Worldcoin co-founder in talks with Multicoin, Variant for ‘Blackrock for new economy’ venture – TechCrunch

Max Novendstern, co-founder and former chief executive of Worldcoin, is working on a new venture, according to sources and regulatory filings and an investor deck obtained by TechCrunch.

A Worldcoin spokesperson confirmed that Novendstern left the firm last year, something which hasn’t been previously reported, but continues to advise the firm. Novendstern did not respond to a Twitter message 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 engaging 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 Wednesday.

An investor presentation obtained by TechCrunch described Mana as:

Their target is a general Al that can analyze any company and then fund it with one click. The goal is a venture model that scales like software—no marginal cost: anyone in the world can raise; 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.’

For any investment criteria (team, product, strategy, etc.) an Al predicts the analyst’s judgment. Predictions are outputted by data pipelines, split between neural nets and human labelers. Analysts use the tool to work faster; by using the tool they train the Als (‘GitHub Copilot for investors’).

Success means beating every fund in the world in terms of speed-of-capital and cost-of-capital in an exponentiating market. Venture is no longer constrained to early equity checks into moonshots in the Bay. Rather, the new market entails underwriting all asset classes—debt, equity, and tokens—in all cities and industries simultaneously, as the globalization of software hits the ‘second half of the chessboard.’