Juniper Ventures

Juniper Ventures is a San Francisco-based pre-seed venture capital firm founded in 2024, focused exclusively on startups that reduce AI risk. The firm's investment thesis is that AI safety will be a significant and growing market, and that now is the critical time to fund the infrastructure that makes advanced AI systems secure and beneficial. Juniper maps its investment universe across the full AI stack: energy, hardware, physical networking, compute security, audits, data, evaluations, interpretability, inference guardrails, observability, authentication, agent safety, integrations, compliance, insurance, and policy. Portfolio companies include Goodfire (mechanistic interpretability), Apollo Research (deceptive alignment), Haize Labs, Andon Labs, Gray Swan, Musubi Labs, FutureSearch, Softmax, Alien, Axiom, Workshop Labs, Lucid Computing, and Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company, among others — 16 or more investments in total. The firm is led by Nick Fitz (Founder and General Partner, previously founder and CEO of Momentum, which was acquired by Virtuous) and Griffin Bohm (General Partner). Esben Kran, co-director of Apart Research and a prominent figure in AI safety startup circles, plays a leading role at Juniper. Boston Nyer is also listed as a team member. The firm is backed by notable investors including Reid Hoffman, Eric Ries, Geoff Ralston, Jan Leike, and Woj Zaremba. Beyond the core pre-seed fund (Juniper Ventures), the organization has described sibling entities: Juniper Growth for Series A-C stage companies, and the Juniper Foundation (a C3/C4/PAC structure) for policy and advocacy work. Juniper also publishes the AI Assurance Technology Report (aiat.report), which maps the current landscape of AI safety and assurance startups.