Bison Ventures Announces $160M Fund 2 to Advance Intelligence in the Physical World

With Fund 2, Bison Ventures will continue backing founders reimagining how technology builds, heals, and powers the physical world, building on the firm’s thesis that AI’s next major opportunity lies in Real World Intelligence.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Bison Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm investing at the frontier of technology, today announced the close of its $160 million Fund 2. Building on the success of its $135 million debut fund, Bison will use the new capital to continue backing deeply technical early-stage founders who are bringing intelligence into the physical world. Bison believes this Real World Intelligence category represents a $50 trillion market across the global economy and is the most consequential investment opportunity today.

With Fund 2, Bison will continue investing from pre-seed through Series B in ambitious founders building non-incremental technology.

The world runs on physical things: energy, food, factories, biology and the infrastructure that sustains everyday life. While AI spent its first decade largely transforming the digital world, Bison is betting that its next era will be defined by intelligence moving into these physical systems, and the energy and compute innovations enabling them.

Core to the firm’s ability to surface and support deeply technical founders is a team tenured in both investment and engineering, with experience spanning robotics, semiconductor manufacturing, energy, biology, materials science and infrastructure — long before frontier technologies entered the mainstream venture conversation.

“We are still early in unlocking the full value of AI to help us build a better future in the physical world. There will be a rapid acceleration in the use of AI to transform how we manufacture affordable goods, develop effective drugs, and produce sustainable energy, all driving better outcomes for people and the planet." said Ben Hemani, Founding Partner at Bison Ventures. "We saw this inflection point proved out in Fund 1's thesis, and we’re already deploying Fund 2 to back the next generation of deeply technical founders creating entirely new categories in massive, well-defined markets."

That thesis is taking shape across Bison’s portfolio. Zyphra is building frontier AI models and infrastructure on AMD’s full-stack compute platform; Cobot’s collaborative robots have logged 12,600+ production hours and moved 40M+ pounds of material across healthcare, manufacturing, and logistics deployments; Vivodyne just launched the world’s largest human biological datacenter; and Thinking Machines has released its first open-weights model and secured a gigawatt-scale partnership with NVIDIA.

Bison is also seeing validation of their early deployments in Fund 2: Grid Aero has built a full-scale autonomous cargo aircraft; Great Sky has translated more than a decade of superconducting research into chips that will offer 1 million times more efficient compute than traditional GPUs; and Inner Logic has shown surgical AI trained entirely in simulation can transfer to real patient anatomy, following success in an autonomous gallbladder removal.

“Five years ago, we started Bison to back the companies that may appear contrarian today but will look inevitable in hindsight,” said Tom Biegala, Founding Partner at Bison Ventures. “A new technology has to change value created by an order of magnitude, and when it does, it's incredibly hard to displace. Our success in Fund 1 has only reinforced our conviction in backing these step-change solutions.”

ABOUT BISON VENTURES

Bison Ventures is a venture capital firm investing at the early stage in Real World Intelligence, the frontier where AI collides with the physical economy. The firm partners with founders reimagining the ways we build, move and heal, as well as the energy and compute innovations that underpin it all. Founded in 2021 by Tom Biegala and Ben Hemani, Bison brings deep technical and operational experience to companies building at the frontier of technology. For more information, visit bison.vc.