Max Novendstern, co-founder and former chief executive of Worldcoin, has left the high-profile startup to start a new venture, according to sources and regulatory filings and investor cover obtained by londonbusinessblog.com.
A Worldcoin spokesperson confirmed that Novendstern is no longer with the startup, but said he will continue to advise the company. Novendstern did not respond to a Twitter message on Wednesday.
His new venture is called Mana and it is building an “AI venture capitalist that will run autonomously on-chain” or “Blackrock for new economy,” according to the investor deck. The startup is partnering with Tribe Capital, Multicoin Capital, Dragonfly and Variant to raise funds, according to sources familiar with the matter. Multicoin did not respond to an email on Wednesday.
“Their target is a general Al who can analyze any company and then fund it with one click. The goal is a business model that is scalable as software — no marginal cost: anyone in the world can increase; anyone can invest; and because Al gets better with scale, the system improves in a flywheel. The core of their system is the ‘programmatic deal memo’”, according to an investor presentation.
“For each investment criterion (team, product, strategy, etc.), an AI predicts the analyst’s judgment. Predictions are performed through data pipelines, distributed across neural networks and human labelers. Analysts use the tool to work faster; using the tool they train the If (‘GitHub Copilot for Investors’). Success means beating any fund in the world in terms of speed of capital and cost of capital in an exponential market. Venture is no longer limited to early stock checks in moonshots in the bay. Instead, the new market means that all asset classes – debt, stocks and tokens – will be accepted simultaneously in all cities and industries as software globalization reaches the ‘second half of the chessboard’.