Wisdom Ventures Closes $77.7M Fund II to Back Human-Centered AI Startups

Wisdom Ventures just closed an oversubscribed $77.7M Fund II, and somewhere in Silicon Valley a founder with a meditation app and an AI stack just sat up straighter in their chair like the teacher finally called on the weird kid who actually did the reading.

What Bradley Horowitz, Cecily Mak, and Soren Gordhamer are building is not another venture fund throwing “human-centered AI” into a pitch deck like parsley on bad pasta. This thing has texture. Timing. Intent. Fund I was a $10M experiment launched in 2022 around a question most firms were too busy chasing crypto raccoons to ask: what if technology actually made people healthier, calmer, more connected, and a little less likely to scream into the void before breakfast?

Turns out the market had an appetite for that. Fund I deployed across 38 companies, produced 14 markups, and climbed into the top quartile of early-stage funds. Quietly. No chest beating. Just disciplined conviction and founders solving problems tied to resilience, health, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and human connection while the rest of the industry kept pretending burnout was a personality trait.

Now Fund II jumps to $77.7M with backing from names that know how to spot seismic shifts before they hit the group chat. Reid Hoffman. Evan Sharp. Stewart Butterfield. Jen Rubio. That roster reads less like an LP list and more like a table where every conversation changes an industry before dessert lands.

And the signal gets louder with Dr. Vivek H. Murthy joining as Senior Venture Partner alongside Zoë Rogers, Jack Kornfield, Ruchika Sikri, and Diego Perez. That mix matters. Product wisdom. Public health credibility. Mindfulness. Operational depth. Community. Most firms collect logos. Wisdom Ventures is assembling perspectives.

The smartest part of this whole strategy might be the thing most people will underestimate. They are investing in AI that amplifies human capability instead of replacing it. In a market drunk on automation theater, Wisdom Ventures is betting there is massive value in technology that helps people regulate stress, deepen relationships, improve wellbeing, and actually function like humans instead of overclocked notification centers wearing Allbirds.

That matters because founders are exhausted. Consumers are overloaded. Employees are fried to a crisp somewhere between Slack pings and 6-minute calendar gaps pretending to be lunch breaks. The next generation of category leaders will not just optimize productivity. They will optimize people.

And Wisdom Ventures understands something Wall Street still struggles to price correctly: resilience compounds. Human connection compounds. Trust compounds. The firms that recognize that now are underwriting the emotional infrastructure of the next decade while everybody else is still arguing with chatbots like it’s couples therapy.