Good morning! Melinda French Gates is backing women in the workforce, Trump picks a replacement for FTC chair Lina Khan, and a new fund invests in frontier tech—backed by Marc Andreessen and Paris Hilton. Have a great Thursday.
- New frontier. Casey Caruso is deep in the tech world: She has lived in hacker houses, worked as an engineer at Google, and made her first nest egg mining crypto. Now the 31-year-old is tapping all of those experiences for her next act: launching a $75 million fund that will invest in frontier tech.
Caruso's fund, Topology Ventures, is backed by Marc Andreessen, a cofounder of OpenAI, a coauthor of GPT-4, Paris Hilton, and anchors Cendana and Accolade, I reported exclusively for Fortune this morning.
Her thesis is that investors who deeply understand technology will win in an era in which tech is changing rapidly. "I think we pick better investments, because we basically can call technical BS, and then we can support founders better," she says. She says she's seen some "undisciplined investing" in AI that has reinforced that thesis. Her expertise gives her not just a better understanding of investment opportunities, but access to them—she likes to contact founders through Discord and GitHub. So far, Topology has made six investments.
Caruso's definition of frontier tech includes AI, robotics, aerospace, neurotech, and crypto—all male-dominated fields. That's barely on her radar as she focuses on the work she's excited about in the communities she has always been drawn to.
"I can only build so much with my own one mind and two hands as an engineer," she says. "Investing was the perfect answer, because you can really scale your impact."
Read the full story here.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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