It would seem like a family vice, that of the Altman brothers’ passion for the world of startups. Jack Altmanyounger brother of Sam Altman known to the world for having created ChatGPT, in recent days announced that he had raised 150 million dollars for the creation of a venture capital fund called Alt Capital which will invest in startups in their early years “that operate mainly in the artificial intelligence sector”.
But let’s take a step back. In 2015 Jack founded Lattice, an AI personnel management platform which will reach a valuation of over $3 billion at the end of 2022 thanks also to the record raising of a 175 million round. To date, leading Silicon Valley figures such as Marc Benioff (CEO of Salesforce), Alexis Ohanian (co-founder of Reddit), and Kevin Mahaffey (founder and CTO of Lookout) have believed in and invested in his creation.
The twist comes at the end of December 2023, when Jack Altman announces his resignation as CEO of Latticeassuming the position of executive president, and handing over the position of company head to Sarah Franklin, an esteemed top manager at Salesforce for sixteen years.
“I’m ready to go – Sam Altman’s young brother wrote a few days ago in an email post su X – . I am excited to share with you a new chapter in my professional life, introducing you to Alt Capital. This is a new $150 million fund aimed at supporting early-stage AI startups. The idea of listening to the voices of young founders convinced that their startup will change the world makes me super happy.”
Entrepreneurship Sam Altman’s empire has nothing to do with ChatGpt by Gabriella Rocco December 30, 2023
Who is Jack (and what does he do) Sam Altman’s brother
Serial entrepreneur, thirty-four years old, graduated in economics from Princeton University in 2007, Jack is the penultimate of the three Altman brothers: Sam, Max and Annie. Raised with a single common denominator: a boundless passion for technology and mathematics.
“Every evening we had dinner together as a family. And afterwards we played the ‘square root’ game: mother pronounced a number with many digits, and we brothers competed to guess the result. When Annie took the calculator to check the figure correct, it was usually always our brother Sam who guessed the outcome.”
As soon as he graduated Jack began working in the Bay Area as an analyst at the consulting firm “Gleacher & Company” dealing with mergers and acquisitions and financing. In 2013 he became president of Teespring, now the world‘s leading social commerce platform that allows you to create and sell personalized products online.
The transition to the entrepreneurial world took place in May 2012, when Jack founded, together with his brother Sam Altman, a venture capital company called Hydrazine Capital which from the beginning has focused on investments in early stage technology companies.
In October 2015 Jack Altman founded with Eric Koslow in San Francisco Lattice, AI personnel management platform. The startup has closed six rounds so far, the latest being a $175 million Series D.
With offices in North America and the United Kingdom, Lattice serves more than 5 thousand customers worldwide, including Slack, Monzo, Klarna, Alan. The company said it would reach revenue of $91.2 million in 2023, and added that its strength beyond sophisticated software technology has always been “helping companies build a strong culture of business, aggregating, retaining talent and making them grow”.
In February 2024, Jack officially announced the birth of Alt Capital, a venture capital fund that helps early-stage startups with a focus on artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence Sam Altman fears that AI could produce “social misalignments” by Pier Luigi Pisa 13 February 2024
“Working with startups has never felt like work. I love the blank canvas,” Jack Altman posted on LinkedIn on the occasion of the announcement of the new VC fund.
The Altman brothers seem determined to intercept more and more talents and visionary projects that have the ambition of changing the world.