Cosmos Ventures

Profile

Cosmos Ventures is a venture capital firm founded by Brendan McCord and Matt Mandel. Based in the U.S., the firm was established in 2024 as an outgrowth of the Cosmos Institute, which McCord founded to unite philosophers and AI builders. The firm distinguishes itself with a unique deal-sourcing model built on a community and fellowship network started years before raising its first fund. The team is lean, allowing for significant engagement between founders and the co-founders, who have backgrounds in AI startups and philosophy, respectively.

They focus on the earliest stages of investment, specifically pre-seed and seed, targeting founders building institutions for the AI era. Their sector focus spans AI safety and assurance infrastructure, frontier AI, human-autonomy-preserving AI products, and education. Though the specific check sizes were not disclosed, the firm has reported total assets under management of $77.6 million for its debut fund, Fund I.

Notable investments include AIUC - building certification and insurance infrastructure for AI agents, Workshop Labs - creating AI systems tailored to users, and Prime Intellect - focusing on open AI model infrastructure. Workshop Labs was acquired by Thinking Machines Lab in 2026, demonstrating the fund's capacity to generate early exits from its unique thesis-first sourcing model.