network for incentivizing distributed resources such as VPN nodes, and was a Venture Partner at Fabric Ventures. Nazaré Ventures is his first independent fund as General Partner and reflects his commitment to reshaping the AI landscape by reducing barriers to entry for building, training, and deploying AI models.

The current AI industry is oligopolistic, dominated by massive incumbent technology companies that control most of the necessary resources, leading to a prohibitively expensive and highly centralized status quo.

Nazaré Ventures will disrupt this oligopolistic structure by investing in open-source infrastructure that reduces these barriers, fostering innovation by making AI more affordable. This will pave the way for advancements in privacy, security, composability, and performance, enabling a new wave of developers to create using AI.

"Decentralization is not the answer in itself. it's a consequence of making AI more affordable and accessible, both financially and technically. Lowering the cost of AI will naturally lead to broader participation, and decentralization will follow," says Waterhouse.

Waterhouse's journey with AI began in 1993 with his PhD research on neural networks for speech recognition at Cambridge, specializing in "mixtures of experts" – before the industry was known as "Artificial Intelligence." Post-graduation, he worked at NASA Ames Research Center, applying machine learning to diverse data sets, from space exploration to more earth-bound applications. After participating in the first wave of the Internet with a startup that sold to Sun Microsystems, he grew frustrated with AI's growing role in ad tech and "mining humans". This led him to pivot towards technologies that counter surveillance capitalism, exemplified in his work with Orchid Labs, the decentralized privacy network he co-founded in 2017.

"Nazaré Ventures marks a return to my roots in AI, albeit with a vastly different purpose. With the emergence of transformative technologies like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, the AI landscape is evolving. We will fuel this new wave of AI infrastructure," says Waterhouse.

Named after the small Portuguese town famous for its record-breaking surfable waves, Nazaré Ventures is the culmination and intersection of Waterhouse's work in AI, decentralized systems, and investing. It is the manifestation of his ambition to democratize technology to spur innovation and reflects his belief in harnessing the powerful, transformational wave of AI.

For the past decade, Waterhouse has been dedicated to the growth of decentralized technologies. Now, with Nazaré Ventures, he aims to bridge his foundational AI knowledge with recent advances in decentralized infrastructure, reshaping the future of AI.

www.nazare.io

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