Chicago companies in order to create repeat entrepreneurs who replenish the tech ecosystem. You've seen it with Groupon co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell at Lightbank, GrubHub CEO Matt Maloney, and Trunk Club c0-founder Brian Spaly, who have all used their success to keep the tech community thriving.
Braintree Founder Bryan Johnson, another one of Chicago's early tech successes, announced Monday that he's investing back into the tech ecosystem, and his plans are much grander than an investment here or there in the next hot digital startup. Johnson has launched a $100 million fund to find companies who are tackling big problems with truly innovative solutions.
The OS Fund is "dedicated to investing in inventors and scientists who aim to benefit humanity by developing quantum leap discoveries at the operating system, or OS, level," Johnson wrote in a Medium post.
Johnson, who led Braintree to a successful $800 million exit in 2013 when the company was bought by PayPal, has brought on Chicagoan Jeff Klunzinger as the OS Fund's managing director. Klunzinger was a founding member and CFO of West Family Investments.
Companies the OS Fund currently invests in include Human Longevity Inc. that's revolutionizing healthcare to increase lifespans, Matternet, which uses drones to deliver food and medicine to poor areas, and Vicarious, which is creating artificial intelligence software that's capable of the same kind of thinking and learning as mammals.
“I want to get a company from ‘crazy’ to ‘viable,'” Johnson said in an interview with Fortune. “With today’s technology, we can now create in days, weeks or months what previous generations couldn’t do in a lifetime. Where DaVinci could sketch, we can build. Yet, we don’t have sufficient resources and people pursuing these goals.”